Personal opinion based on anecdotal evidence: population mobility has increased career opportunity at the expense of the opportunities afforded to young families through staying close to home. From newborn to age N, local gandparents can be a godsend. In any family's case, which grandparents are nearby may be crucial, but if you came from a nuturing home, moving to a different timezone has definitely negative, high stress consequences in the young home.
Population mobility has decreased over the past decades, the median american lives 18 miles from their mother, and only 20% of Americans live more than a couple hours away from their parents. (NYT Upshot 12/23/15).
Perhaps the fact that 64% of the women were dealing with unemployment suggests a different stressor.
Neither my wife's parents nor mine are involved in our lives, and I can say it makes a huge difference - our friends whose parents are involved with the grandchildren have it much easier. Being an island is very, very difficult.
Alternate hypothesis: population mobility is caused by fewer career opportunities overall and clustering of what opportunities exist in urban areas. Move or starve.
As a recent new father having my mother and father in law has been extremely helpful. For my wife and I we made a decision to move from NYC to live in the same city as them to start our family and that decision has made our lives much easier.
I have the same experience. We decided to move closer to my wife's parents house (20 mins drive) and it has been really helpful with kids. When we feel burned out (which does happen often with both of us working), my wife picks up the phone and asks her(her mom works fulltime as well but has fridays off). Even a few hours on a weekend really helps to just be alone without kids.
Moving to within a twenty minute walk of both sets of grandparents is probably the best decision my wife and I have ever made. We spent the first year of having a child several hours away and it was super tough, and pretty isolating. The last couple of years have been so much easier thanks to grandparents meaning we're able to get out for the occasional meal, or drop our son round for a few hours when there are things we need to get done.
Young women are the group who self harm most, but who are at lowest risk for death by suicide.
This appears to be slowly changing. It seems that women are choosing more lethal methods for self harm and attempted suicide, and thus dying more frequently.
There's still a 3:1 male:female ratio. But (at least, in the UK) rates for men are slowly falling and rates for women are slowly rising.
For a group supposedly at low risk of suicide, who also have higher than normal health risk, (and who are at higher risk of domestic violence) it's disturbing that death by suicide is a leading cause of death.
Tackling mental health stigma, especially around the perinatal time, is crucial to save lives. In England there's informal peer support from Twitter @PNDandMe. Watch out - this is informal and there's not much in place around governance or safeguarding. There are other things happening - there are national programmes to improve perinatal access to MH services including tackling the stigma.
The city of Denver alone seems to be going through a major addiction epidemic. As someone who lives in Denver i'm a little surprised that this doesn't get much national coverage, yet it comes up quite often in local publications.
> Overdose deaths from just one kind of opioid painkiller outnumbered all homicides in Colorado in 2015, according to new data from the state’s Health Department.
> In 2015, 259 people died from overdoses of what health officials call “natural” prescription opioids — drugs like hydrocodone and oxycodone. That compares with 205 people who died from homicide.
It doesn't get much national media coverage because it is not exceptional. Nationally, there are about twice as many opioid overdose deaths as homicides. Colorado's rate of opioid overdose deaths is only roughly 20th of the states.
Post natal (or post partum if you're USian) depression is a much bigger problem than is generally recognised. Typically it'll occur in 10-15% of mothers, and if there's a history of depression or other mental illness those numbers are much, much higher. Its also reasonably common in fathers, who while they don't have the physical shock to deal with, are dealing with everything else.
Sadly at last in the UK its handled really badly, often with a health visitor just writing it off as "baby blues", and saying it'll pass. In most cases it probably will, but there seems to be pretty minimal training to recognise the cases where more needs to be done. I'm not usually one for this sort of thing, but my wife and I went through this a few years ago after the birth of our son, if you don't know where else to go or what to do my email address is in my profile, feel free to use it.
It's pretty sad that the question "Why are western women, particularly American women, so miserable?" is now a political question. (And therefore resists attempts to discuss it, which I don't recommend btw.)
Of course it's political. Western culture has moved away from glorifying the nuclear family as the ideal way of living, so generations are being brought thinking that having a family is not all that important.
I believe that a lot of issues like this (with depressed and drugged out single moms, etc) could have been avoided if more people realized that having a tightly knit nuclear family is definitely worth striving for. And that a lot of the cultural changes over the past decades (the promotion of promiscuity and other forms of social liberalism) are not really progressive in terms of improving the quality of life within our society as a whole.
I think a significant portion may be military spouses. It's very difficult for a new mom, even more so if the father is recently deployed and there's no other family close-by.
We probably need to be a bit careful with definitions here. CDC are very precise with their definition of suicide (Something like "death following self injury where the intent was to die"), other orgs use "death following self injury".
Accidental death ("unintentional injury") (motor vehicle incidents, accidental overdose, etc) is the leading cause for young people (20-30s), men and women.
Postpartum hormonal changes require a change in the brain chemistry: Prolactin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolactin) is enabled by Dopamine level going down. Dopamine is a key brain chemical affecting mood and energy to think. The potential for unexpected behavioral changes is a given. If someone is sensitive, already off balance or the change is larger than usual there is a great risk for mother and newborn.
[+] [-] niels_olson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msabalau|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps the fact that 64% of the women were dealing with unemployment suggests a different stressor.
[+] [-] RUG3Y|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knieveltech|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jim_d|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codegeek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jon-wood|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
This appears to be slowly changing. It seems that women are choosing more lethal methods for self harm and attempted suicide, and thus dying more frequently.
There's still a 3:1 male:female ratio. But (at least, in the UK) rates for men are slowly falling and rates for women are slowly rising.
For a group supposedly at low risk of suicide, who also have higher than normal health risk, (and who are at higher risk of domestic violence) it's disturbing that death by suicide is a leading cause of death.
Tackling mental health stigma, especially around the perinatal time, is crucial to save lives. In England there's informal peer support from Twitter @PNDandMe. Watch out - this is informal and there's not much in place around governance or safeguarding. There are other things happening - there are national programmes to improve perinatal access to MH services including tackling the stigma.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/mentalhealth/perinatal/
Here's the NHS Chocies pages for PND, and Post-partum psychosis.
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Postnataldepression/Pages/Intro...
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/postpartum-psychosis/Pages/Intr...
Finally, a reminder that men can get post natal depression too.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] avenoir|9 years ago|reply
> Overdose deaths from just one kind of opioid painkiller outnumbered all homicides in Colorado in 2015, according to new data from the state’s Health Department.
> In 2015, 259 people died from overdoses of what health officials call “natural” prescription opioids — drugs like hydrocodone and oxycodone. That compares with 205 people who died from homicide.
[1] http://www.denverpost.com/2017/01/03/colorado-opioid-heroin-... [2] http://kdvr.com/2016/11/09/drug-more-powerful-than-heroin-be... [3] http://glendalecherrycreek.com/2016/11/denver-becomes-heroin...
[+] [-] greeneggs|9 years ago|reply
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html
[+] [-] stuckagain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
http://lostallhope.com/suicide-statistics/us-methods-suicide
I think the CDC is careful to distinguish between suicide and accidental overdose.
[+] [-] jon-wood|9 years ago|reply
Sadly at last in the UK its handled really badly, often with a health visitor just writing it off as "baby blues", and saying it'll pass. In most cases it probably will, but there seems to be pretty minimal training to recognise the cases where more needs to be done. I'm not usually one for this sort of thing, but my wife and I went through this a few years ago after the birth of our son, if you don't know where else to go or what to do my email address is in my profile, feel free to use it.
[+] [-] umberway|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rabboRubble|9 years ago|reply
* Hormone balance changes
* Grey matter "pruning"
* Lack of sleep
* Lack of paid maternity leave
* High medical bills for even a straightforward pregnancy
* Lack of social support
These are the ones I thought of without any effort. I'm sure there are more.
[+] [-] codebolt|9 years ago|reply
I believe that a lot of issues like this (with depressed and drugged out single moms, etc) could have been avoided if more people realized that having a tightly knit nuclear family is definitely worth striving for. And that a lot of the cultural changes over the past decades (the promotion of promiscuity and other forms of social liberalism) are not really progressive in terms of improving the quality of life within our society as a whole.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] up_so_floating|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RugnirViking|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retra|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparrish|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] up_so_floating|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
I'm not very good with the CDC WISQARS tool, but I think this is relevant:
https://www.cdc.gov/women/lcod/index.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/women/lcod/2013/womenall_2013.pdf
Unintentional injuries, cancer, heart disease.
We probably need to be a bit careful with definitions here. CDC are very precise with their definition of suicide (Something like "death following self injury where the intent was to die"), other orgs use "death following self injury".
[+] [-] pepve|9 years ago|reply
> in 2012 suicide was overall the most common cause of death in Colorado among those age 10 to 44
[+] [-] loeg|9 years ago|reply
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_o...
[+] [-] heisenbit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lordnacho|9 years ago|reply
Is there any truth to that, or was it some spurious correlation?
I can't remember where I heard it, it might have been one of those books about spurious correlations.
[+] [-] cryoshon|9 years ago|reply
one more piece of evidence that our economics are killing us
[+] [-] wyager|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] randyrand|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] chatterbeak|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] xyzzy4|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mildbow|9 years ago|reply
Oooh! oooh! you should forward this to your parents with the comment "Good reason not to have kids".