I live 60 degrees northern latitude in a country with bad suicide statistics and the winters do get pretty harsh on you mentally. And there's still millions of people living norther than I do.
Highest suicide rates occur during the spring, around the vernal equinox not around the darkest time of the year. If you've never experienced the northern spring where each day is 10+ minutes longer than the previous, you'll never understand it. It just fucks up your mind in ways that are hard to describe.
My kitchen psychology thinks the high suicide rates in the spring may be related to the fact that people around you start to get more positive and active (some too much so) but if you're suffering from a bad depression, seeing that around you will make it worse.
It's not just suicides that peak. It also affects breakup/divorce rates as well as forming new relationships. It probably affects professional careers too, but I don't know if there are stats about it.
The long, dark winters and the rapid change that follows brings out some very primal sides. That being said, I'd recommend travel to the extreme latitudes around the solstices, both of them.
side note: we have about 15 hour long days at the moment. It's still pretty dark at night but I can't wait for the summer when you can see the sunset and sunrise at the same time if you look to the north at around midnight... it's magical.
I live at 60 degrees also, and I agree with everything you said.
The cold didn't bother me at all, even though I'm from a hot country originally. I rode my bike to work every day of the year in fact, even in -45C. I loved it. It's like being on another planet in it's beauty and differences.
Like you said, it was always in late winter/early spring that I'd loose it a little. I'd grab a burger and beer after work, then somehow two weeks would go by where I had done that every day, with lots and lots of beer, and I wouldn't really know how it happened.
The key for my was to always, always get outside at midday when the sun it out and get it on your face. Even on the coldest days I always go for a walk along the river to marvel at the beauty and get the sun on my face - that's a luxury of not being further North, the sun actually comes up and I can have it directly on my face.
And to get moving after work. Eat dinner then go snowshowing, x-country skiiing or whatever for at least a couple of hours. It's nice to get into this habit before winter really hits in Oct/Nov, then keep it up. It's amazing to be out there in -45C with a headlamp, the stars and of course it's how you get to see the Northern lights more often than not.
Of course, in summer, I get home from work, eat dinner then go mntn biking/hiking/fishing/whatever until 2am in the beaming sunshine. I call it two days for the price of one.
When people are really depressed, they don't kill themselves. Because they have no energy to.
Once they go on antidepressants, they go on suicide watch. It's the most dangerous time. Because they'll still be depressed, but they'll finally have the energy to get up. And they just might have the energy to do themselves in.
I actually have the opposite reaction to the spring. When I get 5+ minutes extra per day of light, I'm ecstatic, happy all the time. October and November are always brutal on me.
I'm only at 43-ish these days, but I've lived as far north as Edinburgh, Scotland (56ish). I had to explicitly get outside every day at lunch to get as much sun as I could.
Seasonal Affective Disorder is apparently a real thing.
> Highest suicide rates occur during the spring, around the vernal equinox not around the darkest time of the year.
If you don't take vitamin D pills or consume (lots of) cod liver oil, then your vitamin D levels will be lowest in the spring. If I remember correctly, at around 60 degrees north, you have to wait until the end of April until you get vitamin D from the sun.
It's coldest about 30 minutes into dawn. Spring suicides could just because the new amount of daylight has yet to have enough impact to reverse the depression of the dark winter.
I especially recommend visiting St. Petersburg during the summer. It's on that same latitude so you get nights that don't go dark and the whole city celebrates. They're called "White Nights" and there's a "White Night Festival"[1] but really, the fascinating part is how the whole city (or at least the city center) comes alive during those nights.
I love, love, love Greenland. Best place I have ever been to. When I was spending time in Tasiilaq, I was told that the breakdown happened because of the fallout from the Greenpeace activities against seal clubbing in Canada. This destroyed the market for fur products and led to social welfare from Denmark and alcoholism.
Anyway, when in Greenland it is politically correct to eat seal and whale, once you find out how they are hunted and how the population cherishes the animals.
The coolest thing about Greenland was that the museums had no tools for warfare. Conflicts between people in Greenland were carried out by people playing drums and 'rapping' their cause in a song duel. If you had the laughs and opinions on your side, the person who 'lost' received sled dogs and food and was let go. I wish this could be used for all conflicts around the world.
Seeking whale meat to tourists is completely against the spirit of subsistence whaling, and the reason Greenland lost its official whaling quota in 2013.
I'm thinking of visiting, but there's no way I'll be eating whale.
I can't help thinking that if all world conflicts were resolved by rap battle, the US would be even more belligerent. What? You thought the East Coast versus West Coast divide was bad? Marijuana as export-controlled munitions? Colonel D-o-double-g and General Dre?
The section talking about contagion was interesting. What follows is pure speculation on my part and a bit of a ramble.
I believe many mental illnesses, depression, suicidal behavior and anorexia among them, can be characterized as contagious. And perhaps some other things that aren't usually described as mental illnesses. The border between belief, religion and mental illness seems a bit fuzzy (echoes of Snow Crash). Small isolated communities must be much more susceptible to contagion taking hold, as single events have a great sway over perceptions, and there are few connections with a larger world to normalize things.
Charles Stross said something about the internet that stuck with me: "the accidental invention of telepathy". Just like public water supplies opened up new vectors for diseases such as cholera, I wonder if the internet's ability to more or less put minds directly in touch can facilitate the spread of certain mental illnesses. Consuming unfiltered internet might be looked on in a few years like drinking unsterilized water. In particular, I wonder if certain "echo chamber" social websites that allow easy isolation from mainstream opinion (Tumblr and 4chan, I'm looking at you) might be analogous to these dangerous isolated communities.
This is a very interesting thought process. Tumblr and 4chan in my mind are extreme examples of the unsterilised Internet you refer to....
> Consuming unfiltered internet might be looked on in a few years like drinking unsterilized water
For the last year or so I've decided to avoid news outlets as much as possible. So I've updated my Reddit subscriptions to remove anything that might be a news channel, I no longer frequent the BBC news website, and avoid newspapers and TV news as best I can.
The constant fear mongering and general bad news is at times overwhelming but oftentimes just unnecessarily miserable (IMO). It's like being given a long list of problems you can't do anything about. So I've decided to simply switch it off.
I would much prefer your approach where my news could somehow be "sterilised", taking out anything that is overtly negative leaving only factual stories (e.g. business, technology and so on).
"I believe many mental illnesses ... can be characterized as contagious."
I can believe that.
Social cognition, attachment theory, mirror neurons, etc.
Swarm Intelligence has (for its time?) a great primer on social cognition, how our brains resonate with each other, how children use their parent's brains and emotions to regulate their own, etc. http://www.swarmintelligence.org/SIBook/SI.php
I lived with a paranoid schizophrenia. It started making me crazy too. Took months to shake that off.
And I can definitely confirm that anxiety is contagious, from personal experiences.
There are certainly communities that "explain" the behaviors of mental illnesses in a way that don't help people who are at risk but instead drives them even more into the illness - i.e. certain extreme conspiracy boards, esoterics sites or misguided bulimia "self-help" groups. For sites like that, I agree.
However, as for groups which just represent off-mainstream subculture I don't see it. Well, technically they are of course "contagious" - that's how transmitting culture and ideas work. But not every bad idea or weird subculture is already a mental illness. I would think "sterilizing" the internet by taking away all "contagious" sites would not just rob it one of its core identities, but would also present serious free-speech and censorship issues as the criteria for being "sterile" don't seem clear-cut at all to me.
Or to make an example, many opinions on HN aren't mainstream either. What would make HN a safe site to visit, but Tumblr not?
A few years ago when my anxiety, depression and agoraphobia peaked one of the things that terrified me about talking about it to anyone was the way I'd managed to "logically rationalise" it to myself - I was literally scared of infecting friends with my ideas because even though a part of me knew it was stupid and broken beliefs, I was still capable of entirely justifying them. The fact I'm usually a strong minded person who's good at talking people round to my way of thinking only made this idea more troubling.
Whenever I read about tribal communities coming into modernity, I can't help but think that our "first-world" culture gets a lot wrong. These communities seem to have a deep sense of narrative--you're a part of a greater cultural story, a spiritual story that's connected with place, nature, and family. There is a journey laid out for you rich with sacrament (e.g. the rite of passage to become an Inuit hunter in this article). I can't help but feel that the modern world has lost this purposeful way of life. In the modern world, we're really left up to our own devices to figure out where we fit in and what we find meaningful. Would love to hear other's thoughts.
I recently read Sapiens by Yuval Harari, and this is a recurring theme in the book. "Collective fictions" throughout human history, the different forms of these myths, and how they help a society grow, or need to change as one does grow.
One sort of related example is local religions versus universal, missionary religions. The majority of religions in history have been local and exclusive. Deities such as nature/animal spirits and the like, other tribes may have their own spirits in their own regions, and there is no need to convert people outside of your regions. But the most successful religions are ones are universal and missionary; they believe that their religion is affects everyone, regardless of whether they believe it (and is often the only true religion), and that for some reason, it is beneficial to convert others to your religion.
Ideas like money, capitalism, art, really anything not essential to the biology of humans, are such "fictions", and the most successful (from any evolutionary standpoint) societies are the ones that have or adapt the most effective "fictions" for their societies. I guess to put it in HN terms, "how scalable are your beliefs?"
A lot of the old ways we've lost touch with, or never had, aren't helpful to modern society. A hunting trip in which you become a man doesn't amount to much in a society with mega-farms, slaughter mills and processed foods that don't expire immediately. Instead, our equivalent goals would be like "get a degree, get another degree, get a job". You're an adult when you're old enough to vote, and so on.
There's a lot of other topics as well, but that's what stuck with me the most and my interpretation of it. It's fascinating to think about.
Fascinating long read, which gives a lot of insight in the struggles of daily life in these remote parts of our world.
And no, it's not just the dark that makes people commit suicide. Of the top 10 countries with the highest suicide rates, only Lithuania can be considered as having a somewhat gloomy winter. The rest of the countries all get more sunlight (Guyana, Suriname and Sri Lanka for instance) than the countries generally accepted as happiest in the world: Denmark (ironically, considering the story), Switzerland, Iceland and Norway.
> Fascinating long read, which gives a lot of insight in the struggles of daily life in these remote parts of our world
I find articles like this highly annoying. I see the headline, think "if it's not the darkness, I wonder what is" and click the link expecting to find the answer. Instead of the answer, however, I get a fluffy human-interest piece that I simply do not care about.
How about we stop with crap like this, I don't need to hear a story, just the facts please. I've wasted several minutes on this story and still have no clue what the real reason is.
> The rest of the countries all get more sunlight (Guyana, Suriname and Sri Lanka for instance)
Guyana and Suriname have severe problems with their post-colonial status, very low income contrasted by wealth shown by western mining companies and their employees, a very big problem with alcoholism and very bad perspectives for most (soldiers turning barkeepers because they don't get paid, police extorting people in lieu of a living wage etc). I think the same reasons the author listed for Greenland might apply to those countries too.
> The rest of the countries all get more sunlight (Guyana, Suriname and Sri Lanka for instance) than the countries generally accepted as happiest in the world: Denmark (ironically, considering the story), Switzerland, Iceland and Norway.
South Korea as well, its latitude roughly matches the northern half of Tunisia (Seoul's latitude is 37°33′N, Tunisia's northernmost city of Bizerte is at 37°16′N)
That said I find it much more cheerful going off somewhere sunny when it's Jan/Feb in London. Maybe they could lay on some charter flights to Bahia or somewhere.
When I saw the title I thought this was going to be about Canada. Suicide rates are extremely high in some aboriginal communities; in Attawapiskat for example, 5% of the residents have attempted suicide in the past year.
And I can't say that I really blame them. Attawapiskat is an extremely isolated community, with few jobs and no amenities. Kids growing up in Attawapiskat have nothing to look forward to. Those who leave the community have much lower rates of suicide, but given the memories of children being taken away from their families and forced into abusive residential schools, no politician in their right mind would dare to suggest that as an option. So they live out their lives in miserable isolation, waiting for their boredom to end; and some decide to speed along the process.
> Attawapiskat is an extremely isolated community, with few jobs and no amenities.
Thing is, like the towns in the post, these have always been "isolated communities with few jobs", but they used to be somewhat content. The difference is that they (like everyone else) are now bombarded with very powerful messages about rich and successful white people living in the Big City. They are basically getting constantly shamed for doing what their ancestors have done for generations. Those same powers of connectedness that can be so positive in certain cases (e.g. alienated small-town geeks finding accepting communities elsewhere) can often turn out to be trojan horses for cultural shaming.
While there is some of what you mention going on my personal experience having lived many years in northern Ontario, had many native friends and acquaintances and seen many different bands (some call them reserves) is that many are successful with their own schools, police forces, businesses, and land rental to outside businesses and cottagers but you never hear about the successful ones cause they got their shit together. Only the disasters make the news.
It's not necessarily an isolation issue. It's really a combination of despair in the young (they don't see a clear path to succeed in life while holding on to their identity), a cultural shift between the old holding on to past grievances and the young wanting to move on. And a serious lack of individual accountability from so-called adults. For example, First Nations have an astronomical rate of diabetes. The alcohol abuse stereotype, while not as prevalent as people think, is higher than in the general population. Band councils ban booze on their land but people smuggle it and others look the other way.
As a people they are walking a knife's edge trying to live in a modern world while holding on their ancestral ways of self governance and cultural identity. I could write more about this but it would be off topic.
I was struck by the comment by the woman who answered the suicide line: "Maybe I am giving them a little love."
I spent years answering the phone on a crisis line. Some people's problems just didn't seem that bad, yet they were overwhelmed nonetheless. Some people had such crushing burdens I was astonished they could even talk.
I didn't find it uplifting, in fact it drained me. I am astonished by her ability to do it for almost 20 years. I guess it was a form of catharsis for her as well.
The novel "Smilla's Sense of Snow" by Peter Høeg is in large part about the alienation and culture shock of an Inuit woman in Denmark.
P.S: I like the article's side bar about responsible reporting on suicide. That's forgotten far too often in the rush for gripping headlines and clicks.
This reminds me so much of Native American communities in America. Loss of culture, feelings of no hope, no jobs, no opportunities, it's one of the worst feelings to have. When there's nothing else to do, and no hope of things getting better, suicide seems like the easy option.
As someone who grew up in Tromsø, Norway (69 degrees northern latitude), I've always found the idea that long winters and depression go together a strange one (That's not to say there aren't a lot of people in Tromsø that struggle with sleep[1], or that there are no winter depressions).
As a counterpoint to this article's title (but not content, really), there was an interesting piece a while back about seasons and psyche:
TL;DR: Mindset matters. If you don't like winter, then a long dark winter isn't much fun: "The survey results indicated that wintertime mindset may indeed play a role in mental health and well-being in Norway. The Wintertime Mindset Scale had strong positive correlations with every measure of well-being we examined, including the Satisfaction with Life Scale (a widely used survey that measures general life satisfaction), and the Personal Growth Composite (a scale that measures openness to new challenges). The people who had a positive wintertime mindset, in other words, tended to be the same people who were highly satisfied with their lives and who pursued personal growth."
[1] On a somewhat related note, I highly recommend the Norwegian original film "Insomnia" (the basis for the American remake with Al Pacino): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119375/
Didn't read past them hopping in a boat w rifles, but the novel 'From the Mouth of the Whale' by Icelandic author Sjón is a serious dive into an Arctic psyche. Highly recommended.
I can't imagine how much hard work needed to put this story out to people...great journalism.. Also I wish situation in greenland improves in futurw...
Just by looking at the title it brought to my mind "The Thing". ;)
See also this trailer, which I like a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwNoqgg474s (not the original movie, not the remake - but a StarCraft 2 mod allowing to play a mafia/werewolf-style game).
This is wrong and have nothing to do with "successful white people" and quite frankly your remark is racist.
Their ancestors were hunters and this gave them purpose in life as well as good diet which led to much happier life. Now they have nothing to do except watch TV and sit on their couch and eat bad food. Of course they are unhappy, you would be too.
[+] [-] exDM69|10 years ago|reply
Highest suicide rates occur during the spring, around the vernal equinox not around the darkest time of the year. If you've never experienced the northern spring where each day is 10+ minutes longer than the previous, you'll never understand it. It just fucks up your mind in ways that are hard to describe.
My kitchen psychology thinks the high suicide rates in the spring may be related to the fact that people around you start to get more positive and active (some too much so) but if you're suffering from a bad depression, seeing that around you will make it worse.
It's not just suicides that peak. It also affects breakup/divorce rates as well as forming new relationships. It probably affects professional careers too, but I don't know if there are stats about it.
The long, dark winters and the rapid change that follows brings out some very primal sides. That being said, I'd recommend travel to the extreme latitudes around the solstices, both of them.
side note: we have about 15 hour long days at the moment. It's still pretty dark at night but I can't wait for the summer when you can see the sunset and sunrise at the same time if you look to the north at around midnight... it's magical.
[+] [-] grecy|10 years ago|reply
The cold didn't bother me at all, even though I'm from a hot country originally. I rode my bike to work every day of the year in fact, even in -45C. I loved it. It's like being on another planet in it's beauty and differences.
Like you said, it was always in late winter/early spring that I'd loose it a little. I'd grab a burger and beer after work, then somehow two weeks would go by where I had done that every day, with lots and lots of beer, and I wouldn't really know how it happened.
The key for my was to always, always get outside at midday when the sun it out and get it on your face. Even on the coldest days I always go for a walk along the river to marvel at the beauty and get the sun on my face - that's a luxury of not being further North, the sun actually comes up and I can have it directly on my face.
And to get moving after work. Eat dinner then go snowshowing, x-country skiiing or whatever for at least a couple of hours. It's nice to get into this habit before winter really hits in Oct/Nov, then keep it up. It's amazing to be out there in -45C with a headlamp, the stars and of course it's how you get to see the Northern lights more often than not.
Of course, in summer, I get home from work, eat dinner then go mntn biking/hiking/fishing/whatever until 2am in the beaming sunshine. I call it two days for the price of one.
[+] [-] warfangle|10 years ago|reply
Once they go on antidepressants, they go on suicide watch. It's the most dangerous time. Because they'll still be depressed, but they'll finally have the energy to get up. And they just might have the energy to do themselves in.
[+] [-] mabbo|10 years ago|reply
I'm only at 43-ish these days, but I've lived as far north as Edinburgh, Scotland (56ish). I had to explicitly get outside every day at lunch to get as much sun as I could.
Seasonal Affective Disorder is apparently a real thing.
[+] [-] jensen123|10 years ago|reply
If you don't take vitamin D pills or consume (lots of) cod liver oil, then your vitamin D levels will be lowest in the spring. If I remember correctly, at around 60 degrees north, you have to wait until the end of April until you get vitamin D from the sun.
[+] [-] Arnt|10 years ago|reply
I wish I could move back north, even so.
[+] [-] blazespin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tikhonj|10 years ago|reply
It's absolutely beautiful.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Nights_Festival
[+] [-] warfangle|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] julianpye|10 years ago|reply
Anyway, when in Greenland it is politically correct to eat seal and whale, once you find out how they are hunted and how the population cherishes the animals.
The coolest thing about Greenland was that the museums had no tools for warfare. Conflicts between people in Greenland were carried out by people playing drums and 'rapping' their cause in a song duel. If you had the laughs and opinions on your side, the person who 'lost' received sled dogs and food and was let go. I wish this could be used for all conflicts around the world.
[+] [-] Symbiote|10 years ago|reply
I'm thinking of visiting, but there's no way I'll be eating whale.
[+] [-] logfromblammo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sevenless|10 years ago|reply
I believe many mental illnesses, depression, suicidal behavior and anorexia among them, can be characterized as contagious. And perhaps some other things that aren't usually described as mental illnesses. The border between belief, religion and mental illness seems a bit fuzzy (echoes of Snow Crash). Small isolated communities must be much more susceptible to contagion taking hold, as single events have a great sway over perceptions, and there are few connections with a larger world to normalize things.
Charles Stross said something about the internet that stuck with me: "the accidental invention of telepathy". Just like public water supplies opened up new vectors for diseases such as cholera, I wonder if the internet's ability to more or less put minds directly in touch can facilitate the spread of certain mental illnesses. Consuming unfiltered internet might be looked on in a few years like drinking unsterilized water. In particular, I wonder if certain "echo chamber" social websites that allow easy isolation from mainstream opinion (Tumblr and 4chan, I'm looking at you) might be analogous to these dangerous isolated communities.
[+] [-] simonswords82|10 years ago|reply
> Consuming unfiltered internet might be looked on in a few years like drinking unsterilized water
For the last year or so I've decided to avoid news outlets as much as possible. So I've updated my Reddit subscriptions to remove anything that might be a news channel, I no longer frequent the BBC news website, and avoid newspapers and TV news as best I can.
The constant fear mongering and general bad news is at times overwhelming but oftentimes just unnecessarily miserable (IMO). It's like being given a long list of problems you can't do anything about. So I've decided to simply switch it off.
I would much prefer your approach where my news could somehow be "sterilised", taking out anything that is overtly negative leaving only factual stories (e.g. business, technology and so on).
[+] [-] specialist|10 years ago|reply
I can believe that.
Social cognition, attachment theory, mirror neurons, etc.
Swarm Intelligence has (for its time?) a great primer on social cognition, how our brains resonate with each other, how children use their parent's brains and emotions to regulate their own, etc. http://www.swarmintelligence.org/SIBook/SI.php
I lived with a paranoid schizophrenia. It started making me crazy too. Took months to shake that off.
And I can definitely confirm that anxiety is contagious, from personal experiences.
[+] [-] xg15|10 years ago|reply
However, as for groups which just represent off-mainstream subculture I don't see it. Well, technically they are of course "contagious" - that's how transmitting culture and ideas work. But not every bad idea or weird subculture is already a mental illness. I would think "sterilizing" the internet by taking away all "contagious" sites would not just rob it one of its core identities, but would also present serious free-speech and censorship issues as the criteria for being "sterile" don't seem clear-cut at all to me.
Or to make an example, many opinions on HN aren't mainstream either. What would make HN a safe site to visit, but Tumblr not?
[+] [-] BuildTheRobots|10 years ago|reply
A few years ago when my anxiety, depression and agoraphobia peaked one of the things that terrified me about talking about it to anyone was the way I'd managed to "logically rationalise" it to myself - I was literally scared of infecting friends with my ideas because even though a part of me knew it was stupid and broken beliefs, I was still capable of entirely justifying them. The fact I'm usually a strong minded person who's good at talking people round to my way of thinking only made this idea more troubling.
[+] [-] wille92|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squeaky-clean|10 years ago|reply
One sort of related example is local religions versus universal, missionary religions. The majority of religions in history have been local and exclusive. Deities such as nature/animal spirits and the like, other tribes may have their own spirits in their own regions, and there is no need to convert people outside of your regions. But the most successful religions are ones are universal and missionary; they believe that their religion is affects everyone, regardless of whether they believe it (and is often the only true religion), and that for some reason, it is beneficial to convert others to your religion.
Ideas like money, capitalism, art, really anything not essential to the biology of humans, are such "fictions", and the most successful (from any evolutionary standpoint) societies are the ones that have or adapt the most effective "fictions" for their societies. I guess to put it in HN terms, "how scalable are your beliefs?"
A lot of the old ways we've lost touch with, or never had, aren't helpful to modern society. A hunting trip in which you become a man doesn't amount to much in a society with mega-farms, slaughter mills and processed foods that don't expire immediately. Instead, our equivalent goals would be like "get a degree, get another degree, get a job". You're an adult when you're old enough to vote, and so on.
There's a lot of other topics as well, but that's what stuck with me the most and my interpretation of it. It's fascinating to think about.
[+] [-] dirktheman|10 years ago|reply
And no, it's not just the dark that makes people commit suicide. Of the top 10 countries with the highest suicide rates, only Lithuania can be considered as having a somewhat gloomy winter. The rest of the countries all get more sunlight (Guyana, Suriname and Sri Lanka for instance) than the countries generally accepted as happiest in the world: Denmark (ironically, considering the story), Switzerland, Iceland and Norway.
[+] [-] Aaargh20318|10 years ago|reply
I find articles like this highly annoying. I see the headline, think "if it's not the darkness, I wonder what is" and click the link expecting to find the answer. Instead of the answer, however, I get a fluffy human-interest piece that I simply do not care about.
How about we stop with crap like this, I don't need to hear a story, just the facts please. I've wasted several minutes on this story and still have no clue what the real reason is.
[+] [-] jlg23|10 years ago|reply
Guyana and Suriname have severe problems with their post-colonial status, very low income contrasted by wealth shown by western mining companies and their employees, a very big problem with alcoholism and very bad perspectives for most (soldiers turning barkeepers because they don't get paid, police extorting people in lieu of a living wage etc). I think the same reasons the author listed for Greenland might apply to those countries too.
[+] [-] masklinn|10 years ago|reply
South Korea as well, its latitude roughly matches the northern half of Tunisia (Seoul's latitude is 37°33′N, Tunisia's northernmost city of Bizerte is at 37°16′N)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catania
[+] [-] tim333|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|10 years ago|reply
That was obvious from the get go. Whoever even claimed this in the first place just did not bother to check facts for more than 5 minutes.
[+] [-] cperciva|10 years ago|reply
And I can't say that I really blame them. Attawapiskat is an extremely isolated community, with few jobs and no amenities. Kids growing up in Attawapiskat have nothing to look forward to. Those who leave the community have much lower rates of suicide, but given the memories of children being taken away from their families and forced into abusive residential schools, no politician in their right mind would dare to suggest that as an option. So they live out their lives in miserable isolation, waiting for their boredom to end; and some decide to speed along the process.
[+] [-] toyg|10 years ago|reply
Thing is, like the towns in the post, these have always been "isolated communities with few jobs", but they used to be somewhat content. The difference is that they (like everyone else) are now bombarded with very powerful messages about rich and successful white people living in the Big City. They are basically getting constantly shamed for doing what their ancestors have done for generations. Those same powers of connectedness that can be so positive in certain cases (e.g. alienated small-town geeks finding accepting communities elsewhere) can often turn out to be trojan horses for cultural shaming.
[+] [-] ghettoCoder|10 years ago|reply
It's not necessarily an isolation issue. It's really a combination of despair in the young (they don't see a clear path to succeed in life while holding on to their identity), a cultural shift between the old holding on to past grievances and the young wanting to move on. And a serious lack of individual accountability from so-called adults. For example, First Nations have an astronomical rate of diabetes. The alcohol abuse stereotype, while not as prevalent as people think, is higher than in the general population. Band councils ban booze on their land but people smuggle it and others look the other way.
As a people they are walking a knife's edge trying to live in a modern world while holding on their ancestral ways of self governance and cultural identity. I could write more about this but it would be off topic.
[+] [-] gumby|10 years ago|reply
I spent years answering the phone on a crisis line. Some people's problems just didn't seem that bad, yet they were overwhelmed nonetheless. Some people had such crushing burdens I was astonished they could even talk.
I didn't find it uplifting, in fact it drained me. I am astonished by her ability to do it for almost 20 years. I guess it was a form of catharsis for her as well.
[+] [-] Kristine1975|10 years ago|reply
P.S: I like the article's side bar about responsible reporting on suicide. That's forgotten far too often in the rush for gripping headlines and clicks.
[+] [-] ridgeguy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|10 years ago|reply
Very good article.
[+] [-] e12e|10 years ago|reply
As a counterpoint to this article's title (but not content, really), there was an interesting piece a while back about seasons and psyche:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/07/the-norweg...
TL;DR: Mindset matters. If you don't like winter, then a long dark winter isn't much fun: "The survey results indicated that wintertime mindset may indeed play a role in mental health and well-being in Norway. The Wintertime Mindset Scale had strong positive correlations with every measure of well-being we examined, including the Satisfaction with Life Scale (a widely used survey that measures general life satisfaction), and the Personal Growth Composite (a scale that measures openness to new challenges). The people who had a positive wintertime mindset, in other words, tended to be the same people who were highly satisfied with their lives and who pursued personal growth."
[1] On a somewhat related note, I highly recommend the Norwegian original film "Insomnia" (the basis for the American remake with Al Pacino): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119375/
[+] [-] brianzelip|10 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Mouth_of_the_Whale
[+] [-] andrewguenther|10 years ago|reply
https://amzn.com/0316346624
[+] [-] misalyogeshwar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stared|10 years ago|reply
See also this trailer, which I like a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwNoqgg474s (not the original movie, not the remake - but a StarCraft 2 mod allowing to play a mafia/werewolf-style game).
[+] [-] golemotron|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romanovcode|10 years ago|reply
Their ancestors were hunters and this gave them purpose in life as well as good diet which led to much happier life. Now they have nothing to do except watch TV and sit on their couch and eat bad food. Of course they are unhappy, you would be too.
[+] [-] msdos|10 years ago|reply
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