If you have been troubled by anything in this article, or feel like you might need help with problems in your own life, please seek assistance. Most countries have a mental health or suicide hotline. You can reach the American suicide hotline on 1–800–273–8255. You can find the appropriate hotline for your country here.

Better and more informed people than me have looked at the data on this and come to the opposite conclusion. I’m going to look at their methodologies, but in the interim these are just working notes- a kind of statistical thinking out loud.

Generally speaking, good measures are correlated with low income inequality, bad measures with high.

But what’s this about?:

P=<0.001. R=~.5 R²=.27.4%

According to this graph more inequality= less suicide.

Okay, so let’s control for social and political values, does this change anything?

Not really. When we include religion, percentage voting republican and state inequality in the regression, more religion and more inequality reduce suicide while more republican voters increases it. All effect sizes are pretty big.

Of political interest: More people voting Republican is moderately to strongly (R=.5, R²=25.8%) associated with more suicides.

What about if we control for other economic features. Let’s throw in Gini, median income, per capita income and poverty rate.

On a regression using these variables we find that poverty rate has no statistically significant effect, per capita income has no statistically significant effect. Median income provides moderate protection against suicide while economic inequality continues to be associated with greatly reduced suicide.

What do we make of this?

Probably I’m missing an extremely important controlling variable of some sort. Other studies by better equipped people have found the opposite conclusion and I’m inclined to believe them. See for example this.

Obviously as a partisan of economic equality I find these statistics disturbing. More than disturbing though I find them to be inexplicable. I had thought that the explanation might lie in a protective effect of traditional values, but regressions using percentage religious and percentage Republican don’t support this- State Gini still matters a great deal. I had also considered that perhaps the protective effect came through more unequal states being richer, but the only economic variable with any effect on suicide — Median income- is actually negatively correlated with inequality (in more unequal places the median person tends to be poorer).

There’s pretty good evidence from other studies that mental illness problems are caused by inequality, so I suspect the effect is relatively specific to suicide.

In conclusion, I don’t get it.