"However, I though it would be helpful to start with a proactive thesis to get people thinking about this issue."
Well sorry to sound like a grumpy grandpa, but if anything, this site needs less posts of higher quality, not more empty posts with the explicit goal of provoking replies.
"How come the suicide rate in Africa is much lower (close to zero) than in Europe?"
First, correlation between depression and suicide is not linear as you seem to imply. While I don't have the expertise to have an authoritative opinion on this matter, depression is much more complex than 'my life sucks'. It's just as much (more?) about 'I feel my life sucks'. Japan has a very high suicide rate, yet ranks high in various happiness indexes, and has first world GDP.
Secondly, your claim that suicide rates in Africa are close to zero is flat out wrong, as even a cursory google search would have revealed to you. To start there is the objective problem with getting data - many African countries keep little to no statistics on this. Then there is a cultural issue, which incentivises all involved actors to mask or under-report actual causes of death (this is Greenspan talk for: families report suicides as accidents to avoid the social stigma). Furthermore, even the data that is available and at least somewhat reliable, points to African suicide rates that are not substantially different from countries worldwide. For example, the only African country on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... (Zimbabwe) is somewhere in the middle, just above (meaning: slightly worse than) Luxemburg, the most prosperous country in the EU. While Wikipedia isn't the end and all of data, I found that WHO data paints a similar picture when I looked into it a while ago when I had the same discussion, but that data is a lot harder to distill and I don't have time right now to do so.
Well sorry to sound like a grumpy grandpa, but if anything, this site needs less posts of higher quality, not more empty posts with the explicit goal of provoking replies.
I assume you mean more posts of higher quality. I agree with you in general, except that I know no site where the density of high quality posts is so high as here. If it was any higher, I would probably be afraid to post anything. However, social science works different than the topics the discussion is usually about on this site. The best university professors often start their courses by asking provocative questions, which make the students think for themselves. Sometimes the question is more interesting than the answer, if it provokes thought.
Well I meant 'less posts, but of higher quality', but I admit that my wording was unfortunate to the point of indefensible.
I guess we're going off topic here and into a not so interesting discussion, but with the advent of universal access to heaps of data, the old ways of thinking are becoming less relevant. What we need is data and evidence; facts, not talk. Now you and I are from a country where it is a high good to let everybody have an 'opinion' (I dislike that word and the concept because opinions are like assholes: everybody's got one and most of them stink) about everything, but luckily we're now beginning to realize the detrimental effects of the excesses of that, and are curbing it. Many scientific fields are moving the same direction: less vacuous talk, more substance.
Well sorry to sound like a grumpy grandpa, but if anything, this site needs less posts of higher quality, not more empty posts with the explicit goal of provoking replies.
"How come the suicide rate in Africa is much lower (close to zero) than in Europe?"
First, correlation between depression and suicide is not linear as you seem to imply. While I don't have the expertise to have an authoritative opinion on this matter, depression is much more complex than 'my life sucks'. It's just as much (more?) about 'I feel my life sucks'. Japan has a very high suicide rate, yet ranks high in various happiness indexes, and has first world GDP.
Secondly, your claim that suicide rates in Africa are close to zero is flat out wrong, as even a cursory google search would have revealed to you. To start there is the objective problem with getting data - many African countries keep little to no statistics on this. Then there is a cultural issue, which incentivises all involved actors to mask or under-report actual causes of death (this is Greenspan talk for: families report suicides as accidents to avoid the social stigma). Furthermore, even the data that is available and at least somewhat reliable, points to African suicide rates that are not substantially different from countries worldwide. For example, the only African country on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... (Zimbabwe) is somewhere in the middle, just above (meaning: slightly worse than) Luxemburg, the most prosperous country in the EU. While Wikipedia isn't the end and all of data, I found that WHO data paints a similar picture when I looked into it a while ago when I had the same discussion, but that data is a lot harder to distill and I don't have time right now to do so.