Kevin McCaffree is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas, author of multiple books, editor of the journals Theoretical Sociology and Evolutionary Analysis in the Social Sciences, and a chief researcher at the Skeptic Research Center. I invited him to talk about his new paper “Pulling Back the Curtain on Suicide Research,” which shows that decades of suicide research have failed to reduce suicide. Kevin and I discuss who commits suicide and under what conditions, whether it’s socially contagious, and why the suicide prevention interventions we’ve developed have failed so miserably. We also talk about why we need better-trained mental health clinicians, how secularization and digital technologies have created a crisis of meaning, whether differences in theory of mind along the autism-schizophrenia spectrum explain different styles of religious and political thinking, and Kevin’s new theory of individualism that explains rising narcissism and mental health issues.

You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Links:

* Kevin McCaffree, Pulling Back the Curtain on Suicide Research.

* David Philipps, The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Werther Effect.

* Lubin et al., Decrease in Suicide Rates After a Change of Policy Reducing Access to Firearms in Adolescents: A Naturalistic Epidemiological Study.

* Tyler Black, Associations Between Income-Based Nutrition Programs and Suicidality.

* Tyler Black, Children’s Risk of Suicide Increases on School Days.

* Kevin McCaffree, The Secular Landscape.

* Landon Schnabel, Opium of the Masses? Inequality, Religion, and Political Ideology in America.

* John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism.

* Jean Twenge, Generations.

* Kevin McCaffree, Review of Generations.

* Kevin’s Google Scholar.

* Skeptic Research Center, @SkepResCenter.