Suicide is a symptom of some types of mental illness. But perfectly sane people can still kill themselves. If one wants to prevent suicide one has to accept that fact. We cannot prevent suicides if we look only to people with some sort of observable mental illness. Normal everyday people, some in the prime of life, can and do occasionally decide to kill themselves.

Aside from extremist views (ie never/always appropriate) our society does generally accept suicide in some circumstances. We give medals to people who knowingly die in order to save others. Our movies are full of characters deliberately killing themselves for the benefit of others. On rare occasions we openly criticize those who do not kill themselves where we expect them so to do (Gary Powers). It is part of our culture. We can debate whether suicide is an appropriate action in various hypothetical circumstances, but that's a rambling debate with no end.

Imho suicide is a private issue. In most circumstances our society should work to prevent it from happening, but I'm not going willing to describe every suicide as the result of criminality or mental illness.

A great many of those normal everyday people are suffering from mental health problems. The data suggests that as many as 60% of people with a serious mental health condition are not receiving treatment. A multitude of barriers prevent people from seeking appropriate diagnosis and treatment, from stigma to insurance coverage to the shortage of psychiatrists.

I have no problem with voluntary euthanasia. I have a big problem with the fact that thousands of people are needlessly dying due to treatable mental health conditions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15939840

You're not wrong, but do note that the first paper you cited was from 2003. The CDC results published recently [1] indicate a strong rise in suicide since 1999. And more than half of the people didn't have a known mental health condition. It looks like things are changing.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/suicide/index.html

Given that the vast majority of Americans have a diagnosable mental illness at some point during their lives, if anything that is evidence against there being a strong relationship between mental illness and suicide. E.g. supposedly more than 50% of college students have a diagnosable mental illness during those four years alone.

Even if we saw the statistical effect you predicted (eg. diagnosed mental health issues correlated with a lower rate of suicide), you should consider that the stigma of getting a diagnosis of mental illness, is likely to cause some people who may even know they have a problem, to intentionally avoid getting diagnosed.

Also, these: "I can't seek help because if I do have a mental health issue then my insurance is going to skyrocket / I don't have any health insurance / my insurance doesn't cover mental health."

Well it's an apple-to-apples comparison with the CDC stat about people with undiagnosed mental illness. Basically instead of waiting for people to go in and see a psychiatrist, you just screen every single person in a certain sample for every possible mental illness. This is how mental health assessments at a population level are normally done, e.g.:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disor...

I'm extrapolating a lot from a small comment, so forgive me if I've misinterpreted your comment, but I have an issue with your reasoning; I don't know what it tells us that 50% of people suffer from mental illness at any given point in their life, or how that can be suggestive of any evidence against a relationship between mental illness and suicide.

The numbers may seem telling on the face, but the rate of mental illness in cases of suicide is not based on "diagnosable," it is based on actually diagnosed cases (and jumping ahead, the NIH report linked in the parent comment certainly came to a very different conclusion than you seem to have inferred.)

There's a reason I would think that they sample populations in this way, as in terms of "diagnosable;" most centrally in order to get a more accurate count of the actual incidence, and because the rate of incidence is actually known to be higher than the rate of actual diagnosis.

This kind of sampling helps us to better know the actual rate of mental illness, and taken with the known rate of diagnosed mental illness it may allow us to learn the rate of undiagnosed cases.

What I'm saying is, we can't know anything more than that from these simple averages taken together. The NIH report tracked individuals with known case history, and that's exactly how you can know more.

It is also known that many people who are suffering as such will not seek help. Those are exactly the individuals that "The CDC's data [which] relies on reports from coroners, medical examiners and law enforcement agencies" simply can't take into account. The rate of undiagnosed mental illness is nonzero and significant (a quick search shows recent reports suggesting that it is also near 50%). If there was a perfect 1:1 correlation (say, every suicide co-incident to a case of mental disorder, diagnosed or not), you would absolutely expect that CDC post-mortem number to be lower; less than NIH number by the rate of undiagnosed mental illness.

You can compare these statistics in aggregate, and "rates of undiagnosed mental illness" are also knowable in aggregate through population sampling methods like these, but those people with undiagnosed mental illnesses, who then committed suicide, cannot be directly counted. Cases of "co-morbid mental disorder" among those individuals, as the NIH report calls it, are not so readily quantified. (I think the CDC report does not even attempt to quantify them. This is the idea of a psychiatric autopsy.)

So I think that you can't say more without knowing more about those individuals suffering from undiagnosed mental illnesses (yeah, that's the thing you unfortunately can't know.)

As those undiagnosed illnesses are ostensibly people who did not seek help, those are exactly the ones who the CDC stat won't be able to measure.

You can know something about the relative uncertainty of those measurements though – if you could say that 50% of individuals with severe psychiatric disorders are untreated, then you can have an expected value for the difference between these numbers. This also may seem suggestive, but it is also not sufficient evidence to directly draw any conclusions from.

Actually diagnosed mental illnesses can, however, be correlated with incidences of suicide, which the NIH study linked in the parent commenter's reference does. That report indicated that there was shown a strong correlation.

Disregarding all of the reports and statistics though, as a layman, if forms of treatment used are remotely successful, I would hope that suicide rates among patients with a diagnosis should be lower than the rate of suicide in undiagnosed cases. And if so, that is also going to be a driver for the type of error I'm trying to express that I thought you were not fully considering.

And is not an accurate description of depression.

If you think depressed people are just sad/unhappy - please read more on this debilitating disorder.

The majority of those with access to TV who've also seen some American media have likely felt they're missing out on the riches and opportunities that can be had that they're not fortunate to.

Is the definition of mental illness and depression and their treatments and factors the same across cultures?

To me it seems (opinion) that the only constant is... if you feel sad: there's a pill for that.

People in bad situations work hard to get themselves out. It's human pride, it's our nature. People don't just kill themselves. Are those who do "weaker beings" or have bigger struggles than those who haven't?

There's another factor at play here, in my opinion, and it's the medication.

Your statements just help perpetuate those types of responses.

Depression is not hopelessness. It is not sadness. It is not unhappiness.

Depression is a chemical state in the brain which leads to lower general emotion levels. Depression is when you feel nothing. Depressed people may self-harm to "feel something".

Depression isn't just an error of thought. It's not a lack of understanding about how great your life really is. It's a hardware error causing the software to malfunction.