From: mark@unicorn.com
Date: Mon Jul 13 1998 - 07:20:01 MDT
Damien Broderick [damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au] wrote:
>How reliable are these comparative figures? It strikes me as likely that a
>religiose culture like [large portions of] the USA (or Iran) might well
>record deflated figures for suicide on the grounds of familial shame, etc.
>Europeans are often more candid.
Reasonably... i.e. about as good as any other international comparisons.
There's always an incentive to record suicides as accidents, and evidence
that a fair number of supposed gun accidents in America were really
suicides; but even then there are comparitively so few reported gun
accidents that adding them all to the suicide rate wouldn't affect it
that much.
There are also other oddities, such as Japan where there's evidence of
many family murders (e.g. parents killing children then themselves)
being classified as suicides.
But it's not likely to affect the figures that much either way.
Mark
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