DanBC

Be interesting to see if climbers like it - I'd love to see Wide Boys testing it out.

> and the guys watching him were very lackadaisical about it.

Anyone who knows anything at all about suicide prevention is unsurprised by this. We know that observation does not work because staff cannot maintain it. This is true whether it's 15 minute obs, 5 minute obs, permanent line of sight obs, arms length obs, two to one arms length obs: they do not work.

There are countless examples of staff in hospital, on duty, doing obs, knowing their patient is at increased risk of suicide, falling asleep.

> Your question was: "Does a balanced diet include fast food?"

> The answer to that is simple: No

Registered healthcare professionals - dietitians - disagree with you, and do so pretty strongly.

> I'm referencing Jonathan Haidt's work

Why not link to real numbers though? Haidt doesn't understand the numbers, misquotes them out of context, and mangles the data.

> . The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media.

This is simply false.

It's what they claim to do. The science is bunk. It's genetic astrology.

> Unfortunately, 1) these numbers come from Hamas

The official Israeli count is higher than the Hamas count.

> Depression and sucidides in first world countries, the ones that tick all the intial boxes, are a highs not experienced since WWII. [1] is just from a quick googling and US-only. You won't have trouble finding much more evidence to support this though, for many other 1st world countries.

It's difficult to compare suicide statistics over time, especially over decades, because definitions change. (For one example, in England a coroner used to need to be able to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that a person had died by suicide, and that changed to balance of probabilities in 2018).

It's also important not to use sources like media outlets for suicide statistics, because they often don't understand what's being counted or how it's being counted. Statistics are tricky, and media often get them wrong.

You say that it's easy to show that suicides are at an all time high in many first world countries, but that's not correct. In many countries rates peaked in about 2008 - 2010 because of world wide financial crash, and have been declining since then. We might see another peak because of the financial (and other) distress caused by pandemic, but so far we're not seeing a big increase.

> maybe it’s just me, but most of the new drugs seem to come from USA.

It's just you.

What we see from the US is re-patenting. Citalopram gets a minor change and becomes escitalopram, it gets a new patent and some bullshit sales pitch to make doctors switch from a cheap generic to a more expensive branded med. Or ketamine infusion becomes eskatamine nasal spray - moved from a generic and tricky to administer med to a branded and easy to administer med (and, it turns out, much less effective).

The other thing the US does is "Me too" drugs - someone develops an SSRI and the US is then able to spin up 8 different versions of SSRIs that are different enough to get their own names and patents.

Most of the funding in the US doesn't come from big pharmaceutical companies, but is government funding.

For the new meds that are developed in the US the funding normally comes from Government (NIHR) funding, and not direct from pharmaceutical companies.

It's also difficult to work out what to measure: do we look at GERD (gross expenditure on research and development) or do we look at GDP too? DO we look at the quantity of new meds, or the impact on quality of life or years of life lost to disability? Do we focus on meds aimed at diseases that affect wealthy countries (diabetes, breast cancer, etc) or on disease that mostly affects poorer countries? Because three meds that have moderate impact for a small population are "less" than one med that has a good strong impact on a large population.

The Cass Review has also said that children should have easier access to cross sex hormones - they're considering removing the requirement for children to have spent time on puberty blockers before moving onto CSH.

The Cass review supports transition.

The alternative explanation is that it was almost impossible for trans children to access healthcare in the UK and the only people making their way through the pipeline of GP to GIC to hormone centre were those who were undeniably trans.

Double check those bone density results, because new research shows they're present before treatment with puberty blockers starts. Some theories are that some children have reduced access to sporting activity.