For both I used data from Wikipedia:Suicide rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate (WHO data for 2019)GDP per capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita (World bank column, mostly for 2018/2019/2020)

Each dot corresponds to a country, but labeling all of them made the plot unreadable. Apologies if your country wasn't labeled.

GDP per capita is a really bad metric. There are a lot of places that have companies that make a lot but the general public does not benefit from that money.

Is median income a good alternative in this context?

Yeah it's definitely not perfect, doesn't account for income inequality at all. If you have a suggestion for a better metric (data for which is available publicly) let me know, I will share another plot using that. Would be interesting to compare it with this one.

But then again it shows that there's a clear trend even without accounting for inequality.

Love graph.. Bit macabre.. So Barbados..

Does it, though? There are only nine countries with the GDP per capita to even potentially make the upper right quadrant. And those nine countries appear (eyeballing it) to average somewhere around the median for suicide rates.

Desperate poverty certainly seems to significantly elevate suicide risks in some places, but at higher income levels it seems to hover around a fairly median level. It doesn’t appear that the correlation is super strong beyond a few outliers.

It is extraordinarily difficult to find a consistent causal factor for suicide. For each potential factor - income, economic opportunity, family life, rural vs urban, etc - there are some regions that seem to fit the hypothesis, but there are many others that completely confound it.

How is Ireland so high at GDP?

Yeah Barbados huh

I agree that it doesn't really show correlation. It is just a Gaussian distribution at around 6-10 suicides per 100,000 and all countries on the far right are just richer but they don't seem to have significantly lower suicide rates. The upper right quadrant is empty because only five countries in total out of 200 have a high enough suicide rate to be in the upper half and none of these are one of the richest nine in the world

It's the Amazons and Apples of the world evading taxes :)

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No, there aren't.

It seems you're Canadian from your profile. If that's the case, then you literally do not have a frame of reference or ability to even know what being poor in a poor nation is like. You live in a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world. If you're talking about the US, please -- just shut up.

You should find a source, or stop sharing such silly, ignorant, and offensive opinions. GDP is well known by economists to correlate extremely well with almost every positive metric. Is it perfect? No. Does it explain every possible thing? Not at all. Is it objective, relatively easy to measure, and highly correlative with postiive results on a global and historical scale? Yes. This is objectively true and is seen in just about every GDP regression done by people who know what they're doing.

Side note - GDP should almost always be logarithmic. Nominal GDP is not nearly as meaningful.

What is the trend? I do not see any trends whatsover. It seems like there is zero correlation. Most countries are between 0 and 20 GDP pc and 0-20 suicides pc.

Would be interesting to research the outliers, ones that interest me are Guyana vs Venezuela (Near equal GDP) , and South Korea vs Italy. (Near equal GDP)

South Korea has a GDP which is roughly 20% higher than the global average.

not sure if I trust the reporting for some of those countries though... Like death records in india in some outskirts are seriously lacking. Im betting thats true of many developing countries.

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Tax Haven status throwing off the GDP metric for certain countries.

The convex hull is Guyana, South Korea, United States, and Singapore. All others have lower suicide/GDP rates.

It wouldn’t account for inequalities as much as somehow using the Gini metric, and I’m no statistician, but how about using the median income - if there are enough sources…

I agree with most of what you say but would caution that just because they live in Canada doesn't mean they don't have a frame of reference. I live in the US and have spent a cumulative 3 years living in some of the poorest countries on the planet.

This has definitely opened my eyes to the plights of those in actual poverty.

I get where you are coming from in general, though, and agree that GDP/capita is a poor metric.

And yet rich people will insist that money doesn't buy happiness. Well, it buys food, housing, education and health care all of which make it a hell of a lot easier to be happy.

I'll suggest you to try suicide rate vs HDI

Sheltered 1st worlders here in Reddit love to parrot "muh inequality" to pretend they are poor at a global scale. Can't help but roll my eyes every time as someone from an actual poor country.

Per the oil production projections in Guyana, their GDP per capita should more than double by 2026. Assuming their suicide rate doesn't change, that would place them in the top right quadrant.

People cant complain about inequality unless they're from a poor country? TIL ...

Singapore, Qatar, and good old tax-haven Ireland all at the far right of the graph bear this out.

Leprechaun gold.

Yeah Ireland is way out of place there

I would recommend making both axes logarithmic to uncluster the data points.

So money does kind of buy happiness then eh?

It's a tax haven for the EU, so many large companies have "located" their profits in Ireland.

It also has a major housing bubble pushing up asset prices across the board.

Canada is in a similar situation, our GDP looks high but our economy is in shambles.

But the one with suicide rate below the world average is mostly low gdp country tho. Afghanistan, bangladesh, myanmar, libya, bhutan, etc. While on the other hand US and other developed eastern europe have higher gdp than world standard but also higher suicide rate than the world avg

And those high suicide low gdp countries looks like more of africa problem than economic problem, so can we really use gdp as matrix?

Seems like Sweden, Belgium and the US all have higher suicide rates than Japan

Looks like that’s true only because you have a relatively small number with low gdp and high suicide rates, but it’s still true that most low gdp countries don’t have high suicide rates, so the correlation is low

good to know about tax haven ireland

I mean, if you draw a line of best fit for the data, then it definitely shows a correlation. Just because it doesn’t form a perfect curve doesn’t negate the correlation.

Seems to be a common belief among the youngsters today that you can only have an opinion if you meet random conditions.

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No, capitalism bad. hissssssss

Interesting that you correlate higher GDP with lower suicide rates and somehow completely ignore the fact that the lower left corner shows a great deal of countries with significantly lower GDP than say, the US, somehow have even lower suicide rates...

It's almost as if...wait for it....it's almost as if there are dozens of other factors that determine a country's suicide rate OTHER than GDP and those factors should be given credit for their influence on suicides too instead of just "rich countries have less suicides".

I am not implying a negative correlation. The plot looks like a 'lower left triangle' not like a line with a negative slope. I am just saying that 'upper right triangle' is mostly empty.

Might want these on log scales

Source? I bet the data collection on this has very different criteria in each country, even across the United States.

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Source is WHO data and World Bank data

I see several outliers that you could take out. What was your r value?

Literally nothing beautiful about this. The shape of the shitty point cloud even tells us that you're plotting the wrong things on the wrong scale. Go away and come back with something we can actually look at.

A heuristic I was taught was to always label your visualizations with the source data.

I’d like to see that done with a GINI coefficient

One of the reasons Russia is so high is because of all those tempting windows in tall buildings.

You’re telling me suicide is more common among the poor? Really? Who knew?

Pretty annoying that none of countries between Croatia and Japan are not named :)

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Low population and lots of companies

I met a man in Ukraine who attempted suicide. Fascinating story that guy.

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Reporting probably has an impact in some of those lower GDP countries.

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Overlay the average income of people whom commit suicide in each country.

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You imply causation, which is the actual problem, by phrasing that 'higher gdp results in...'.

It's not exclusively about the wealth of the country, nor how much individuals make per capita, but also, importantly;

1. The government; Does the government give off the vibe of containing competent people, competent leaders who have your best interests at heart without requiring backwards/roundabout thinking? Is there unrest within the government, or within the political class, where the wealthy are trying their best to elect a leader who leans more with the interests of the wealthy as opposed to the common people?
2. Security, and this ties in with the government; People like feeling safe. Safety is projected by competent, safe leaders who obviously have the best interests of the general public at heart, as opposed to the best interests of the wealthy few.
3. Future safety, future compatibility; Does the government in your country appear to be actively preparing itself and you, the citizens, for a future transition with as little trouble as possible, or alternatively, are opposing leaders fighting to obviously risk the public's safety in favour of their own financial gains?

These may all appear to be the same thing, written differently, but they all tie in with general safety and security, access to affordable healthcare, preventative measures taken to try and ensure the survival of the species, the prioritization for the well-being of the general public as opposed to only catering to the well-being of the wealthy.

The world currently is only profit-driven because our leaders so far, have been greedy bastards.

Don't get me wrong. Making a return on your investment isn't inherently bad, but starting a business solely out of the possible profits, during which your company completely demolishes the competition is not a fair way of going about things, not in any way, shape or form.

Countries governments may have been founded to cater to the rich, initially, as they were the ones with voting power, but things have changed. We have evolved. Our societies have evolved. We need governments to put in place limitations on corporations and the rich. Sure. Let them profit. But limit them from profiting excessively. If they want to expand, put it to vote by a committee of general well-being, taking into accounts such as general public happiness, market competitiveness et cetera.

At the end I want to say, one of the many, many causes for depression, leading to suicidal ideation, has to do with whether the able bodied, and not-so able bodied appear to be able to find themselves a place in society because in the end, we're all social creatures by nature. Nothing can change that. Even the biggest recluses were known to talk to animals as opposed to people.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Biggie lied to us all - it’s mo money, less problems

Well there’s a lot of countries in the bottom left square, which implies that countries with low GDP per capita tend to have low suicide rates

Yeah bunch of blue dots most of which have no name. They are countries I guess? But how can I appreciated the differences between them?

This could have been a bit more interesting if the dots were color coded by global region or some other collection to give us another dimension of data.

I mean I guess OP did that with India/World? That was a bit random.

This graph doesn't show any correlation. It does the majority of the world have similar suicide and GPD (bottom left) and the are outliers in both categories

Speaking for Belgium, it is a huge problem here

Data envelope analysis might work. Outlier points furthest from the axis are Singapore, USA, South Korea and Guyana.

Kiribati has only 100k population so 30 suicides per year is terrible

Log GDP, for one thing is much better: going from 1 to 5 dollars a day is life changing. From 100 to 105 is nothing.

For another, you can multiply this by 1/gini as a proxy for how many people really benefit.

There's no country in the upper right corner, so we could say that any country could have low suicide rates but a high GDP per capita precludes high suicide rates.

That in itself can be a useful conclusion, even if there is no correlation.

Damn Korea got some sad people

Useful how? there are only 8 candidate countries in the lower right, and only three in the upper left.

I agree it's weak.

Another thing to note about the US is the availability of guns makes suicide attempts more "successful" -- iirc this is why men in the US are much more likely to die from suicide despite having the same number of attempts as women.

It'd be interesting to also see suicide attempt rates.

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The state of our mental health care is just sad (and i can't even go to the therapist for that because our waiting lists are >6 months).

Ireland is a tax haven.

Account also for number of sunny days or hours per country instead of GDP.

> Generally, an increase in GDP per capita results in a decrease to suicide rates

OP did make a correlation? It's right there in the title.

Here is an interesting study on Muslim countries and Susie rate by age. I searched it because of the right hand corner of the graph.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-13101-3

It wouldn’t be one metric I’d like to see cause of death outside of Suicide. As some countries don’t report them the same.

Oh, how did I manage to only read half a headline... I edited my response.

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Note that reported suicide rates are extremely vulnerable to reporting bias, arising from both unintentional and deliberate misclassification of deaths.

A variety of social, culture, religious, economic, political, and criminal factors affect the detection of deaths by suicide and how they are reported. (He accidentally took too many pain pills. She accidentally blew her head off while cleaning her gun collection.)

Heck, just being in a country that conducts more autopsies is associated fairly strongly with a higher reported suicide rate. This 2011 study in JAMA Psych found that a 1% increase in autopsy rate was associated with a 0.45 per 100,000 increase in suicide rate.

I am not so sure if these two things are strongly correlated. A lot of poor countries seem to have low suicide rates.

There are mathematical formulas for computing correlation that are more useful than just looking at the raw data. And to be more specific, the correlation is in fact the opposite, though very small. https://uca.edu/cahss/files/2020/07/03-King-CLA-2020.pdf

I believe teen girls cut themselves and attempt suicide at much higher rates but alas, boys just get the job done 👊

I meant correlation is not the only thing you can get from a plot, there are other things to note.

Am I blind of there is no Spain?

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I want to know what’s going on in Barbados!

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lol i am really happy that India is highlighted. Saves time. 🤣

Correlation does not equal causation.

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and in many cultures/religions suicide is a huge no-no and a bigger topic, like Turkey which has a low rate despite people being stressed out for all kinds of reasons, he mentioned 3 countries that are majority muslim so in only 6-7 countries where muslims make up atleast 50% of the population the rate is above world average.

There's quite many more countries that have higher suicide rates than Japan.

u/ankuprk you make one interpretation out of this data and you fail with that. Fit a line into your data and you will see that generally an increase in GDP per capita does NOT result in a decrease in suicide rates.

I really wonder why these posts get upvotes.

Ya, the 'the aren't any outliers of type x' type of "analysis" using scales just isn't really a thing.

Oh ya, and they give as much weighting to tiny countries as they do to large ones ugh

It's a 'plot' of data, and fitting a 'line' is one way to interpret that data. If you fit a line to this data it will have lots of outliers, so line fitting is useless. Maybe you might be able to find some value in this post if you could appreciate that we plot data for pattern recognition, not for fitting a line.

Good luck trying to establish causation with statistical plots

It's one of the dots, but just not labeled. I will share the code sometime so that everyone can have a look at their country of choice

That's exactly my point. Often, the way we display and communicate our data doesn't capture the whole picture. When done poorly it leads to biased conclusions.

Very constructive feedback, and detailed explanation of what's missing/wrong in the plot. Thank you

This is a good question. I will get back to you soon.

Thanks for the good suggestion. I will do it, and get back to you.

Thanks for the suggestion. Do you have a source for this metric for every country?

I agree with x axis, but I don't think we should make death rate logarithmic, because that doesn't make sense physically. Like say things like infant mortality rate, births per woman, etc are always plotted on a linear scale.

Yeah that's also a fair point. There are papers about how suicides are underreported in India for reasons like fear of persecution for harassment, social shame, etc

I think equal weighing is okay, because we have everything in per capita?

Yeah this is pretty much what I wanted to say: very high income countries don't have very high suicide rates.

I am only saying 'higher GDP per capita with higher suicide rates' doesn't seem to happen. To which one person gave a valid argument, that there are only 9-10 countries with high income to begin with. But yeah, that's all I was trying to say in the title of the post

Ok let's be clear: generally an increase in GDP per capita does NOT result in a decrease in suicide rate.

You claim it does in your post title and your claim is wrong based on the very plot you present.

If I read this correctly, I seem to appreciate your plot more than you do yourself.

I'm not saying a linear regression of form y = kx+ b would be anyhow appropriate or correct as an explanatory model for the presented factors. Your very data again shows it would not be suitable for a multitude of reasons. But what a linear fit of the aforementioned form WOULD demonstrate together with some statistical measures is that your statement in the title is false.

You cannot save the issue with any other pattern recognition either. You can see that generally, your x axis does not work as a sufficient predictor of y axis, especially not in the sense you suggest. You need at least some additional factor/variable to build a model that reaches reasonable explanatory power for your y axis.

Absolutely not 😂

But I’ll try to give you one if I stumble on such a source!

These data seem to be wrong, is this GDP per capita or GDP PPP per capita ? I don't know but in my humble opinion posts like these which are not clear should be taken down and remade.

The interpretation is muddier, but I agree applying log’s appropriate: you probably have at least a nonlinear (eg multiplicative, power law, etc) style of relationship giving rise to these data and log would help for visualizations like these where linear relationships are most comprehensible

Your story fits with the research that suggests if you make suicide less convenient, the rate drops. I'm really happy you hung in there and are doing better!

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It clearly says 'GDP per capita', and I have also commented with the source of the data, in accordance with the rule of the subreddit. What's not clear?

Although, I agree with you that GDP PPP per Capita would definitely be a more sensible metric.

It's GDP PPP per capita then.

Ah. I checked the comment and the graph again, yeah indeed I have plotted GDP PPP per capita, not GDP per capita.

Yeah, sorry for the confusion. This is totally my fault. The y axis should be GDP PPP per capita. And thanks for pointing out the inconsistency.

The Guyanese people aren't likely to see huge benefits from this though.

I can shed some light on Guyana... quite often the method to go is to 'drink poison' ... there is no stomach pumping that.

Mental health services are poor there is still great shame about discussing mental health.

From what I know, these decisions are made due to things like, DV and 'forbidden love' ...also, if you look closer into the data you will see they have a lot of young people included.

I also feel that from a young age, unless you were privately educated (then nepotism will do its job regardless) you are put into a class system... literally, entire secondary schools are known for how smart or 'stupid' their students are.

I can imagine being put into a school where you know you will come out with limited prospects will give you a deep sense of hopelessness.

Its sad to see Guyana is still at the top for such a stat... such a beautiful country.

This is incredibly sad. What is the political climate like there? Would it be possible to set up a NPO/humanitarian programme bringing in professionals that are trained in treating mental health aswell counsellors, coaches, trainers, etc.

It's a 'by country' chart The data points forming the "relationship" are still weighted by country, each country is one datapoint. So in the visualisation suicide/gdp by capita for the US, has as much influence on the observed relationship as suicide/gdp for Barbados. Even though Barbados is less than 1/600th the size.

But practically speaking, they do. The US has comparatively high income and high suicide rates. More than Double Mexico in both, so the relationship between the two points doesn't have much meaning. It just happens there is no data point outlier in the chart's upper right of these two metrics if scaled this way.

Yeah, I agree... that would be a great idea.

I am not too sure of the political climate there, (I dont live there anymore, I just follow the odd news story) but like the rest of the world I'm going to assume its a shit show.

The 'UN' is already there and things are changing, but very, very slowly. I'm sure if you wanted to, you could set up an NPO there.

What worries me the most, that right now various nations, are doing a land/ resource grab on Guyana because it has a huge amount of natural resources and largely remains untouched, some aggressively (Venezuela) others more subtly, (China and USA), while we'll get some money, it wouldn't be what the country deserves, we're essentially giving it away to no benefit of the people.

I suggest you to try also GNI PPP per capita as an indicator, it might be a better indicator, If I knew how to do these kind of graphs I would it myself, but I don't know.

I will do this, assuming I will be able to access this data for all the countries somewhere. If you'd like to play with this stuff let me know, I would be happy to opensource the code and data on GitHub or somewhere

The problem is that I am not a coder otherwise I would accept. If you want GNI PPP per capita data you can find it on the world bank website. I suggest you to use GNI PPP per capita (constant 2017 International $) with 2019 data since the new data are not widely available yet.

link

No probs. Thanks for sharing the link. I will do it this weekend. (Have been out of town due to work so don't have access to the personal laptop)