Definitions and category confusion

I was reading an article, since misplaced, lamenting the dramatic rise of suicide rates in the media industry and trying to position this in part of a larger narrative of how dangerous a job is that of a news reporter. There was something not quite right about the numbers being cited which caused me to go to the CDC for some details. It wasn't that the numbers being cited were wrong, but there were definitional and category errors creeping in.

And I stipulate that all suicides are tragedies. This is not an exercise in competitive victimhood. It is an effort to understand what is going on. Suicides are one of the least discussed issues, most consequential and most ominous metrics we have right now. Victims of social ennui and anomie. All the signs are flashing red.

In 2016 we suffered 45,000 suicides, up 25-50% (by gender) since 2000. Drug overdose deaths in 2016 were 64,000, up nearly 350% from about 18,000 in 2000. 109,000 American's dying each year from depression or despair and the number is rising relentlessly. That is about how many military men and women died on average in each year of World War II.

And while America burns, Washington, D.C. fiddles with its obsessions about gender identity and ethnic identity and plays games with government shutdowns and obsesses over the next Special Prosecutor indictment of an obscure person for parking the wrong side of the street twelve years ago. No wonder there is such a disconnect between the American people and the Mandarin Class of the political establishment.

Back to the claim about the suicide rate of journalists. The first issue when looking at the CDC numbers is that we are not talking about the suicide rates of journalists. We are talking about the suicide rate for Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media. The Table Three. Maybe journalistic rates of suicide are indeed rising but we cannot tell that at this level of aggregation.

The second issue is categories and proportionality. In this particular report, they are showing suicide rates as well as absolute number by employment category and gender. It is easy to get distracted when you do that.

The top three categories with highest rise in suicide rates since 2012 are Women in Food Preparation and Serving Related (54%), Men in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media (47%), and Men in Food Preparation and Serving Related (43%).

A nearly fifty percent increase in the space of four years? Incredible. OK, it looks like we should be targeting the Food Preparation and Serving Related industries. But should we? For this limited sample report, 2.8 million people work in this sector and there are a total of 415 deaths. None of these three categories have a suicide rate even remotely close to the single sector with the highest rate. For Men in Construction and Extraction there were nearly three times the number of suicide deaths (1,248) on a labor force base of 2.3 million. The suicide rate is 53.2 per 100,000 compared to 39.7, 20.9 and 9.4 in the other three.

You stare at Table Three long enough and you realize there is very little it can tell you based on gender and sector.

I think the big questions are 1) Why are the suicide rates (and absolute number of deaths) so many factors higher for men than women? 2) Why are blue collar sectors so much higher by factors than white collar? 3) What are our goals - to reduce suicide overall or to reduce suicide by sector? and/or 4) To reduce the number of suicides or to reduce the rate of suicide?