14 DAY TRIAL // A study recently published in the Journal of Mood Disorders details the link between environmental pollution and suicide rates.
More precisely, this research suggests that, all things considered, air pollution might have to be held responsible for upping the suicide rates in a given community.
The researchers who took the time to investigate this issue are not denying the fact that psychiatric conditions are the ones most strongly associated with suicidal tendencies.
However, they maintain that it might also be possible for emissions released by coal-fired electricity plants to influence an individual's mood disorder and therefore make him more vulnerable to suicide.
“The presence of a coal-fired electricity plant correlated with airborne levels of nickel, mercury, lead, chromium, cadmium, beryllium and arsenic,” lead researcher John G. Spangler of the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center argued.
“This study raises interesting questions about suicide rates in counties where coal-fired electrical plants operate and suggests that the quality of air can affect people suffering from different mood disorders,” he went on to explain.
According to the official website for the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, Dr. John G. Spangler and his fellow researchers reached these conclusions following their comparing suicide rates in North Carolina to those in the rest of the United States.
Thus, they discovered that the North Carolina counties that had an additional coal-fired electricity plant also had roughly two more yearly suicides per 100,000 population.
“This is the first study to show that the existence of coal-fired electricity plants is related to population-level suicide rates,” John G. Spangler commented with respect to these findings.
The specialists now wish to carry out further investigations into this matter and collect more data concerning how it is exactly that coal plant emissions influence suicide rates.
As John G. Spangler put it, “Further research is needed to understand what factors related to coal burning actually are at play and suggest that tighter regulation of coal-fired power plant emissions might cut down on county suicide rates in North Carolina.”