The Banker Suicide Nonepidemic

   In a rare convergence between the mainstream media and alternative media the story that bankers are killing themselves off left and right keeps cropping up. All those of us soaked in student loans are probably secretly gleeful in our worst moments. Unfortunately, I must rain on our schadenfreude parade with reality. The real suicide epidemic is not of bankers and, but debtors and workers. What is happening in the media reflects the fact that American news makers are either woefully unable to grasp statistical concepts and given to sensationalist blather or willfully deceitful.
   Suicide is nothing new. In fact even the Hebrew bible, contains references to suicide. Samson, the mighty warrior, chooses his death. The narrative spun by the press about banker suicide can be interpreted along similar lines. Bankers are the mighty of our times. But are they really the suicidal?
   Over the financial crisis of the last seven years there has been a substantial uptick in suicides. But it is the average man, an increasingly woman who accounts for this. The CDC has run the numbers. The story we should be hearing more about is why middle aged people- those in the prime of their lives- are increasingly suffocating, poisoning and shooting themselves dead. In a testament to the dark side of equality, female suicide is rising as well as male. In fact female doctors (like myself) have surpassed full suicide equality with male doctors who kill themselves more often than the general population. The person most likely to kill themselves is a female doctor, not a high powered male banker.
    Behind headlines about a wave of banker suicides lie no real numbers to support the claim. Wall Street is not the center of any epidemic besides perhaps sociopathy. The number of people working in Wall Street type jobs, finance jobs in New York City has become fairly low. By the best estimates New York now houses about 400,000 financiers. While year to year suicide rates should fluctuate stochasticaly, we could estimate the average annual suicide rate of financiers, if equal to that of the general population, should be around 20 to 30. Over the past year there has been approximately two New York banker suicides. Two. In order to get bigger numbers we must look at global numbers. Here again, the numbers are suspiciously low. Under twenty. Basically statistically not significant. Working in finance actually seems to be a protective factor against suicide. Perhaps the protective factor has something to do with having obscene amounts of money. The reverse is certainly true: unemployment and poverty are correlated with an increased risk of suicide.
   What lies behind the distortions of the media around banker suicides is unclear. But suicide is a real growing epidemic that very occasionally touches even the high and mighty.