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Background: Suicide remains a major public health concern worldwide, responsible for more than 700,000 deaths in 2021, accounting for approximately 1.1\% of all global deaths. While many high-income countries have reported declines in…
Background: Neighbourhood social fragmentation and socioeconomic deprivation seem to be associated with suicide mortality. However, results are inconclusive, which might be because dynamics in the social context are not well-represented by…
In the past six decades, lifespan inequality has varied greatly within and among countries even while life expectancy has continued to increase. How and why does mortality change generate this diversity? We derive a precise link between…
Indirect standardization is widely used in disease mapping to control for confounding, but relies on restrictive assumptions that may bias estimates if violated. Using data on suicide-related emergency calls, this study highlights such…
Widespread population aging has made it critical to understand death rates at old ages. However, studying mortality at old ages is challenging because the data are sparse: numbers of survivors and deaths get smaller and smaller with age. We…
We show that a large scale mass mortality results in increased numbers of suicides. As a case in point, we consider the influenza epidemic of October 1918 in the United States. In this month, suicides peaked at a level of over 4s (where s…
Human aging is marked by a steady rise in the risk of dying with age-a process demographers call senescence. Over the past century, life expectancy has risen dramatically, but is this because we are aging slower, or simply starting it…
Suicide explains the largest number of death tolls among Japanese adolescents in their twenties and thirties. Suicide is also a major cause of death for adolescents in many other countries. Although social isolation has been implicated to…
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that approximately 1.4 million individuals worldwide died by suicide in 2022. This figure indicates that one person died by suicide every 20 s during the year. Globally, suicide is the…
The persistence of poverty is not well explained by who is poor. We argue the relevant object of measurement is trappedness--expected escape time from deprivation--which varies systematically across institutional environments and is…
We study the dynamics of cause--specific mortality rates among countries by considering them as compositions of functions. We develop a novel framework for such data structure, with particular attention to functional PCA. The application of…
The study of mortality patterns is a popular research topic in many areas. We are particularly interested in mortality patterns among main causes of death associated with age-gender combinations. We use symbolic data analysis (SDA) and…
Although traditional literature on mortality modeling has focused on single countries in isolation, recent contributions have progressively moved toward joint models for multiple countries. Besides favoring borrowing of information to…
Why are human societies unstable? Theories based on the observation of recurring patterns in historical data indicate that economic inequality, as well as social factors are key drivers. So far, models of this phenomenon are more…
Certain currents in sociology consider society as being composed of autonomous individuals with independent psychologies. Others, however, deem our actions as strongly influenced by the accepted standards of social behavior. The later view…
The prevalence of suicide has been on the rise since the 20th century, causing severe emotional damage to individuals, families, and communities alike. Despite the severity of this suicide epidemic, there is so far no reliable and…
Mortality is different across countries, states and regions. Several empirical research works however reveal that mortality trends exhibit a common pattern and show similar structures across populations. The key element in analyzing…
Biologists have found that the death rate of cells in culture depends upon their spatial density. Permanent "Stay alive" signals from their neighbours seem to prevent them from dying. In a previous paper (Wang et al. 2013) we gave evidence…
Ignoring the differences between countries, human reproductive and dispersal behaviors can be described by some standardized models, so whether there is a universal law of population growth hidden in the abundant and unstructured data from…
The paper explores the connection between short-range social ties (i.e. links with close relatives) and the occurrence of suicide. The objective is to discriminate between a model based on social ties and a model based on psychological…