In my previous post I mentioned an article in Stanford Report on psychological effects of stress. Greate quote from the article:
Typically, observant Mormons and other religious people are less likely to smoke and drink, he noted. “But once you control for that, religiosity in and of itself is good for your health in some ways, although less than some of its advocates would have you believe,” Sapolsky said. “It infuriates me, because I’m an atheist, so it makes me absolutely crazy, but it makes perfect sense. If you have come up with a system that not only tells you why things are but is capped off with certain knowledge that some thing or things respond preferentially to you, you’re filling a whole lot of pieces there-gaining some predictability, attribution, social support and control over the scariest realms of our lives.”
By the way, I couldn’t agree more, but at the same time this is quite depressing. As the trite goes: “Ignorance is a bliss”.
I stumbled upon some interesting statistics. It’s not reading for a rainy day, but it has some interesting and perhaps surprising facts if you look closer. The total suicide ratest, per 100,000 citizens, of the countries that WHO had information on:
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suiciderates/en/print.html.
It should be no surpise that 16 out of the top 25 countries on the list are either Eastern European countries or countries associated with the former Soviet block. However, what struck me as interesting was that Japan, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Luxemburg made the top 20! Here are is the sorted result of the top 25:
| Country |
Males |
Females |
Totals |
| LITHUANIA |
75.6 |
16.1 |
91.7 |
| RUSSIAN FEDERATION |
70.6 |
11.9 |
82.5 |
| BELARUS |
63.6 |
9.5 |
73.1 |
| LATVIA |
56.6 |
11.9 |
68.5 |
| UKRAINE |
52.1 |
10 |
62.1 |
| SRI LANKA |
44.6 |
16.8 |
61.4 |
| SLOVENIA |
47.3 |
13.4 |
60.7 |
| HUNGARY |
47.1 |
13 |
60.1 |
| ESTONIA |
45.8 |
11.9 |
57.7 |
| KAZAKHSTAN |
46.4 |
8.6 |
55 |
| JAPAN |
36.5 |
14.1 |
50.6 |
| FINLAND |
34.6 |
10.9 |
45.5 |
| CROATIA |
32.9 |
10.3 |
43.2 |
| BELGIUM |
29.4 |
10.7 |
40.1 |
| AUSTRIA |
27.3 |
9.8 |
37.1 |
| CUBA |
24.5 |
12 |
36.5 |
| SWITZERLAND |
26.5 |
10 |
36.5 |
| FRANCE |
26.1 |
9.4 |
35.5 |
| LUXEMBOURG |
23.9 |
10.7 |
34.6 |
| BULGARIA |
25.2 |
9.1 |
34.3 |
| CZECH REPUBLIC |
26 |
6.7 |
32.7 |
| YUGOSLAVIA |
21.6 |
9.2 |
30.8 |
| POLAND |
25.9 |
4.9 |
30.8 |
On that note, there was a great article in Stanford Report about psychological effects of stress. Although, I wasn’t impressed by Robert Sapolsky’s insight on how stress levels are high among the Americans and the Japenese, but that the Japenese seem to handle stress better, since life expectancy is high and they have “extremely supportive social network”. How does that make sense if 5 out of every 10,000 people in Japan commit suicide!?
