Want to Die Young? Bathe Yourself in Right-Wing Media & Vote Republican
From Thom Hartmann :
Want to die young? Immerse yourself in conservative media and vote Republican. Seriously.
We should have known, but, still, the science is shocking: when conservatives run governments, suicides and homicides go up; when liberals run governments, suicides and homicides go down.
We got the first clue back in 2002, when, in a 100-year longitudinal study published that year in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Australian researchers found that the suicide rate in that country and the UK increased throughout the 20th century whenever a Conservative government (similar to Republicans here in the U.S.) was in power and declined measurably when the liberal Labour Party was in charge.
The BBC cited the research, noting that tens of thousands of Australians and Brits would not have committed suicide if conservatives had never run either government during the 20th century.
Their headline was unambiguous: “More Suicides Under Conservative Rule”:
“When the Conservatives ruled both state and federal governments,” the BBC summarized, “men were 17% more likely to commit suicide than when Labour was in power. Women were 40% more likely to kill themselves.”
Referencing the researchers’ work, the BBC concluded:
“Overall, they say, the figures suggest that 35,000 people would not have died had the Conservatives not been in power, equivalent to one suicide for every day of the 20th century or two for every day that the Conservatives ruled.”
They added, as the last sentence of the article:
“The UK Conservative Party refused to comment on the research."
More recently, here in the US, a 2014 study by Bandy X. Lee, Bruce E. Wexler, and James Gilligan published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior titled Political correlates of violent death rates in the U.S., 1900–2010: Longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses found pretty much the same outcomes as the result of Republicans versus Democrats running our country.
Read the full article here at The Hartmann Report:
https://hartmannreport.com/p/want-to-die-young-bathe-yourself-b99