While genetics or culture may matter a little, overall I am just going to end with a blanket recommendation to avoid being part of any small circumpolar ethnic group that has just discovered alcohol.
That is at the end of a long and typically careful analysis of parts of the world that have high suicide rates.
Because suicide is a rare event, it is very difficult to make inferences from data. Scott, as usual, does a good job of being careful. One note that I would add is that Case and Deaton observed that in the U.S., suicide rates are higher in states with low population density. I don’t know if this is just coincidence or in fact there is something protective against suicide about high population density.
This was my comment when Tyler Cowen linked to the same article:
In short, Alexander’s analysis was not careful. I suspect a truly careful analysis would demonstrate that the problem is mostly socio-economic. The current hotspots represent pathological equilibria that are hard to escape. Moving successfully to a modern industrial nation-state system is non-trivial and the hard constraints of geography and colonial era “assistance/treaties” are not helping and neither is the progressive obsession with oppression.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the baseline rates are different in different phenotypical groups, and the hot spots represent aggravation by socioeconomic distress.
It’s worth examining why Africans don’t have higher suicide rates. I think it’s not high in Tropical / Equitorial Africa, nor in African American communities in the USA.
It could be reporting, but I don’t think it’s just the taboo against reporting.
Ilardi wrote a book on why suicide is low in stone age communities. All that exercise, all that socializing, getting enough sleep. It’s a six factor explanation. My offhand sense is that he not a fraudster or a crank, and he’s on the right track in terms of clinical insight.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/stephen-s-ilardi-phd/the-depression-cure/9780786747481/
…and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.
-Anne Sexton
With respect to population density, maybe the rising insistence that only gigantic megacities are to be allowed to have functioning economies (in the interest of showing off, billionaires desire to set up shop at prestigious addresses; and it’s as if no means of communication has yet been invented other than face-to-face in a stuffy conference room) is the causal connection, rather than density in and of itself…
I expect the other half of the puzzle is that less densely populated areas have less gun control (which is appropriate, both for hunting and for defense from said wildlife).
There does seem to be a correlation of the further north you go, the higher the suicide rate.
Aren’t low density states exactly where evangelical churches are the most powerful?
The Bible Belt includes Texas, home to some of the largest metropolitan areas in America. I think the correlation of Evangelical Churches to low-density states is an accident of geography and demography rather than a causative relationship.