| > I think there's something specific about suicide in the East that we just don't have in the West for whatever reason. Are you sure? I'm not so sure. I think we just don't talk about it. There is a lot of suicide in the West. Staggeringly plenty. Look at any statistics and you'll see that in most of the West, suicide is at the very peak of causes of death. 10th leading cause of death in 2013 officially.[1] And that doesn't count all those "Swerved left into oncoming traffic for no obvious reason" cases. And pay attention to the news. Every "found dead in their apartment" news report for a famous person is a suicide. There's a lot of those. But the West has a very strong ethic of not reporting suicide for fear of suicide epidemics. That's why celebrity suicides are never reported as suicides and why suicides in general rarely make it into the news.[2] In short, suicide is a very real problem in the West too. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicide-datasheet-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide#Journalism_cod... |
Rather than invoking conspiracy theories, consider this much simpler theory: Western media doubles as entertainment and doesn't report much on suicide when they don't have to because it's fucking depressing.