7. The Male Suicide Belt

Why are Northern European and North Asian Men So Hopeless?

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When researching the reasons for hopefulness rates (measured as births per suicide) amongst the 10 least hopeful countries, I noticed a curious trend. More than half of them are in the north-east Europe or north Asia.

Looking more deeply, while some have very low birthrates, they all have exceptionally high suicide rates. If we look at 2019 data, we see that more than half of the countries with suicide rates above 10 per 1000 are in a contiguous belt from eastern Europe through east Asia.

Finding this, I ran across an academic paper which included the chart below.

This is older data, so you’ll notice it doesn’t exactly match my table above, but it does make clear how unusual the north-east portion of the global map is, and why Russia is the second-least-hopeful country on Earth.

Even more strikingly, when that same paper just looked at women the trend mostly disappeared, with that portion of the map showing just-above average.

And then here it is, just showing men. The rates in what I’m calling the “Male Suicide Belt” are so high that they had to adjust the legend to accommodate it.

In the previous post, we discussed the rates for South Korea, the country with the second-highest suicide rates, which are likely driven by a success- and shame-driven culture in which suicide is considered an appropriate response when you fail to live up to the extremely high social standards for measurable success.

But it’s a huge region with a variety of cultures present. So what accounts for the widespread suicide rates across it?

Women

Looking specifically at male vs. female rates makes me think that Japan and South Korea are different than the rest of the countries in the Male Suicide Belt.

Adding to the table above the ratio of male/female suicides, we see that the high-ratio countries are all in eastern/northern Europe (including Russia).

Including the fact that these countries have higher birthrates than Japan and South Korea, this implies to me that something else is going on here. As discussed in the previous post, South Korea has factors that are distinctive and associated with an honor/shame culture where measurable success is a high social value. Japan shares this culture to a large extent. And in both countries, female suicide is also high.

Note that China (a neighbor to both) is the only country where the female suicide rate is higher than the male rate.

Alcoholism

A potential pathway (though an unlikely original cause) is alcohol addiction. If you’ve ever read travel memoirs or journalistic accounts of Russia or Finland, you’re likely to read about widespread excessive consumption of various addictive substances like cigarettes, alcohol (especially homemade liquors), and antifreeze. In this case, the stereotype does appear to fit, as we can see here based on data from the world population review, which shows a nearly 1:1 correlation between suicide rates and alcoholism, with India, Iceland, and Japan (high suicides, low alcoholism) the obvious exceptions.

But as I said, this is likely another symptom of a different malady.

One obvious potential cause is the weather. All the countries which show up dark blue in this chart have significant portions which experience cold winters. One can imagine a reasonable cause being the desire to medicate the depression and boredom. In some places (like my home state of Wisconsin) this can result in excessive deaths from high-speed drunken nighttime snowmobiling (a form of suicide?).

Canada and Iceland make notable exceptions, both with low alcoholism rates.

Within the United States, which I’ll show in a later post, this trend does not hold. The more-southern states do not have lower suicide rates than more-northern states.

We can also see (from the same source) that in the Suicide Belt the rates of male alcoholism (which as we saw earlier drives the suicide rates for this region) far exceed female alcoholism. For example, compare the United States (M/F ratio 3:2) to Hungary (M/F ratio 5:1). This roughly 5:1 ratio between male and female alcoholism fits all the high-male-suicide countries from the Male Suicide Belt.

This gets us closer. But it doesn’t tell us why males from many cold climate countries are so much more prone to alcoholism than women from those same countries, or males from other countries?

Religiosity

We do see a moderate correlation with low religiosity, as we see here in this research from Pew.

But of course there are exceptions here. China (which may not report suicide accurately), Canada, and Australia show low religiosity but also have low alcoholism rates (Australia’s suicide rate is on the high end). The United States has a high religiosity, but also high suicide rates. And many western European countries show very low religiosity but also alcoholism and suicide rates. Uruguay is an interesting case study, with high suicide rates, low alcoholism, and low religiosity.

If you combine lack of religiosity and cold winter temperatures, you end up with a moderately strong correlation for suicide rates (especially among males).

Things It’s Not

One reader (thanks Steven!) mentioned how in the United States suicide rates seem to correlate with elevation above sea level. I’ll share later how that correlation isn’t very strong, but obviously we don’t see it worldwide as Nepal, Switzerland, and Peru have very low (especially male) suicide rates.

It does not appear to stem from gender inequality or income inequality. The countries in question currently also have a variety of forms of government.

Russian Imperialism?

All the countries in the Male Suicide Belt besides South Korea and Japan (discussed as likely following a somewhat different pattern) are touching Russia, which holds the world’s highest suicide rates and has a long history of imperialistic tendencies. In fact, all of these countries on our list were part of the Russian Empire in 1914.

So it’s possible that this is somehow a cause or contributing factor, perhaps by virtue of adopting Russian alcohol consumption practices or being stripped of their religious leanings by Russian communism under the USSR.

Birth Rates

To say just a little bit about birth rates, besides Japan and South Korea the countries in the Male Suicide Belt don’t appear to have birthrates out of line with the normal range for countries in our sample. Russia in particular, despite being the second-least-hopeful country in our sample, has a total fertility rate about 1.5, which is historically low but about average for our sample. It’s place in the hopefulness ranking is entirely driven by its extremely high suicide rates (the highest in the world).

I do find it interesting that in for most of this region male behavior (suicide) seems to drive the low hopefulness scores, while for east and south Asia female-associated behavior (birthrates) seem to drive it.

Conclusion

The strongest conclusion here seems to me that participation in Russian imperialism seems to be a very strong driver of male suicide, distinct from female suicide and birthrates. This is worthy of further research, and I hope to do some more at some point. But this is already a long post.

If you can think of anything you think motivates Russian-area male suicide, please share below in the comments.

Alcoholism is clearly a pathway and/or correlate with male suicide rates in the Male Suicide Belt (besides Japan). Cold winters and lack of religiosity also seem like strong correlates.

Overall, though, the most interesting result here is how ironic the current male-driven admiration for Russia is, since Russia (and the states historically influenced by it) are the place where men experience the most hopelessness.