THE LEAST COMMON MULTIPLE OF SUICIDE
Every now and then I swing by the Web site of my first job, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. AFSP is a small research/education driven foundation which faced some struggles while I was there. It was stricken externally by the considerable social stigma of suicide (some people still don't believe in clinical depression, and we know how Christians feel about it) and internally by an often contentious relationship between leading scientists and Survivors of Suicide as to where the monies should be spent--grants or direct support. Anyway, they appear to be thriving, so I occasionally drop by the website to see how they're doing, read the latest research grant applications awarded, see which C-list celebrities they had at their most recent spring gala (although they're edging towards C-plus listwith Mariel Hemingway and Emmylou Harris) and whether my original boss and Foundation founder Dr. Herbert Hendin is still alive. (He is).
DISCLAIMER: When I left AFSP, I thought all the internal stuff was preventing the organization from focussing enough attention on its real mission, so I was a little disgruntled. A little wide-eyed and naive, I'm sure. Also, the pay sucked.
On the website I noted this ad. 'Every 18 minutes, someone kills themselves. Every 19 minutes, someone is left to make sense of it.'
What in the name of Lucy von...who came up with this? If somebody's committing suicide every 18 minutes, someone or someones are grieving every 18 minutes, right? Using algebra, we can conclude that for every 19 suicides, there only 18 'someones'. If you're bad at math, let me demonstrate:
Let x=the number of suicides, and y=the number of grievers.
x/18 = y/19 (Each event at the rate it happens, in minutes)
19x = 18y (multiply both sides by 342, the Least Common Multiple of 19 and 18)
There you go. One out of every 19 suicides goes unaggrieved. That is truly tragic.
My heart goes out to Survivors of Suicide. I wish AFSP provided them more intelligent promotional materials.
DISCLAIMER: When I left AFSP, I thought all the internal stuff was preventing the organization from focussing enough attention on its real mission, so I was a little disgruntled. A little wide-eyed and naive, I'm sure. Also, the pay sucked.
On the website I noted this ad. 'Every 18 minutes, someone kills themselves. Every 19 minutes, someone is left to make sense of it.'
What in the name of Lucy von...who came up with this? If somebody's committing suicide every 18 minutes, someone or someones are grieving every 18 minutes, right? Using algebra, we can conclude that for every 19 suicides, there only 18 'someones'. If you're bad at math, let me demonstrate:
Let x=the number of suicides, and y=the number of grievers.
x/18 = y/19 (Each event at the rate it happens, in minutes)
19x = 18y (multiply both sides by 342, the Least Common Multiple of 19 and 18)
There you go. One out of every 19 suicides goes unaggrieved. That is truly tragic.
My heart goes out to Survivors of Suicide. I wish AFSP provided them more intelligent promotional materials.
posted by stinkrock at 11:31 AM
9 Comments:
yep, bad math for the sake of a catchy saying.
Unless every 18th someone grieves for two suicides.
If there are 525,600 minutes in a year (365 x 24 x60), that means that there will be 27,663 people left to make sense of 29,199 suicides.
That's a net 1,536 suicides un-made-sense-of.
I agree it is a stupid slogan. Still, it would have been unwieldy to say "Every 18 minutes after time=t, somebody commits suicide. Every 18 minutes after time=t+1, somebody is left to make sense of it."
I don't understand the "sic" next to Mariel Hemingway. That's how she spells her name.
sic! you're right. corrected.
I don't know - I think Dave's slogan is pretty catchy.
Anyhow, why does it take a full minute for someone to start making sense of a suicide? Can the AFSP explain that to me?
I'm confused.
I'm late to the game here, but I think it was clearly right-brained ad agency minds at work (right brains are the creative part, right?).
I read it very clearly - someone offs themselves every 18 minutes, and a minute later someone is grieving. I bet for sure they didn't bring in their research dept. heads to quantify the numbers.
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