Statistics TED Talk

Suicide is a big epidemic that our country and other developing countries around the world are experiencing. Suicide affects a lot of other factors that are looked at pertaining to the citizens of these countries and their health. Suicide of course is taking your own life but it is considered a disease. You would think this disease would affect life expectancy more. It happens a lot and there is medication to help but this decision is still in everyone’s own hands so you may not be able to prevents this that often. When more people commit suicide in a certain place, the life expectancy rate will go down in that place. Although you would expect suicide would affect life expectancy more drastically,  I have learned from further research and graphs that it doesn't affect it as much as expected.

From further research I have learned that the suicide rate doesn’t affect life expectancy as drastically as I expected. The graphs that I found based on this information show that suicide affects life expectancy but not as much as expected in most countries. Three countries that I focused on for this information is Russia, India, and the U.S. One of the graphs that I found that focused on this data was focused on these three countries. On these graphs it shows how the rate of suicide per 100,000 people and the life expectancy rate changes over time in these countries. For the U.S. the suicide rate and life expectancy moves back and forth but it doesn’t change much over time. The suicide rate is low and the life expectancy rate is high as expected. For India the life expectancy rate and suicide rate barely changes over the years. The suicide rate in India is high than the U.S. and the life expectancy is lower but compared to each other it still is as much as expected. For Russia, both the suicide rate and life expectancy rates fluctuates but not how you would expect it to. The life expectancy rate of Russia moves but not much compared to the suicide rate over time. On the graph the suicide rate rises and lowers between 20-40 suicides per 100,000 people but the life expectancy rate stays between 60-70. You would think that the life expectancy rate and suicide rate may move and affect each other together but the graph shows otherwise.

The other graph that I found compared the life expectancy rate and suicide rate per 100,00 people but not over time. This graph shows all of the countries from 2005 that have data to be presented for these categories. You can’t see the change over the time but you do see that some countries have high suicide rates and still have high life expectancy rates. Also some countries have a low suicide rate and low life expectancy rate. This is kind of the opposite of how I expected the data would be found. Because there are countries whose data shows this pattern you would expect there to be something else in these other countries affecting the life expectancy more than the suicide rates.

One of the reasons that could be affecting the life expectancy in these countries is the age in which people are committing suicide. In some countries that have a high suicide rate and life expectancy the people who are committing suicide there are more than likely to be committing suicide at an older age. The age which people kill themselves affects the life expectancy rate more than expected. If people are living longer in a certain country but as they get older they start to commit suicide the life expectancy rate will still be high because they are living to an older age. In the countries that have a low suicide rate and low life expectancy rate there could be other things in the country that just isn't safe for the citizens. They could be dying from war, because there are other major diseases in that area, etc. The suicide rate of that country will still affect the life expectancy but there are other factors that affect it more.

As far as the suicide rates and life expectancy rates of countries I don’t think anything will change. I feel that they will still affect each other how they already have and there isn’t much we can do about that, Another thing we could take into considerations is that this data is almost 12 years old, so there may be some changes that could have happened but they have not been documented yet.