This feels like something that would be damn near impossible to get actually accurate.
Really curious how much higher than 30 per 100k is in Las Vegas. I saw a suicide once in The Excalibur. Poor guy shot himself in the lobby. When I came back 30 minutes later everything looked like nothing happened at all.
I grew up in one of the “no data” counties in the North East. My neighbor committed suicide 30 years ago or so. There, now there is data.
That’s such an oddly specific north to south multi-state swath of No Data that I’d easily believe there was something going on with that particular longitude, even though that’s a completely insane thing to imagine.
In a round about way, it probably is geographically related. So few people live there due to the land being pretty useless, but not so useless that the people there are spread out and when county lines were drawn they followed county sizes similar to Midwestern states. More western states drew larger counties but had similar population density averages so the number of people per county are high enough that there are enough suicides that someone may actually be tracking that on an annual basis
Arbitrarily cherry picking that squished pentagon county in northern Nebraska, there are only 769 people living in the entire county . If just one of them committed suicide that county would be off the charts lethal at 137. So when you take the US average suicide rate per year it could take up to ten years for someone in the county to commit suicide. So there probably isn’t anyone keeping real statistics in that county
Realistically I think this is a bad map since counties with lower populations get disproportionately amplified suicide rates
I went to highschool in Utah, every year we had at least one assembly about suicide prevention. We had more depending on if a suicide happened in one of the counties nearby. Not one for each since that would have taken a while.
There was a month or two where there were like six pretty rapid fire and one by a student at our school. We’d already had an assembly pretty recently, so they didn’t have another one. It was a very quiet week, but then everything went back to normal, as always.
Anyway if you’re wondering why it’s that bad in the Great Basin region of the US the answer is Mormonism, and lack of education/resources especially in rural areas.
The assemblies I mentioned weren’t “this is how you can deal with things” they were “no one in their right mind would do this, suicide and thinking about it is weak and stupid so stop” or they were “god doesn’t want you to die” neither were effective.
Then again I wouldn’t expect effective solutions from people who are the problem. Not sure any amount of words from men who use “gay” and “queer” as an insult would help queer kids feel like living in that hell was better than death.
Oh and if anyone is wondering, this was less than a decade ago, not in the very distant past. I think most of the staff in my highschool are still the same, and the majority of the residents in the town certainly haven’t moved, physically or “spiritually.” Honestly, with the trump rhetoric they’ve probably gotten worse.
