[gt_]

I can’t help but wonder about the overlap between US regions with high opioid use rates and US regions with high suicide rates.

I don’t doubt the incentives in the article contribute to the issue, but I wonder how we can account for the regional discrepancies.

[lsc]

I would assume there's a high correlation between experiencing long term pain and opioid use.

It also seems there would be a large degree of overlap between people experiencing difficult to treat long-term pain and people who commit suicide.

therefore, while it's certainly not an advertisement for the effectiveness of opioids for the treatment of long term pain, it seems unsurprising that there would be a great deal of correlation between opioid use and suicide, even if opioid use didn't cause suicide.

I mean, there are several mechanisms wherein opioid use could be the causative factor, sure; I'm just saying that even if opioids mostly worked as designed and never made anything worse, I would expect there to be a lot of overlap between the people who are prescribed opioids over long periods of time and people who commit suicide.

[DanBC]

Reducing access to methods is a key part of suicide prevention work.

In the US the main methods are guns and opioid medication. Reducing access is politicially difficult, but would save tens of thousands of lives each year.

If you have a stockpile of medication please either keep it locked away, or give it back to the pharmacist. A disturbing number of children die after taking their grandparent's medication that's been left out because "we don't have children around".