Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 38, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 February 1906 — EPIDEMIC OF SUICIDES. [ARTICLE]

EPIDEMIC OF SUICIDES.

Sweepin* over New York and All the Cities of the East. A suicide wave for which there is no satisfactory accounting is sweeping over New York and the entire eastern portion of the country, says the New York Times. Experts who day by day compile and tabulate the vital statistics of our cities have adduced this fact from their columns of comparative facts and figures and have presented it for public consideration without opinion or comment, which is a way peculiar to statisticians and others of their kind who deal in cold, hard actualities. And perhaps it is just as well, for selfmurder at best is one of the most illusive and generally unsatisfactory problems which the health department of a great city is called upon to face. There is no adequate explanation for it in any of its general aspects. If there is a decrease, that decrease cannot be accounted for, unless theoretically; if increase there bo in the number of suicides the health authorities are equally at sea. save, of course, in times of economic distress. But in the accepted sense of the term there is no economic distress in this city, in any city of the country, at the present time. Times are economically propitious, never better, and hence" the fact that New Y’ork’s suicide rate in the present month has gone far above the average for the months of last year—22.7 per 100,000 —and that other cities report similar conditions cannot be explained on the basis of economics, of hard times.