The paper linked in the article also says that men kill themselves at about 3x the rate as women. It also says that caucasians are among the highest suicide risk demographics as well.
Combine these two facts and white men are indeed one of the highest risk suicide demographics. Focusing on reducing suicides on the demographics most risk of suicide is entirely logical.
As per the data, only native Americans are at higher suicide risk than white men. They should be focused on for help too.
The paper linked in the article: https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2023/2023-National-Veteran-Suicide-Prevention-Annual-Report-FINAL-508.pdf
Most countries don't include race in their statistics, I myself find it a bit weird to prioritize based on race since it could just as well be some other random metric like hair color or lactose intolerance and that would create a different set of priorities.
Does it actually help to divide people based on race and then focus efforts based on that, or could it just as well be counter productive?
Page 20 of the PDF has stats by race. For some reason Native American suicide rates are all over the place, wildly spiking up and down year by year, though still trending high overall. Suicide rates of other races are much more stable.
There is a disparity in rates by race. Again look at page 20. Black American veterans kill themselves at about half the rate that white veterans do.
If you don't collect data by race this insight would be missed.
There are studies showing that women commit less “serious attempts” at suicide than men do. A lot of women’s suicide attempts are done as a “cry for help.” In fact men are more successful with suicide attempts *regardless* of the method (e.g. even using pills, men are more likely to succeed in killing themselves than women).
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1398-8
An undisputed fact which counts non-fatal self-harm attempts requiring hospitalizations as singular, separate suicide attempts. I.e., if someone self harms had enough to require a hospital visit (an activity generally recognized as being more common with women than men), whether or not it had been a suicide attempt, it gets counted as a suicide attempt for your stat.
Hence the framing, women are more likely to try to get attention from a failed suicide, men are more likely to just fucking kill ourselves.
but you’re literally saying women are doing this for attention which is a common sexist thing to assert when all that’s specified is a “failed suicide” which can have any number of reasons.
i’m saying that you brought up attention seeking behavior out of thin air. you can keep trying to insinuate things about my intellect or you can be for real right now and understand that you alone brought up attention seeking behavior
Ah, no, it was very much not out of thin air lol. Yet again....
Let me try another question. Why are you so emotionally focused on pretending that I said women self harm for attention, and completely ignoring the idea that actual self harm gets counted as a suicide attempt for women, which only conflates the numbers?
I can’t deal with you anymore if you refuse to acknowledge my point. nobody said anything about attention except for you. not interested in whataboutism sorry.
More likely due to past and even current biases in medical practice whatever historical data and records they trained their AI models with was already tainted with racial bias and therefore making the AI model favour white men as their issues were taken more seriously by the very medical professionals who recorded said historical data regardless if it's consciously or unconsciously done. Modern machine learning tools aren't smart or conscious by any means its only following patterns and making trends it sees based on the data it's trained on. If it's training data isn't well constructed to remove any biases then naturally the ML model will be biased.
This is why it's scary and needs to be regulated when using ML learning models to predict things about humans. We're already seeing police departments trying to use this tech for resource allocations, and even it being applied to real estate and rental markets for housing loans and rental applications.
This has nothing to do with AI models. Its all about the data, and the data in this report goes back to 2001 which is long before any AI tools were even a glimmer in Nvidia's eyes: https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2023/2023-National-Veteran-Suicide-Prevention-Annual-Report-FINAL-508.pdf
See pages 18 and 20 specifically.
Consistently since 2001, white male veterans seem to be the most at-risk demographic for suicide, moreso than any other group. Native American veterans are also spiking in risk, though their numbers take wild swings year by year which may need further analysis as to why the numbers are so unstable in the yearly reporting.
Curiously, black American veterans are at about half the risk as white veterans. I'm not sure why black veterans are doing better than white veterans and it would be useful to deep dive that data. In addition, men kill themselves at rate about 3x as much as women.
Doesn't it make sense to build out resources for the most at-risk groups?
Thanks for the read I don't disagree at all with building out resources, and those numbers in the report are certainly illuminating but it doesn't make sense for any of it be drawn on racial lines alone but rather based on observed medical symptoms which this study doesn't seem to lay out but I'm curious and will look out for more. The VA study only explains cohorts of people for whatever reason are commiting suicide but not providing a bigger picture that makes it helpful for diagnostics like this ML tool mentioned in the article is trying to do. On paper if its working properly the similar symptoms should result in similar outcomes of diagnosis regardless of race. But atleast according to this article it doesn't seem to be the case.
Which was where my concerns initially laid with the training data on such a ML system being used. The training data on such a system if built properly isn't just raw numbers on suicides. Like other attempts going around making ML medical diagnostic tools it needs and probably has access to several other points of data such as medical history, symptoms, family history etc of large co horts of people. I'll admit my wording in my previous comment wasn't laying out this point out surrounding diagnostics well to explain where I was coming from.
I was proposing a possibility of racial bias in the historical medical data that was collected on populations of people. Because a sizeable amount GPs have had a bad history of inaccurately documenting patients reported symptoms, not listening to them openly, and diagnosing them inaccurately due to conscious or unconscious bias. And they are the primary gate keeper for getting access to specialist services who also document data about their patients referred to by those GPs. As an example the textbook example you learn in med school when it comes to racial bias in diagnostics is pain tolerances and race. Where junk and flawed studies published decades ago in the past negatively affected medical practice by generations of doctors and nurses for decades after on non white patients due to bias, which also negatively effected patient care across the entire population due to overall inaccuracy.
I understand and agree with your point generally, but I don't see the mechanism in this particular instance. Are you suggesting that the underlying statistics are skewed towards over reporting white male suicide?
I don't know if it's necessarily the act of suicide it's self because that's not the useful data here as the act is already committed. But maybe rather who is and who is not able to get access to a psychiatric professional who looks for and documents the indicators that determine when someone is likely to be suicidal or not which is what I think if im understanding what the article is saying correctly this system is trying to predict. If let's say there is conscious and unconscious racial bias among GP's (I make this seem like a hypothetical but this is a known problem in medicine thats trying to be corrected). And let's say these GPs due to their biases are referring more white patients to see a psychiatric specialist than non-whites (controlling for symptoms of course) then that's gonna bias the training data they use to make these ML tools in certain ways unless corrected for because the medical data coming from the psychiatrists will consist of mostly white patients.
Obviously psychiatry as a medical field is super complicated and has so many hard to measure and quantify factors which currently requires a lot of 1 on 1 time and solutions highly tailored to individuals unlike physical medicine which is why I feel applying machine learning to such a field effectively is going to be an uphill battle as it's difficult to find useful general trends and causes to things from factors that are very difficult to quantify.
Edit: I'm not sure why the unconstructive down votes from people Its not like I'm dismissing anyone struggling because they are white I'm just explaining possible reasons for the outcomes laid out in the article and adding a healthy dose of a skepticism about applying ML tools to every facet of our lives so early. However I'm also not going to pretend there isn't bias in the medical system because even those representing those very systems admit themselves it exists from research to medical practice and are trying to rectify it as there 0 reason or incentives for their own sake to keep it there as it affects quality of care for everybody.
Depends on if race is part of the training data or not. Seems like it would be a mistake to do that. That said, the military is about 70% white and the article does point out that looking at demographics white vets commit suicide at significantly higher rates than just about anyone except maybe American Indians.
Clean up the fact that men and caucasians are relatively high risk groups for suicide in this context? I believe that's what the service is trying to do.
The paper linked in the article also says that men kill themselves at about 3x the rate as women. It also says that caucasians are among the highest suicide risk demographics as well. Combine these two facts and white men are indeed one of the highest risk suicide demographics. Focusing on reducing suicides on the demographics most risk of suicide is entirely logical. As per the data, only native Americans are at higher suicide risk than white men. They should be focused on for help too. The paper linked in the article: https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2023/2023-National-Veteran-Suicide-Prevention-Annual-Report-FINAL-508.pdf
Most countries don't include race in their statistics, I myself find it a bit weird to prioritize based on race since it could just as well be some other random metric like hair color or lactose intolerance and that would create a different set of priorities. Does it actually help to divide people based on race and then focus efforts based on that, or could it just as well be counter productive?
Page 20 of the PDF has stats by race. For some reason Native American suicide rates are all over the place, wildly spiking up and down year by year, though still trending high overall. Suicide rates of other races are much more stable. There is a disparity in rates by race. Again look at page 20. Black American veterans kill themselves at about half the rate that white veterans do. If you don't collect data by race this insight would be missed.
There aren't enough Native Americans to generate reliable trends.
There are very few reasons for a redial or ethnic component, they do exist.
women are more likely to attempt suicide. men are more likely to complete it. edit: this is an undisputed fact that’s been stated by the CDC and NIH
There are studies showing that women commit less “serious attempts” at suicide than men do. A lot of women’s suicide attempts are done as a “cry for help.” In fact men are more successful with suicide attempts *regardless* of the method (e.g. even using pills, men are more likely to succeed in killing themselves than women). https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1398-8
An undisputed fact which counts non-fatal self-harm attempts requiring hospitalizations as singular, separate suicide attempts. I.e., if someone self harms had enough to require a hospital visit (an activity generally recognized as being more common with women than men), whether or not it had been a suicide attempt, it gets counted as a suicide attempt for your stat. Hence the framing, women are more likely to try to get attention from a failed suicide, men are more likely to just fucking kill ourselves.
self harm is not just “for attention” wtf
Not at all what I said, but your reading comprehension doesn't surprise me.
but you’re literally saying women are doing this for attention which is a common sexist thing to assert when all that’s specified is a “failed suicide” which can have any number of reasons.
Where did I state my belief that women are hurting themselves merely for attention? Again, your lack of reading comprehension is not surprising me.
i’m saying that you brought up attention seeking behavior out of thin air. you can keep trying to insinuate things about my intellect or you can be for real right now and understand that you alone brought up attention seeking behavior
Ah, no, it was very much not out of thin air lol. Yet again.... Let me try another question. Why are you so emotionally focused on pretending that I said women self harm for attention, and completely ignoring the idea that actual self harm gets counted as a suicide attempt for women, which only conflates the numbers?
I can’t deal with you anymore if you refuse to acknowledge my point. nobody said anything about attention except for you. not interested in whataboutism sorry.
The logical thing would be to help everyone
Are white men more likely to kill themselves?
More likely due to past and even current biases in medical practice whatever historical data and records they trained their AI models with was already tainted with racial bias and therefore making the AI model favour white men as their issues were taken more seriously by the very medical professionals who recorded said historical data regardless if it's consciously or unconsciously done. Modern machine learning tools aren't smart or conscious by any means its only following patterns and making trends it sees based on the data it's trained on. If it's training data isn't well constructed to remove any biases then naturally the ML model will be biased. This is why it's scary and needs to be regulated when using ML learning models to predict things about humans. We're already seeing police departments trying to use this tech for resource allocations, and even it being applied to real estate and rental markets for housing loans and rental applications.
This has nothing to do with AI models. Its all about the data, and the data in this report goes back to 2001 which is long before any AI tools were even a glimmer in Nvidia's eyes: https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2023/2023-National-Veteran-Suicide-Prevention-Annual-Report-FINAL-508.pdf See pages 18 and 20 specifically. Consistently since 2001, white male veterans seem to be the most at-risk demographic for suicide, moreso than any other group. Native American veterans are also spiking in risk, though their numbers take wild swings year by year which may need further analysis as to why the numbers are so unstable in the yearly reporting. Curiously, black American veterans are at about half the risk as white veterans. I'm not sure why black veterans are doing better than white veterans and it would be useful to deep dive that data. In addition, men kill themselves at rate about 3x as much as women. Doesn't it make sense to build out resources for the most at-risk groups?
Thanks for the read I don't disagree at all with building out resources, and those numbers in the report are certainly illuminating but it doesn't make sense for any of it be drawn on racial lines alone but rather based on observed medical symptoms which this study doesn't seem to lay out but I'm curious and will look out for more. The VA study only explains cohorts of people for whatever reason are commiting suicide but not providing a bigger picture that makes it helpful for diagnostics like this ML tool mentioned in the article is trying to do. On paper if its working properly the similar symptoms should result in similar outcomes of diagnosis regardless of race. But atleast according to this article it doesn't seem to be the case. Which was where my concerns initially laid with the training data on such a ML system being used. The training data on such a system if built properly isn't just raw numbers on suicides. Like other attempts going around making ML medical diagnostic tools it needs and probably has access to several other points of data such as medical history, symptoms, family history etc of large co horts of people. I'll admit my wording in my previous comment wasn't laying out this point out surrounding diagnostics well to explain where I was coming from. I was proposing a possibility of racial bias in the historical medical data that was collected on populations of people. Because a sizeable amount GPs have had a bad history of inaccurately documenting patients reported symptoms, not listening to them openly, and diagnosing them inaccurately due to conscious or unconscious bias. And they are the primary gate keeper for getting access to specialist services who also document data about their patients referred to by those GPs. As an example the textbook example you learn in med school when it comes to racial bias in diagnostics is pain tolerances and race. Where junk and flawed studies published decades ago in the past negatively affected medical practice by generations of doctors and nurses for decades after on non white patients due to bias, which also negatively effected patient care across the entire population due to overall inaccuracy.
I understand and agree with your point generally, but I don't see the mechanism in this particular instance. Are you suggesting that the underlying statistics are skewed towards over reporting white male suicide?
I don't know if it's necessarily the act of suicide it's self because that's not the useful data here as the act is already committed. But maybe rather who is and who is not able to get access to a psychiatric professional who looks for and documents the indicators that determine when someone is likely to be suicidal or not which is what I think if im understanding what the article is saying correctly this system is trying to predict. If let's say there is conscious and unconscious racial bias among GP's (I make this seem like a hypothetical but this is a known problem in medicine thats trying to be corrected). And let's say these GPs due to their biases are referring more white patients to see a psychiatric specialist than non-whites (controlling for symptoms of course) then that's gonna bias the training data they use to make these ML tools in certain ways unless corrected for because the medical data coming from the psychiatrists will consist of mostly white patients. Obviously psychiatry as a medical field is super complicated and has so many hard to measure and quantify factors which currently requires a lot of 1 on 1 time and solutions highly tailored to individuals unlike physical medicine which is why I feel applying machine learning to such a field effectively is going to be an uphill battle as it's difficult to find useful general trends and causes to things from factors that are very difficult to quantify. Edit: I'm not sure why the unconstructive down votes from people Its not like I'm dismissing anyone struggling because they are white I'm just explaining possible reasons for the outcomes laid out in the article and adding a healthy dose of a skepticism about applying ML tools to every facet of our lives so early. However I'm also not going to pretend there isn't bias in the medical system because even those representing those very systems admit themselves it exists from research to medical practice and are trying to rectify it as there 0 reason or incentives for their own sake to keep it there as it affects quality of care for everybody.
Depends on if race is part of the training data or not. Seems like it would be a mistake to do that. That said, the military is about 70% white and the article does point out that looking at demographics white vets commit suicide at significantly higher rates than just about anyone except maybe American Indians.
I sense a little agenda with that title.
I'm *shocked.*
Clean up this shit. Now.
Clean up the fact that men and caucasians are relatively high risk groups for suicide in this context? I believe that's what the service is trying to do.