5/24/2020

If you type suicide and educational level into google search, here are the first two papers that pop up.

My Incentive

These two papers have observations that are not necessarily in agreement.

  • “men and women aged ≥25 years with at least a college degree exhibited the lowest suicide rates” (Phillips JA, Hempstead K)

  • “Individual with higher educational achievement may be more prone to suicide risk”(Pompili M et al.)

This discrepancy promotes my interest in looking at more data on this topic. The data I used for generating my analysis can be found here, and more information on this dataset is here

Suicide Attempts in Shandong, China

Histogram by Education Level

Afterthoughts

  • Within each age group, suicide attempts were more common in less educated group.
  • For people above age of 60, education is generally scarce, this trend changed for younger group due to a transition in attitude towards education in China after WWII, the switch between elementary school and iliterate group observed for the 60~70 age group in the histogram is more likely an aftereffect of this trainsion in government policy.

Afterthoughts (cont’d)

  • For people in 20~60 age group, college degree does associate with lower case of suicide attempts observed, therefore supporting the paper by Phillips JA and Hempstead K.
  • Additional data on the percentage of population in Shandong province that received college education during that time span may help elaborate the actual relationship.