Research What's behind the holiday-suicide myth + Truth & scientific consequences

[C C]

Truth and scientific consequences
https://www.acsh.org/news/2023/11/30/tru...nces-17495

INTRO: An email from Dr. Shao, a professor at Indiana University School of Public Health, states that EPA’s current version of Benchmark Dose Software (BMDS) modeling is “extremely misleading and not scientifically justified.” It is very unusual for a scientist who has been deeply involved with the EPA in developing risk assessment modeling to openly criticize the EPA. This requires a deeper dive into this issue... (MORE - details)

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What's behind the holiday-suicide myth
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1009950

INTRO: For more than two decades, the Annenberg Public Policy Center has tracked the ways in which news organizations erroneously link the year-end holiday season with suicide, perpetuating the false holiday-suicide myth. But as years of national data show, the winter holiday months usually have low average daily suicide rates, with December the lowest of all.

In our new media analysis, we find that of the newspaper stories during the 2022-23 holiday season that explicitly connected the holidays with suicide, 60% correctly debunked the myth while 40% incorrectly supported it.

But it’s not just the media that often gets it wrong. So does the public... (MORE - details)

[Magical Realist]

At least with winter you have an excuse to be lonely. The cold air keeps us indoors and away from each other, along with carrying the faint whiff of coming snow in the air. But with hot summer days there is no longer any reprieve. You must carry your aloneness like a cross in the desert. Up in the corner of a white hot sky there is a little window you peek out of, hoping against hope for some forgiving relief. Then autumn comes like a kiss, and you are set free like a bird in the cool breeze.