Correllation Equals Causation. Wait! No… We mean… well… SOMETIMES… when it bolsters our opinions…
Trigger warning… dealing with WLS and suicide in this article.
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This article saddened me…
Heightened suicide risk after weight-loss surgery
It turns out that statistically, people in a post WLS category were significantly more likely to commit suicide than people in the population as a whole:
The data translate into a suicide rate of nearly 14 per 10,000 men per year, and five per 10,000 women each year.Those numbers are substantially higher than the suicide rates among Pennsylvanians in the same 35-to-64 age range, during the same period. Among all men in the state, the suicide rate in 2005 was 2.5 per 10,000, while the rate among women was 0.6 per 10,000.
That’s a BIG HONKING DIFFERENCE, right there.
But the article wants to ASSURE us that “reasons for the pattern remain unknown”
UNKNOWN, WE TELL YOU!
… the study does not imply that bariatric surgery itself leads to suicides — something that is “critical” for patients to understand, she told Reuters Health in an e-mail.
Rather, she said, it may be that some bariatric surgery patients have depression or other mental health problems before the procedure — or develop them afterward — and that, in turn, increases their overall suicide risk.
The researcher wants to make it clear here, that a CORRELATION of significantly higher suicide rates among post WLS patients are IN NO WAY actually caused by the WLS. It’s all just big coincidence, a coming together of myriad complex factors that impact the individual on many levels that may lead to an ultimate very sad decision to end their own lives.
And, actually, I agree with that point. You see, as with everything else… people are COMPLICATED… reasons that things happen are many and varied… a host of factors are at play in EVERYTHING we do… it’s practically impossible to say, “well they did X, therefore Y.”
And yet… in the SAME ARTICLE:
The benefits of weight-loss surgery are well-documented. The procedures, which alter the digestive tract to limit food intake and nutrient absorption, can help severely obese individuals shed a substantial amount of weight. They can also reverse obesity-related health problems like type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.
Sigh… well, I suppose they have to stick to their guns on the fact that FAT = DOOM!!! Because otherwise the rest of the article, linking WLS and higher rates of suicide, well, it doesn’t look good for the WLS pushers, now does it?
So sad… sad and frightening.
Right, it’s not logical that suicide could even be an alternative to living with the myriad of complications with which WLS survivors have to deal. Nope, it’s not logical that death could be preferable to neurological damage, complicated by bone loss, complicated by continuous vomiting, complicated by being so tired one can’t get out of bed most days, complicated by neuropathy, complicated by dumping syndrome, complicated by constipation/diarrhea, complicated by etc/etc/etc and on and on and on. And then to have your doctor blaming you for the complications on top of those complications, yeah, that’s absolutely no reason for committing suicide, not at all.
It pisses me off no end that researchers will imply causation for diseases/obesity, but when it comes to WLS and increased rates of suicide compared to the general population, they say “correalation is not causation.” I say fuck them, in this case, I’d bet dollars to my baby-flavored doughnuts that correlation IS causation in too many cases.
Of course! But when fat people, again and again, are shown to be at higher risk for suicide, it’s automatically, without fail, because they are fat.
Well what do you suggest? That we actually have the temerity to suggest that treating people like diseased lumps of shit because they’re fat isn’t ok? No no, it’s the FAT that causes the depression, not the fact that we can’t even leave our houses without some jackass feeling the need to make mooing noises at us, or pretending there is an earthquake, or acting as if he has gone blind.
Any other conclusion is just MADNESS I tell you! Pure madness!
Oh, that mentality drives me up the wall. No one can ever explain how being fat, in and of itself, causes depression. (They can’t, and there are, ahem, obvious confounding factors involved.) But whenever a fat person is depressed and suicidal, that’s good reason to encourage a person to lose weight to feel better about themselves.
So wait…I’m confused. Do obese people who don’t have the procedure have the same suicide rate as those who do? Or is the surgery correlated with an independent increase in risk?
Playing devil’s advocate, I would say it’s entirely possible that many folks who choose to undergo WLS are already dealing with some depression, just because of how we’re treated by the medical profession and the culture at large. (no pun intended) However, having watched my mom and my brother go through this gruesome procedure, I can tell you that if I had to vomit several times a day (and it’s not easy vomiting either-it’s horribly painful and awful to witness), have diarrhea that would knock a goat off a gut wagon, lose my hair, feel like crap because my body is shooting out every single nutrient that it needs to survive faster than I can take it in, and deal with the myriad of other wonderful little side effects that this surgery induces, I’d be suicidal too! Geez Louise, how can these findings be a surprise to anybody???
I’m with you, there. If WLS *weren’t* an independent predictor of suicide-or at least depression-I would be quite surprised. I’m just not sure if that’s what the study has shown, and it’s really hard to find meaningful statistical trends when the absolute numbers are so small.
Ok, I’m going to confess here. When I had my VBG in 1997, I was suffering from depression and was taking Prozac. My nurse practitioner knew that, she’s the one who prescribed the Prozac, the surgeon knew I was taking Prozac. What neither of them knew, and I didn’t tell them (and wasn’t about to tell them) was that I had 2 suicide attempts under my belt (one in 1976 and one in 1990). And that psychological testing you have to take before being approved for WLS? It’s a joke. They ask about 100 questions, which are really only maybe 25 questions that are worded differently. Once you figure that out, and figure out what answers they want in order to find you “sane enough” to qualify for surgery, it’s a snap to pass that test even if you’re severely depressed and suicidal.
And the follow-up they say they give patients after surgery? That’s another joke. I didn’t get any psychological follow-up at all - after all, I passed the test and was sane enough for surgery, I didn’t need any, even though I was diagnosed with depression and was taking Prozac. As for surgical follow-up, yeah, right, another joke. Less than 6 months of that, and what I got from my nurse practitioner was a fuckton of blame when I stopped losing weight and started re-gaining. I got told everything from “You’re eating foods too high in calories”, despite the fact that I still couldn’t eat more than 1/2 a cup and it took me 45 minutes to eat that, and I couldn’t eat more often than every 4 to 5 hours or I’d vomit it all up, to “You’re eating too many meals” to “Your increased pain is because you gained the weight back and if you’d just eat less you wouldn’t be in so much pain and no, I’m not going to order any tests to look for any other reasons, it’s your fault.” I got so mad, I quit seeing her, and gave up on seeing doctors altogether because I figured I’d hear the same shit from them. If I had kept seeing her, she probably would have driven me to suicide with her blaming bullshit on top of my depression. She did manage to keep me away from doctors for almost 10 years, though.
And at that, I’m lucky, I don’t have near the complications that I could have had. I can cope with what I have so far, and I just hope that I don’t end up with any more later on. I can totally understand why someone who has a myriad of complications from WLS would consider suicide a viable option.