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The researchers at the Center for Disease Control & Prevention also warned that the widespread belief among parents and teachers that getting good scores trumps anything else risks obscuring mental health issues plaguing children.
Shitty parenting 101. I have been there and I broke down at minor setbacks. I lost my mind because of the smallest failures.
If you do this to your child, in your delusion you are doing the right thing, fuck you.
Haven't studies shown a pretty strong correlation between scores and future income in China?
FWIW, it's not like that culture is new. The increase in suicide rates has other drivers. I think it's far more likely to be driven by social media and social isolation than by academic pressure (which has existed to a similar degree for the past few decades).
The hit in the 11-14 demographic is rather concerning. It's before the big wave of gaokao prep really hits (and thus precedes the job search stress), so it's a really concerning demographic without a clear root cause.
I think you hit the nail right on the head, the unrelenting academic stress
But that's not really hitting the 11-14 demographic that hard.
Kids talk. Stressed kids push their stress to whomever. It is tragic, but doesn't seem shocking that the impact would be earlier. (I have zero insight into China.)
Yeah, but that's the entire reason China splits off high school into age 15-18.
The zero child policy
Oh my god that's horrible and kind of funny even though it's super fucked up.
“True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. There are real-life situations so hopeless that no relief is imaginable.
While we were being bombed in Dresden sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, 'I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.' Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
I'll join you to hell where we're definitely gonna end up after this
I really should feel sorrier than I do for laughing out loud at this
If it jumped 10% annually since 2010 wouldn't that make it 130% or am I bad at maths
That's not how this kind of thing works, and it depends on where it starts. If it's 1% of children attempting suicide, which would be a huge amount, a 10% increase is 1.1%, and then for the next year a 10% increase makes it 1.21%, and then 1.33%. This is why when something increases your risk of something by say, 50%, it might mean absolutely nothing if the initial odds are 1 in a billion. 1.5 in a billion isn't really any more likely.
My neighbour was freaking out when she saw in the local newspaper that burglaries in our town had increased by 100%
I pointed out that we had 2 burglaries this year, compared to the 1 last year...
The increase itself doesn't matter where it starts, 10% each year over 13 years will always be an increase of ~245%.
It also matters a lot to look at the relative change no matter the absolute amount, since it indicates a trend. Even if the chance for something terrible is 1 in a billion, a steady 10% increase every year should worry everyone, since there is a clear trend (and compounding increases get big faster than you'd expect).
Lol. It's 1.1^(2023-2010)
Nice rule of thumb: 7% increase per year means doubling in 10 years.
10% above its current rate.
So if 2% of children are killing themselves an increase of ten percent would be 2.2%.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
China has seen an increase in suicides among young people in recent years, prompting researchers to call for a special program to help them deal with academic pressure.
The increase is small in absolute numbers yet it contrasts with a decline of 5.3% annually in the 2010-2021 period among all age groups in the country, a drop the researchers said was due to a nationwide mental health program.
The researchers called on the government to prioritize developing programs targeting children and adolescents that adopt best practices from abroad and allow for the early identification of suicidal behavior.
Earlier this year, the apparent suicide of a boarding school student named Hu Xinyu gained widespread attention in China, both because the 15-year-old boy had expressed concern beforehand about his grades and how the police handled their investigation.
Also, many people took to Chinese social media Thursday to express sadness over the death of Hong Kong-born singer and songwriter Coco Lee.
The researchers at the Center for Disease Control & Prevention also warned that the widespread belief among parents and teachers that getting good scores trumps anything else risks obscuring mental health issues plaguing children.
The original article contains 402 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 54%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It went from 0.2/100k to 0.8/100k. In aggregate, that's 800 people? I wonder how much of that is due to improved reporting given the lapse of the one-child policy, though.
Suicides averaged over all age groups declined by 5% in the same period, so it can't just be better reporting. Also that's an aggregate increase of about 6000, not 800.
Better reporting of children in particular because of the lapse of the one-child policy? For a decent amount of time China had "ghost children" that weren't reported to the government (though you'll find no reports on this from Western media, it's a pretty well-established truth in some Chinese circles).
Ah, that's possible.
and when china needs its youth the most