World Suicide Awareness During COVID-19 [Infographic]

Matthew Gates https://worldpopulationreview.com 10m 2,509 #suicideawareness

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

COVID-19 Isn’t The Only Thing Killing People

Suicide Awareness Day Is September 10

* If you or someone you know is experiencing depression leading to suicidal thoughts, please just give someone a call and let them know who you are and how you are feeling today, just a few more minutes of your lifetime to let someone else hear your voice. (United States | International)

* Official government websites were linked for reference accuracy of information about COVID-19.

Despite the fact that COVID-19 is the leading cause of death currently in 2021, there are many other factors that come into play that are still killing humans around the world at a very fast rate, including suicide. For reference, this is being written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the topic arose to understand that although COVID-19 is now the number one leading cause of death, COVID-19 technically isn’t what is killing people per se, but it is the cause written down for it.

This article will not dive into the science of COVID-19, but it does seem that COVID-19 exacerbates pre-existing cardiovascular conditions, and with the lingering presence or constant threat of pneumonia, it is often what weakens many to the point of death and either you have additional help and support from machines, and healthcare, and you fight, or you don’t, and you give up, and you die. While it sounds scary, and the mass global media has played a great role in making it scarier, and numbers seem high at first glance, but rates of death are low among the general population, while the older populations are the most severely at risk, as they always are and always were for ANY VIRUS.

Suicide rates have increased, unfortunately, because of COVID-19 and this likely has to do with being kept inside, away from the sun, away from others, socially distancing, not being able to visit friends or family, having to wear a mask all the time, and technically just losing your identity as a human being. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken its toll on the entire world, and not a single human being alive today, could truly ever forget the effects, the promises or lack of, and the devastating loss. When looking into numbers across the board, continuing on that first glance, there is no diminishing the fragility of life. The “high numbers” of COVID-19 have to deal with infection rates, mortality rates, and recovery rates. Fortunately, the recovery rates are actually overwhelmingly high to the point where you could say that humans are unlikely to go extinct from this pandemic.

So that is a bit of happy news. Unfortunately, as much as I want to keep this article happy and positive, I have to dive into the truth of reporting on suicide: it is sad. It is upsetting. It is frightful. And I can only say, “if I could have been there… what I could’ve done.” But I am only a single man who comes up with ideas and researches articles. And here I go, about to bring us into the deeper depths of this article on world suicide rates and suicide awareness.

With our focus on suicide rates around the world because of COVID-19, there are still likely to be a few million ways to die, and if you’re human and living on this Earth, chances are, with the infinite wonders of the universe, if you can think of a way to die, it is likely that the chances it already happened to someone dying that way have already happened, save for more advanced technology that doesn’t exist yet, but even the very thing we all, as humans, are surrounded by, with only this Earth protecting us, space can kill you too, and only three people have actually died in space, with many others who died trying to get there. If you can think of it, someone has probably died that way at least one time on this Earth, recorded or not recorded. And yes, even a feather can kill you, but it’s really only the feather that caused the action that caused your death.

There are an umpteenth number of reasons why people around the world choose to commit suicide. There are also a million ways to do it in other countries, with an even greater risk of exposure to various elements that will kill you, although the majority of people often use the same methods to end their lives. Suicide effects every family member and every person involved in your life. Whether you think you matter or not, 99% of everyone who thinks they don’t matter will be noticed if they were missing. Sorry, not sorry. Now stay alive.

Suicide rates often remain steady, some years increasing and some years decreasing, with several countries often seeing around the same numbers, particularly with South Korea, China, and Japan. Although Japan is not number one in suicide rates, Japanese men between the ages of 20-44 and women between the ages of 15-34 seem to be at the highest risks. Unfortunately, even generally “happy countries”, like Sweden, Denmark, and Finland have relatively low and steady rates of suicide, but winter months bring about more darkness, about 20 hours of it, leading to depression and suicide.

Highest rates of suicide are actually occurring outside of the United States. I am somewhat familiar with Lesotho, as it was not an easy country to obtain for my book, is a small country in Africa with a population of about 2 million people, but it is number one, as in 72 per 100,000 people feel the need to end their own lives. Unfortunately, Africa holds at over half the top 10 list of countries with the highest suicide rates. Kiribati, a small island nation in the Pacific Ocean with a population of just 120,000 also has a high number with 28 per 100,000 people. Breaking it down, that means that every year, around 30 people will commit suicide. Only one country in Western Europe, Lithuania, saw a high number of suicide rates at 26 per 100,000, while Eastern Europe, or Russia specifically, which is a very vast land, taking up to 2 or 3 weeks to drive across, saw about 25 suicides out of of 100,000 people.

Lowest rates of suicide are also outside of the United States in the Carribean Island area, with Antigua and Barbuda seeing only a possible suicide attempt, along with Barbados and Grenada, while Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Sao Tome and Principe, only saw a single suicide. Keep in mind that these countries do have smaller populations. However, and interestingly enough, Jordan and Syria were also the two Middle Eastern countries, that reported just one or two deaths by suicide. Honduras and Venezuela in Central American and South America, respectively also so very low numbers of suicides in 2021 at just 2. And the Philippines also only saw about 2 suicides this year.

Now that we’ve got the data out of the way. Let’s get a bit more personal and focus on you, the reader.

Who am I, you ask? Who am I to tell you this nonsense? Someone who lives with depression and has had some type of suicidal thoughts since I was 10 years old. I live with my depression but I do not want to die or kill myself. I want to live and experience life and enjoy. I’ve created much of the adventure I sought, created much of the journey I’ve experienced, and had a lot happen to me in life that was never planned. Life is and always was worth living. Your life has meaning. You have a purpose. You might have forgotten it. But you’re not here for no reason.

In the vastness of the universe, and the infinite realities of the beyond, you are absolutely here by chance, and you were totally an accident. However, when you minimize the spectrum down to the Earth level and human relationships and connection level, you then realize that your life actually has a lot more meaning than you thought. Take the universe, for example, and I will use that a lot, because it is something we all can see. It is there every day and every night we can see it, filled with stars, and the only purpose any of it ever really serves: finding our way home, being entertained, or doing research to understand the what, why, when, where, and how. 

The universe serves absolutely no real purpose nor does it have any real meaning in our lives, and yet, if Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto weren’t aligned as they are now, it is likely that life on Earth would be vastly different, if there was any life on Earth at all. We’d probably just be one of the many millions of galaxies of stars and planets with no life on it, because the conditions are always by chance, depending on the research of what, why, when, where, and how. And yet, the Chinese attributed the stars to our birth signs, while the Greeks and Romans followed the stars for amazing stories that some of us believe are as true as the life we have in front of us.

Once you get to the other side and find out that problem was only temporary, well, now you have a permanent problem, because the one thing the world has in common: other than the celebration of the Day of the Dead, which is just a metaphorical form of “bringing the dead back to life for one day out of the year”, no one has officially died, only to come back to life and tell everyone about it. Except, well, a few religious figures.

No matter what you are going through, try and get help to solve it before you take the permanent route. You have a purpose here. You just haven’t begun to understand what it is yet. You are here for a reason. You are here because you chose to be here. Unfortunately, we cannot carry all of the knowledge with us from the seemingly immaterial to the material completely, and thus, we forget what we were supposed to do here.

Back in 2019, I flew to Malaysia from New Mexico for a business trip and somewhat of pleasure, to meet the co-workers I’d only worked with for a year before. It took three planes to get there. The first plane went from Albuquerque to Los Angeles. From Los Angeles, the second plane flew to Hong Kong, and finally out of China, a third plane was on its way to Malaysia. The trip to do this took me twenty-four (24) hours, but in reality, I lost forty-eight (48) hours. That is how big this planet is. I flew into tomorrow, where time no longer really made sense, and when I returned, COVID-19 followed me, as I entered The Twlight Zone.

Confessions of the Professions and My Life As A Woman Project have literally put me in contact with the entire world via email, social media, and phone. I cannot say I’ve beat some Guinness World Record nor can I even prove it, as I am very sure that despite my time on a laptop computer, many other men have spoken to or networked with people from around the world. I will just claim that when you write a “one of a kind book“, there’s a possibility that you break a few world records. And I’d claim that I talk to about a dozen people a week, many who email me just because of this website, who all live in various parts of the world. From England to India to Australia and even Russia, this website attracts fans from all over the world.

Why is this guy talking about this and how does it relate to world suicide rates and awareness? There is a point that I am making and I am about to make it! I am in contact with much of the entire world everyday. It was gigantic when traveling by plane, but it is insanely small when using telecommunication and the Internet to bring us all together. I am not a country. I am not a government. I am a single man who started a website 9 years ago. The connections I’ve made with the world and that the world made to me were because of my actions. All of the authors on this website are from many parts of the world, who are also communicating with you.

So, if I were to tell you how meaningless my life was, and I committed suicide. The domain to this website renews in 2023 and is on auto-renew, and the hosting would likely last a few more years. No new articles. But this and many others would last a while until they soon faded into the nothingness of the Internet, as well as the nothingness of life. The significance of the insignificant is just how significant the insignificant are. I am not a celebrity. I am not anyone that too many people know personally, but I am someone that a lot of people know, yet in my own world, my own reality: no one really knows me, and yet, I do business with them everyday.

I am here to talk you out of your suicide attempt and I am also here to tell you that I wrote this article specifically for you, to show you that suicide rates around the world are high. Many people are committing suicide. Many of them are young and had their whole lives ahead of them. Instead, something happened, and they just gave up. At 10 years old, I took a knife to my wrist, and cut. The cut wasn’t enough to leave any lasting impression, but the thought was there. I didn’t know why I was suicidal. To this day, I still have no idea why I sometimes have suicidal thoughts.

But the reason I provided my own backstory was to show you: you are not alone and someone does care about you. I care about you. I can’t say I know you personally. I can’t help you personally. What I can do though is share this writing, this knowledge, this blog post, this article with you, and hope that you’re still alive to live another day. As my favorite #mgtow monk would say, to paraphrase “Another day above ground is another day of blessings.”

You are alive right now. Reading this. If you are thinking about suicide or even if you just came here for information, go hug and kiss the ones you love. Cherish the moments you have with them. The clock continues to tick everyday and natural causes are what you should aspire to eventually take you away.

If you or someone you know is experiencing depression leading to suicidal thoughts, please just give someone a call and let them know who you are and how you are feeling today, just a few more minutes of your lifetime to let someone else hear your voice. (United States | International)

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