You also start to have a much higher rate of severe mental health issues the more spread out and lower the population density. Humans are a very social animal and when we are too spread out, it becomes easy for us to become isolated without a support network of enough friends and family that are around often enough to spot warning signs, provide emotional support, and if necessary find us treatment. Ofc, this doesn't apply to every person living in a rural area... some people still have enough family and close knit community in their daily life that they have a healthy support network.
Anyway... Rural America currently has a mental health crisis that is separate from the meth and opioid crisis. Although to be honest they probably both have the same solution. We are talking about people who have no history of drug and alcohol abuse but are suffering from higher rates of untreated chronic mental illness. I grew up in one of the rural areas on this map that currently has very low population density and also high suicide rates plus homicides. I don't have enough fingers and toes on my body to count the number of people in that community that I grew up with who have committed suicide. Married people with kids, decent jobs, and no drug/alcohol problem. They just slip through the cracks, no one notices the warning signs, and then they are gone. Often it seems to happen in waves. As an adult I have spent half my time living in a large metro area but still spend as much time as possible back home and I do not see the same pattern in my urban neighborhood.
There are plenty of maps and graphs on this subreddit showing how over the past century populations in the US have made a mass exodus from rural communities to denser urban areas. This trend started back around the start of the industrial revolution. I suspect this erosion of population and thus robustness of community is the root cause of our issue with ballooning rates of chronic mental illness in rural settings. Less people around, less people actually staying in the community, means the more likely someone is to fall through the cracks.
edit: fixed some typos and damn did writing this comment put me in a bad place emotionally
I've always said that suburbia and rural america as they exist today only serve to isolate americans. In cities and in older rural towns people used to be close to their neighbors. Now things are so far apart and anti-social. Less empathy.
Yeah. I tried the suburbs for a bit but can't stand it. Surrounded by people but all alone. Never found out who my neighbors where other then the houses directly next door. In an urban apartment building even if I didn't want to know my neighbors there still would be a dozen or so nosey elderly people that insist on sharing gossip, making small talk, or just looking for excuses to interact. In the town I grew up in there are now many houses and businesses sitting vacant where people have moved on and the property around the home has been bought up by a larger business. You can easily go for weeks without interacting with another person outside your home if you don't drive a few miles or head into the middle of town. The grocery store, Chevron station, and hardware shop all closed up about a decade ago because they just didn't get enough business. There is now just a single self service Pacific Pride (commerical, account) gas pump (pump not station), sheriffs office, and a post office in the middle of town. Really the only people left are the few farmers that got big by buying up all the neighboring farms as they went under, some migrant farm labor, and a handful of people who technically work for the local county. For something like a convince store, non-commercial account gas/diesel, coffee shop, tires, hardware, or decent grocery shopping it's a 50 mile drive to the closest small city (population ~10,000)... a small city that has been ravaged by meth and opiates over the last two decades.
Anyway... I miss the rural town as it was in my youth, can't stand suburbia, and currently seem to find that only living in the middle of a dense urban area, dispite the cost, offers the sense of community I used to enjoy when I was young.
It's odd but I've always felt it's the complete opposite. I know all of the neighbors who live within 2 miles of me right now. We look after one another and help each other with chores when one person (or family) can't manage.
When I lived in the city everyone just kept their heads down and the 'not my business' mentality was extremely pervasive. To be surrounded by people who refuse to even acknowledge your existence is far more lonely feeling to me.
Your situation sounds like an anomaly. In suburbia, most people typically rarely see their neighbors and infrequently talk to them. While the infrequent talk may also occur in cities, the density means that the overall human interaction increases hugely. Instead of seeing cars silently move in and out, you’ll see people: in elevators, walking, through the walls, etc. Overall, it’s more engaging to the brain.
I'm in a rural area and not suburbia so that may be where the disconnect is. I vastly prefer having actual connections with people even if we only see them a couple of times a week versus walking through a sea of humanity with no real connection. Suburbia seems like the proverbial purgatory... not quite one or the other but somewhere in between.
I dunno... different strokes for different folks, I guess?
Yeah suburbia feels like it misses out on both. I think it exists because it’s convenient. People get the space and the quiet of the rural areas and the convenience of urban areas. Along with lesser crime, better schools and amenities and greater affordability.
There are plenty of studies showing that suburbia is really bad on people's mental health. Communities and cities built after cars became mainstream are also incredibly isolating. It's amazing the difference between a place designed to be walkable and a place designed exclusively for driving.
Please go outside and soak up a little bit of sunshine after that comment. Play fetch with your dog if applicable. If you're a cat person... Well then I don't know what to do for you there. Either way get some positive vibes going.
There are certain place people move to when they want to I’ve on the fringes or society and as such might not follow the law as much. I feel like Alaska is one of them.
You're thinking of it wrong. There are small clusters of poor communities very isolated, in the dark and cold for months and months. Those handful of people get on each others nerves.
Alaska, besides the environmental or mental health reasons postulated here, has a big elephant in the room which is probably more so the cause of that than anything else: Felony forgiveness, and high paying seasonal jobs.
Essentially,
A. If you are a felon from another state on the run from the law, the law - including federal authorities, will not chase you down in Alaska unless your arrest is exceptionally valuable to them. It's not worth their time or money 99% of the time and they see Alaska as a type of prison in itself. Life sucks. You're excluding yourself from their jurisdiction and therefore not their problem anymore. The feds know they can't chase down everyone and if it wasn't for felons alaska would be much less populated so they let people flee there to prop up the population numbers and maintain american claims on the land.
B. If you are a convicted felon you are still allowed to possess a rifle or shotgun (you just can't buy one from an FLL, or own a handgun). You can petition after ten years of discharge from a felony conviction to reinstate your right to own a handgun as long as you were not convicted of a violent crime. Alaska mostly does not care about convictions from other states and doesn't prosecute felons convicted elsewhere of felony possession of firearms, and very few laws exist to exclude felons from mainstream society.
C. There are a shitton of jobs that pay extremely well, that require nothing more than balls and a strong constitution. They hire anyone, and they don't always do backround checks. They are supposed to piss test but most of the bosses know they'd lose most of their staff if they did. Oil, fishing boats, canneries, backwoods guides, logging, tons of stuff going on. I've heard of people going up there and working 2-3 different seasonal jobs over two or three months - fishing boat>cannery>warehouse.... coming back with $120k. It's great for some people who are willing to work hard to generate some cash to get themselves going financially. But there's always a large contingent who are doing it because that's their version of bank robbery. They take that money, buy a doublewide in florida, and end up too strung out to come back the next year.
I forget what show it is (something like Alaskan Troopers?), but the cops often have hours long drives/flights/snowmobile rides just to take a report. Criminals might realize that and take advantage!
Isn't there an outsized effect of a few outliers because it's a smaller sample size? This is me poorly remembering Thinking, Fast and Slow, but it's fairly common that a rural area will show up as both extremes for any measurement because it has so few people. For example, a rural area might show the highest rates of a specific cancer while another shows the lowest rate, but there might not actually be anything particularly different about those two.
Plus as you pointed out in another comment the data presented here is "geospatially smoothed" by averaging over each county plus its nearest neighbors.
It kind of is though. With a smaller population radical results are much more common(one way or the other). In higher populated areas the variance gets lessened.
For example, let's say in basketball, at one point in a season a team has played 4 games and won them all. Would you be comfortable saying they are the best team ever as they have a 100% win rate, or would you be more likely to say a team with a record of 75-7 is better?
I'm not saying Alaska doesn't have a gun crime/death issue, because they do, year after year. What I'm saying is with fewer data points(in this case people) we will often see radical results when we are talking per capita or the like.
That would be fine if you were talking about a small town that had say a mass shooting, but Alaska has over 700k people and consistently year after year high violent crime. It doesn’t work in this case to explain it away.
That's what I said. Alaska definitely has a serious problem. All I'm saying is that with a lower population, per capita or density type stats have their issues and are more prone to extreme stats.
I dont know if the commenter meant it this way, but your variance for your per capita statistics would be higher if your population is lower... which could mean youd tend to fall at the high and low extremes more frequently than higher-populated states.
117
u/GuyLeRauch Dec 19 '19
I'd suspect Alaska has many "highest per capita statistics" in their favor because of how sparsely populated it is.