Interesting, that suggests that there is a sawtooth curve to the number of suicides. If that's true the conclusion might be that 'preventative counseling' is at too low levels where there has not been a recent crisis.
.. unless the expected suicides are a lower cost to society than the preventative counseling. Perhaps the clamp down is an overreaction. I doubt it's an efficiently designed mechanism to keep the costs even.
There's always some limit to how much we'll spend trying to prevent things from happening. For instance, you could tie people together in groups of 3 to reduce the successful suicide rate. I think most people would rather allow some suicides than take 2 people to the bathroom with them, or for that matter, getting dragged into monitor 2 others' trips to the bathroom.
You could also argue whether all suicides cost society.
It's a classic PID controller issue, not to put a technical slant on a tragedy, but if a mechanism oscillates like that chances are that you can 'dampen' the oscillations by choosing your parameters with more care.
I find it hard to think of this in terms as 'cost to society', there is something very creepy about that.
Every death is a tragedy, and suicides because of a lack of counseling (and for instance an excess in pressure to perform) seem to me to be a total waste.
I agree about the parameters, mostly. Only gotcha is the Influence/Cialdini reference someone rightly made, which may indicate that no change may be required.
I find it easier to think about in terms of 'cost to society.' See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectualization .. which of course I only learned about in counseling. I value it a lot. However, I only skimmed through, but I didn't see a claim that these cases were "because of a lack of counseling."
If you're going to think about it in terms of social 'cost', you may as well think of it over the span of a person's life. Society has invested a lot of... capitol? ... whatever it is that society invests in these people. University students in particular have been a social burden for most of their lives. But the reason society bears this is that the investment will pay in increased social benefit once they graduate.
So students, at least, shouldn't kill themselves. And society should protect its investment by keeping them from doing it. A cold hearted analysis, but that's the name of the 'social cost' game.
Jeffrey Dahmer attended Ohio State University. Joseph Stalin attended seminary (!). Osama Bin Laden went to King Abdulaziz University.
Man, I'm almost up to literally advocating the devil now.
To be fair, flipping through the famously despised people, a really large % of them either dropped out of high school (Hitler, Manson) or college (Dahmer). I was going to say it was surprising, but really, when your sample set is people we all consider to be really messed up, it kinda makes sense.
