by JESSE BERING
In my last post, we saw how suicide rates differ by gender. But when it comes to the myriad ways to terminate one’s subjective existence, there’s far more diversity across cultures than there is between the sexes. Much of this really is about access. Switzerland has the most developed railway travel system in Europe. It also has one of the highest railway-suicide rates, with more young people throwing themselves in front of trains there than elsewhere on the continent. If you’re in a low-income, agricultural region of Africa or Latin America, by contrast, you’re more likely to poison yourself with a common pesticide than with Prozac.
In regions where guns, trains, medications and pesticides aren’t ever-present means to one’s end, there’s always hanging, the “default” method constituting the majority of the planet’s suicide fatalities. In one Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic about a decade ago, there were so many hangings among teenage boys that the local housing authority decided to remove the closet rods from every home. “Hanging in most cases took place at home during the night when the family was asleep,” explained the psychologist Michael Kral, who studied this group of indigenous people. “[It was] from the closet bar with the clothes pushed to the right and the noose tied on the left side … with the victim facing the wall.”
Suicide-proofing the home environment this way might sound too simple, some would say impractical, to be very effective. But it worked. According to Kral, the town went from having the highest rate of suicide in the region to zero suicides four years running. Restricting access to a given method is a proven strategy, actually. Adding catalytic converters to the standard vehicle exhaust system has made the old closed garage-door suicide method almost obsolete. In European countries where suicide by drowning was a major problem, mandatory swimming lessons for young children in the 1980s has correlated with fewer such adult deaths in recent years.
Scientific American for more