Does High Altitude Have Anything To Do With Suicide Rates?

While browsing through many articles from Google Reader, I found an interesting article by Sarah Mausolf from the Denver Post and Vail Daily, “New Study Examines Suicide at High Altitude”, which really made me think hard. 

Mausolf starts out talking about a study published in September in the “American Journal of Psychiatry” that was concerning why suicide rates are higher in Western states which have higher altitudes than the other states. Since many residents in the West go hunting very often, they tend to have a higher gun population than those in any other region.  Also, due to lack of oxygen, it could have a metabolic stress impact on the brain, causing deeper depression. Another factor could be because in the West, there are many rural areas, that our more isolated and lonely, causing depression.  Although many of the causes of suicide differ all the way from age to family history, this is an inference of another cause of depression/suicide.  These statistic's are also backed up from when the lead researcher of this study looked at South Korea's suicide rates and found the same data that has to do with higher altitudes.

This article first caught my attention because of what happened last year at Arapahoe High School with so many suicides and because we live in the high altitudes. In this article, it states that “At Colorado’s high altitude, …the suicide rate is about 70 percent higher than it is at sea level.” That is a lot of people committing suicides in the West. This helps us to notice that since our high school is in a high altitude, we should be cautious of our friends, and that if they are suffering from this, we should help them.  Everyone at AHS would agree about this. What surprised me about this article was that it just said the statistics and facts; it did not even put a suicide prevention website or advice. I understand this was not the purpose of the article, but it would have been good if there was.  This article made me think why don’t we try to avoid these suicide rates and try to lower the statistics? Why don’t we TRY to do something like put more psychiatrists in more rural places in the US?

Taking everything into account, I hope the readers of this article try to change and lower these statistics!