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:

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!?

On that note, there was a great article in 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!?On that note, there was a great article in 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!?