U.S. Suicides Reached a Record High Last Year | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Suicides Reached a Record High Last Year

wsj.com

45 pointsimpish9208125 comments

Three time attempter here. 50 something year old white make living homeless with schizoaffective disorder bipolar type. Trying to end the stigma. Ask me anything.

Is there one thing in your life that if it changed you think would make you want to stop trying to do this?

Stable housing. But flexibility with work is what kept me from keeping jobs even though I was bright enough to teach my self networking and land a job at Cusco in 1996 making more money than I dreamed of.

If stable housing (and food) was separated from employment and your ability to fill out the correct forms on any specific timeline (i.e. it was just taken care of, clean and safe), what would be the remaining largest stressor?

Nothing but some of the environmental triggers like electromagnetic radiation, air pollution, and the weather. I’m very sensitive to having episodes in high temperature and high humid environments.

These both are things that we (society) should be able to provide. Unfortunatley, I don't know much about these things, but if you haven't do so already, I'd look to see what resources could help. This feels difficult, but I think solvable. Thank you for your response!

Is the mental illness (the label aspect of it) a big stigma or does it help?

Interesting! A little if both, it just depends on the person. Usually, I don’t tell people about the schizoaffective part because that tends to scare people more than the bipolar disorder does.

I don’t have the self stigma I used to have. I don’t see myself having a disease as much as I see myself having an environmental sensitivity. Sort of like a peanut allergy.

What are the largest sources of stress in your life?

Can antidepressants be used for lows and you get to keep the mania, or is that dangerous, and you have to stay on stabilizers?

I hear stories about electroconvulsive therapy being used when drugs don't work, but it seems like it can result in anything from a dramatic worsening of symptoms, to nothing, to miraculous improvement and they don't know why. Has it ever been offered?

Homelessness and lack of steady work. They both led to the isolation I suffer. It’s a good thing I never cared about or appearances about being wealthier successful the other people or I would’ve had a much more difficult time with staying alive.

I’ve tried all the drugs, and none of them work to make me feel like most of you probably feel. The only thing that works consistently is Klonopin as needed. I think my major issue is a one of glutamate GABA imbalance. I can for sure trigger a mania with his little as 10 mg of Prozac.

i can cure myself but I lack the ability to do so right now because of my living situation. over the last four years I’ve had three periods of total remission lasting over three months.

Been investigating the genetics behind schizophrenia. Do you have a contact I could dm you?

Oh! Now you’re talking my language! Since my disorder has a strong family history, I got into my genetics in 2014. What I’ve discovered in my genetics has helped me more than a doctor could’ve.

Email me here adiaryofdespair@protonmail.com

If you're looking for another person I was diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder as well.

What does the experience of being close to an attempt feel like?

Once it was a great feeling of liberation (I was going to freeze myself in a Montana winter). The other two I was so delusional I do not remember any sort of feeling, just a mental pressure. (suicide by cop, jumping off a bluff)

What can we do to help? (if anything)

Love you for asking but it is the whole culture that needs to change.

I mean having something newer that a 2001 Dodge grand Caravan to live in would be great, but…

I’m in I have no problem living my van right now but the stress of breakdown is a big trigger for me. I mean if I lose this, I’m totally homeless, and that’s a whole different game.

I’m working with our local school board, consists of over 200 schools in a wealthy county. Even as I got my PhD in Neuroscience 20 years ago, it’s bonkers to me that kids today aren’t being taught about their brains as performance muscles. The teenage mental health crisis is only being addressed as a need basis. It’s like telling people oncologists are available when you get cancer. If we want better brain health it starts with building better brain tools.

What are some brain tools? Or wherever would you get started?

Not OP, but I loved the book Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Number 1 book of all time. You can turn yourself into a robot if you want.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

Edit: cybernetic corollary: neurons that we wire together, will fire together.

From the physiology, the biggest are how sleep and stress affect learning, memory, and attention. Seems obvious but I’ve yet to find a school district that starts even there.

> it’s bonkers to me that kids today aren’t being taught about their brains as performance muscles.

k12 education is incredibly poor for our ROI. We get some algebra skills and reading skills. Hearing people say the words 'trust the science' means they didn't 'get' the scientific method.

I cannot imagine why we don't have a 'health' class that teaches about the human body scientifically works. Teach about how addictions are formed, teach about how hormones/various neurochemicals impact our brains, when we experience them, etc... I currently am learning about these and there are all sorts of LPTs you get when you realize how the brain actually works.

I think that varies by the school and the student's track. I was taught many of those things in stuff like DARE, biology, and physiology classes in grades 5-12.

No you didn't.

Seeing you include DARE in that list means you are talking about something completely different than neurobiology.

Lol, how do you teach neurobiology to 5th graders? The answer is you teach it at a conceptual level they can understand, generally focusing on outcomes or other observable results. I remember being taught the basics of chemical dependence, how it changes your thought patterns, how it affect your brain, etc, in DARE around that level.

You aren't teaching kids PhD level neurobiology. You're teaching them the applied concepts.

Even in high school when you're learning about dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, etc, it's not at a PhD level, but focuses on how those changes impact different systems, especially any observable behavioral changes.

So please don't tell me what I did or didn't learn. Please realize that neurobiology is not only available as PhD level content, but rather, like all other subjects, has content for lower education levels as well.

> kids today aren’t being taught about their brains as performance muscles

I feel the opposite - kids are being treated like machines, with their performance judged at every step. Treating a kid's brain like a "performance muscle" is gross to me. There's a vast emotional world being papered over to squeeze out performance from children.

Gross is teaching kids about how their bodies work? I’m talking basics like the physiology of sleep and stress and how both affect learning, memory, and attention.

Student athletes learn more about their bodies and performance than students do about their brains.

Most of those things in your first paragraph are actually taught to the student athletes that you talk about in the second. Mind-body performance is actually a big part of sports today.

Kind of, the physiology of stress and fight or flight generally isn’t, even to pro athletes. But to that point, why do you think the lessons aren’t crossing over into academics?

It depends on how deep you are talking about. There's a difference between teaching in-depth theoretical knowledge on the subject vs teaching applied concepts.

"why do you think the lessons aren’t crossing over into academics?"

I don't think this. My anatomy and physiology class covered the basics about different processes. Things like sleep, stress, and attention were things that were covered in some assemblies or ad-hoc (at least from an applied standpoint and not necessarily deep technical standpoint).

It was the language you chose and the implied purpose - for academic performance.

I agree its really important to learn how one's physical body and habits shape their felt experience and to truly realize you have a lever to change it.

available advanced classes. They “ran out of space” for calculus in high school for me.

Now they allow high schoolers to take college classes during high school and get credit for both to fill the gaps in some areas.

> Men 75 and older had the highest suicide rate last year at nearly 44 per 100,000 people

This is so crazy to me. When I think of suicide I never picture a retiree taking his own life. There‘s a lot of talk about the mental health epidemic among teenagers. I wonder what causes this high a suicide rate among men 75+. Loneliness?

Most of the people I know who committed suicide were older men diagnosed with dementia. They are making a rational (maybe not reasonable) choice to end things rather than live as a zombie.

Thanks, I hadn‘t thought of that. Certainly puts a different perspective on the statistics.

I dunno it sounds entirely reasonable to me. Everyone was sad when Robin Williams left us. I was too, but given his dementia diagnosis I completely understood and respected his position

I think what sounds reasonable would be mostly up to the individual and their situation, so I left it open ended. For example, one of them was in the very early stages and likely had a good year or two left before things got bad, so maybe they did it too early, or maybe not.

I am fairly sure its from a generation which was very attached to their spouses. They probably met their wife/husband when they were 18-20, and In my opinion lot of these men above 75 were suffering from death of their spouse or a good friend that they spent 2/3rds of their life with. Men are more vulnerable to emotional loss at that age and they are probably less connected with kids while women may just be holding on for seeing their kids even after the husband has died.

I suspect a large portion is to escape a health crisis, such as terminal illness or impending dementia. Mixed with skyrocketing healthcare costs, this also might be a way to bow out to not leave your family indebted with crazy bills.

Two things about why this is a perceptive observation: First, when looking at a systemic trend, look for systemic causes. For-profit, private sector health insurance is not a healthy market. Some markets need to die, before they kill more people.

Second, because the cause is likely systemic, don't blame or try to "fix" individuals.

> For-profit, private sector health insurance is not a healthy market.

Anyone over 65 would be on Medicare. It’s not exactly free, but it’s also not private.

I am on Medicare, and ever since 2007 It’s gotten worse and worse and worse to the point now or I can no longer get care or the test because doctors are so afraid of not getting reimbursed from Medicare.

Drugs can be expensive on Medicare because of the "doughnut hole". Ie, anyone on expensive drugs ends up paying around $7K-8K a year for drugs, on top of their Medicare premium and supplemental insurance premium, which together are anywhere from $200-500 per month depending on the plan.

https://www.medicareinteractive.org/get-answers/medicare-pre...

Medicare premiums increased 5.9% for 2024 ($9.80 increase from $164.90), while the 2024 COLA for Social Security benefits is 3.2%. So the longer you live, the worse your financial picture gets.

There is a crisis of people not having enough savings. That problem manifests more the older you get. That multiplies with how horrible US healthcare is if you're not well off, and the fact that you need more healthcare the older you get. That also multiplies with the problem of smaller/nonexistent close family/community groups that one could normally get help from. I imagine (though I have no studies to link) that this combination contributes significantly.

The strange part of this to me is that the elderly are the one group in the US who get universal, single-payer healthcare.

There are still co-pays and premiums (if not also on Medicaid). The availability or quality can be an issue.

I think the bigger factor is not the healthcare at that point but the lack of healthy living up to that point. There's not much that can be done for some conditions like dementia. There are many conditions though where people ignored their weight, sugar, etc for decades and there's not a magic cure, or the damage is already done.

Answered a similar question below. It's equally crazy to me that people wouldn't immediately understand the elderly having quality of life issues.

A few that came to mind: -chronic pain -immobility (walkers/wheelchairs etc) -mental decline (senility) -loneliness as you say (possibly addressed by mental decline but it's often cited as a major issue for the elderly) -exponential medical costs

There's probably a lot of other reasons as well I'm sure. What a drag it is getting old.

Yeah a married retired man down the street from me OD'd on pills ~10 months ago, what I heard is it was because of his chronic health issues.

The average American has hardly anything saved for retirement. So imagine living a spartan existence while your friends die off around you (if you even had many, men in the US largely don't), your body fails you in more and more ways every day. And it's not like you live in Manhattan and can go sit in central park and play chess or feed the birds with other people like yourself. You live in some rural area or lower tier city that is basically completely car dependent. There is no where to go, nothing to do, you are completely alone.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

I'd guess it could often be a natural conclusion when faced with a declining quality of life and little hope for improvement. If it's a well considered decision, I don't think it's necessarily a "mental health" problem that needs to be solved.

I personally enjoy life and have never had suicidal thoughts, but I also don't want to live forever if my health declines to the point where I'm in a miserable terminal condition.

Lack of purpose, I would guess.

Old men are currently expected to sit in nursing homes and watch TV until they die. Given how painful those years can be, there would be a lot of downside and no upside.

Even if families care about their elderly, the best most can hope for is affection. Whether they deserve it or not, there's not likely to be much reverence in our culture; nobody's really going to listen to them. While it's doubtful they were ever the defining authority in a family, they may have at least been consulted in the past. Now they are more likely to be viewed (rightly or wrongly) as a burden that nobody would even think to ask for advice or input.

The elderly people I’ve spoken to respond that they are a burden. No longer independent, can’t drive or not supposed to drive out of town especially at night, and once they become fall prone it gets very difficult to care for them.

They feel like a burden because we treat them like a burden. I am not elderly yet, but I’m treated the same way. Instead of people seeing my abilities, they only see my disability.

All people need to be integrated into their society.

It’s interesting as well as sad that a burden is defined as a load and a responsibility.

I shadowed at the county morgue for a few weeks a long time ago. When there was not an autopsy to observe, I was given access to their case files, which were color-coded by cause-of-death (natural causes/homicide/suicide/etc).

I spent one afternoon going through a couple handfuls of suicide cases and while I don’t remember many nitty gritty details, the thing that surprised me was seeing a lot of older men.

Their suicide notes were also primarily instructions on what their family should be doing with their assets/finance talk, that part has always stuck with me 2 decades later.

In my US state, physician assisted suicide is legal in cases of terminal illnesses. In most states, it is not. I know of a few family friends living elsewhere that have chosen to end things rather than drag things out for months, and bankrupt their spouse..

You have to understand as well, that there’s a lack of God or spirituality that probably reduced the suicide attempts for fear of going to hell or not having an understanding on how to deal with suffering.

People are listing the obvious but missing the correct answer: mental illness causes suicide. The brain goes in old age, which doesn’t just mean cognitive impairment but personality changes, mood and behavior regulation difficulty. Older people may hallucinate, are typically delusional and paranoid, they have trouble controlling themselves including mood and excretory functioning. There are notable examples in the public view right now if you’ve never experienced it. That someone not in control of their own mind might kill themselves is obvious. There needn’t be rational reasons like those listed and I suspect there often aren’t.

I agree. No one can tell me there’s any state of mind they can be in where they want to die by suicide. That is a mildly healthy state. Pain and suffering are no excuse to die by suicide.

People do not know what it means to say “if I was suffering, I would just kill myself“ to someone who lives with the mental illness and his homeless. Because mid 50s and that’s me. So you’re literally giving me the OK to kill myself.

I hope your situation improves. Keep the faith.

It doesn't have to be depression, it could be very rationale. If my mind goes, why would I care how long my body survives after?

> I wonder what causes this high a suicide rate among men 75+. Loneliness?

Not 75, but old enough to have my share of chronic pain that just randomly comes with aging. Based on my subjective experience to date and extrapolating forward a bit, it's not hard for me to imagine a 75 year old being in enough pain to where that would be a major factor.

Also, I'd guess that cognitive decline is a factor. Speaking for myself, while my body doesn't work as well as it used to in some ways, my mind (so far as I can tell) still does. And the idea of starting to lose my mental faculties fucking terrifies me. And while I currently have zero plans to commit suicide now, or ever, I can take a step back and look at things and say that if/when the day comes that I feel like I'm starting to fade mentally, that might push me to the place where I could consider something like that.

My mid 90s grandmother is waiting to die because she’s afraid of hell if she kills herself. She has family around her, she just doesn’t see any reason to stick around. Hard to walk for her but still can, not a burden at all, just nothing left she wants to do. My father, her son, early 70s divorced twice who lives with me (laid off recently, likely never to work again when that was his entire identity) is right behind her.

this was my great-grandmother. The last two years of her life were her just waiting to die, and if she hadn't thought it would doom her to hell she would have done something herself.

I have to say I sort of understand where she was coming from. She lived to over a hundred years old. Her husband and children had passed by the time she was 98, all of her friends were dead, she couldn't participate in public (church etc) life in a way she found fulfilling... It honestly seems like a terrible situation to be in.

Live well when you're young and able, the last parts are of little value.

This was basically what I learned from those years. I was in my late teens, and it really shaped the way I lived and what I valued in young adulthood.

You know, I'm contemplating a hip replacement at not quite 40 which can be problematic if it wears out too fast, but there does seem to be a lot of advice these days to do it when you're young for reasons like this. Still far from an easy decision for me though.

> Men 75 and older had the highest suicide rate last year at nearly 44 per 100,000 people

75 is a viable die-able age. This is my end of life plan if i am disabled, diseased or just not having fun in life.

I don't get why only men are making this decision though.

“ just not having fun in life.”

That statement is incredible to me. Can you explain what not having fun would look like to you?

Chronic pain is the first thing that comes to mind for me.

I am in chronic pain, chronic mental pain. Should I kill myself?

I hope not. I recommend you seek help.

Chronic pain, immobility, severe mental disabilities (senility) etc. Is it really that hard to imagine a scenario where life isn't fun for someone at an advanced age?

I can imagine what it’s like Not being fun, I can’t imagine what it’s like to kill myself just because I’m not having fun.

Oh man, so many things at very old age. Difficulty moving, leading to an ever increasing cascading series of health problems. Big debilitating diseases like dementia or alzheimers. Anything that can cause being bed-ridden the new permanent normal.

And lets not forget the final stage, the potential 1-3 months (like my grandma) of life. She had finally had enough of the pain and difficulty, but she had to just let the disease take her over rather than end her life right then. So she spent 6 weeks in agony with a nurse 24/7 solely to manage pain.

Yea.. i don't get the appeal, personally.

Men are lonely, isolated, and lack the social support that women do. Not uncommon to hear someone say "if it wasn't for ..... I would just disappear."

Men lack that "...." especially later in life when parents have passed away.

I don't think women above 75 have a good social support too. We as society just don't take good care of the elderly.

Depends on the person too, my 90 year old grandmother still lives alone in her large house and is so in touch with her neighbors that she has someone that mows her grass, someone that brings her mail up to her doorstep, someone that does her weeding, someone that does her shopping, and on and on. I'm always amazed by how many people just volunteer to do stuff for her, it's like a superpower. She is a pretty unique individual though, I think most elderly individuals just slip into a pit of isolation.

I can only give you anecdotes but all of my grandmothers and great aunts have friends and frequently go out with them. I'm not trying to argue with you about the pitiful state of elder care in the US though. I agree fully.

Same. Though i dislike that i feel i'll be forced to make someone else deal with my body. Ie i'd much rather go to a location (or have them come to me) and they can put me down, deal with the body, etc. I don't want to have to take pills or w/e and make some poor medic see that (not that they're not used to it..).

I see so many old people go far, far beyond what constitutes capable or even coherent. That just seems like a nightmare to me. All for the sake of.. what, some religious foundation that is dying out?

In Canada under medical assistance in dying, there isn't a huge gender difference.

> In 2021, slightly more than half (52.4%) of those receiving MAID were men, and the small percentage difference between men and women has not changed significantly since 2020.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230213/dq230...

So in the situation you are describing it may not be a difference in desire but in the effectiveness of the method used. Or that men over 75 commit suicide for other reasons than medical problems.

"I don't get why only men are making this decision though."

Oh come on, we all know why. Its socially acceptable to hate men and blame them for everything bad. It starts or feeds negative emotions.

"I don't get why only men are making this decision though."

I think it's how society treats them. I would think most other cultures have lower rates based on how men are viewed and treated in other societies.

At least in my view, men are expected to be strong, successful, etc. They are seen as providers (look at how courts treat them). So when you aren't working, aren't strong anymore, etc, some people aren't going to see their worth in other areas. In general men are expected to be self supporting (look at charities and welfare) and to support others (alimony, child support, main provider for family), so what do you expect when they've been groomed this way and can't take care of themselves and become a burden to others?

Men of that age group are seeing their beloved 'old world' crumble and be replaced around them. I am one of the tail end of the old world types and I speculate that it adds up after a while.

It's odd going around town and seeing every landmark changed, all the mediums (film, newspapers and more) you loved be relegated to niche outlets. All the people that knew your world and spoke your cultural language are gone.

Memories stacked on memories e.g. this street address used to be a shopping mall, that used to be where my high school sweetheart first kissed me.

Add medical difficulty on top of that, family troubles and financial woes.

Men used to run the world and they were finely tuned for it.

You'd have to write a biography or book to get all that backed up change out of you.

Millenials are going to feel this very acutely, I speculate.

Millennials will always be able to play the old videogames, watch the old films and shows, etc. Much more of our experience is media-focused.

The 75+ category is interesting because at what point is it just being done and deciding to go out on your own terms peacefully than the long tail of falling apart? I have a great aunt that decided to forgo all her medical treatment because she was 78, had cancer and did everything she wanted to do. I guess that's suicide but if I were St. Peter at the pearly gates I don't think I would count it.

why only men though?

Stigma. Economics. And men come last in the social safety system in the US.

And, perhaps, men placing a higher emphasis on those issues in their self-evaluation.

I'm convinced that most of that individual self worth evaluation is a result of the societal views. So what you describe is really a symptom of the comment you're responding to.

My understanding of Catholic teaching is what your grant aunt did was permissible under the concept of natural death. Under natural death, it is also permissible to receive pain alleviating palliative medications.

https://www.usccb.org/resources/ethical-religious-directives... (Part 5 Issues in Care for the Seriously Ill and Dying)

(56) A person has a moral obligation to use ordinary or proportionate means of preserving his or her life. Proportionate means are those that in the judgment of the patient offer a reasonable hope of benefit and do not entail an excessive burden or impose excessive expense on the family or the community.

(61) Patients should be kept as free of pain as possible so that they may die comfortably and with dignity, and in the place where they wish to die. Since a person has the right to prepare for his or her death while fully conscious, he or she should not be deprived of consciousness without a compelling reason. Medicines capable of alleviating or suppressing pain may be given to a dying person, even if this therapy may indirectly shorten the person’s life so long as the intent is not to hasten death.

https://archive.is/zt2fh

Ugh: captcha loop again. Last time I added a couple of DNS providers and it worked. Any new ideas? Root cause?

The typical reason is using Cloudflare DNS for archive.today resolution. Even with multiple DNS entries, if 1.1.1.1 is at higher priority and tried by the system first (and doesn't time out) it won't help. Either have to switch to something else entirely, or manually specify to never use it there (which is what I do). I run Unbound on my network for example, and just setup entries for custom query forwarding for archive.[today|is|md|ph] though I still use 1.1.1.1 as the default.

Is it possible to write a script or plugin that reroutes your DNS request only for archive?

As I said I do it at the network level, but every OS should handle that anyway at the OS level as well (though I don't know off the top of my head if/how more locked down stuff like iOS exposes it). No need for any scripting yourself it's just basic functionality. On Unix-like (including macOS) you should generally be able to do it just by adding entries to /etc/resolver (if you're running a full recursive DNS locally obviously just modify that same as on another system). So a plain

  cat 'nameserver 192.168.1.1' > /etc/resolver/some.mydomain.com

Would then tell any requests for some.mydomain.com to resolve through 192.168.1.1 (locally). In this case specifically it'd be

  cat 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' > /etc/resolver/archive.today
  cat 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' > /etc/resolver/archive.is
  cat 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' > /etc/resolver/archive.md
  cat 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' > /etc/resolver/archive.ph

etc for all their various mirrors. Check manpages I guess for any differences but something close to that. Though note that irritatingly not all applications will necessarily pay attention to the OS resolver (by default, or at all) in the first place. If not and you can't switch you'll have to dig into prefs/workarounds for those specific ones.

----

As a meta-note to all this, this is the kind of manual change that is easy to set and then have just sit there for a decade and completely forget about, then have it potentially cause some head scratching if/when something changes on the far side. Always a good habit to keep an orderly record of such things, or have it as some sort of playbook for auto-setting up systems so you can comment it with the date and reason.

Thanks! Removing 1.1.1.1, even though it is second on the list did it, this time, anyway. What a pain and an obscure one, too!

“About half of people in the U.S. live in an area without a mental-health professional, federal data show, and some 8,500 more would be needed to fill the gap”

The psychologists or psychiatrists that are accepting new patients have a 3-6 month wait for first appointment.

6-14 years of college/post doc/degree to become a psychologist depending on type and state. 12-16 years to become a psychiatrist and prescribe medications.

According to a graph in the article the suicide rate bottomed around the year 2000 and has since risen steadily. I wonder why. You could say that the strong economy in the late 1990s reduced the number of suicides, but since 2000 the uptrend is steady -- you don't see a temporary spike around the deep 2008-2009 recession.

I would propose an environmental factor but afraid I will be laughed at.

What environmental factor?

Electromagnetic radiation.

Would you be willing to accept that this fear may be part of your schizoaffective disorder?

No. In the past I did, but I ruled it out through the best placebo control tests I could do it myself.

How could I have been in remission when I did not even know I was in a low EMF area? It was only when I looked back on my life after I discovered this possibility that I could trace my symptoms in part by how much EMF I was exposed to.

For example, my worst episode I had in years was one they installed Wi-Fi in my work building in 1999. I was at network engineer. I did not know about this effect until four years ago.

I find myself affected by both low frequency and RF radiation.

I’m not saying that is the only trigger to my illness, just one of many environmental factors. The other is air pollution.

Probably because the late 90's up to 9/11 were absolutely amazing in the US.*

* I am an upper middle class white American millennial and could be a bit biased

Matrix said 1999 was the peak of humanity and most of us laughed. But looking back I am starting to wonder if they were right.

Questions for all the knowledge workers here (i.e., people who use their brains for their living) here:

1. When did you get your first course on neuroscience and how brains work best?

2. Did you ever learn in school a tool kit for keeping your brain performing at its best?

1. Is there a free online course you recommend/link? I got mine from chemistry professor in high school.

2. Not in school. In books on my own. Most toolkit info was mnemonics and memory palace type things but few about brain health, focus, activity level, sleep, meditation, and such available on podcasts today.

Neuroscientist here:

1. Grad school. I came in as a more tech/physics applicant and had to learn it all from a fire hose.

The canonical book is Kandell: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kande...

But, please, don;t read that unless you're a neuroscientist. It's too much for a 'layperson'

This one should be better for most casual people with an interest: https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Mind-How-Brain-Works/dp/0393...

Honestly? Just ask chatGPT questions that you have. It's more than good enough for casual interest.

2. Nope. Not even as a person researching and doing experiments. Most US based academia is firmly in the camp of 'beatings will continue until morale improves'. They ignore almost all of their own findings about the need for sleep and learning and spaced repetition when it comes to teaching. Culture is hard to overcome.

Nearly everything I've learned about optimal brain performance (if you can even consider that a thing, which I do not), I learned from reading papers (mostly reviews) and random internet garbage that somehow ended up being true.

It looks like the neoliberal economic takeover of the world after 2000 was the trigger for the rising dice rates. Or was it the internet? Or higher EMFs? Or all of it?

Sunlight is an EMF, genius.

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