The suicide rate has been increasing since about 2000. It's now at a rate above what we've seen since before WW2 - and statistics from before then are probably not comparable to the statistics we have today, simply due to issues in data collection.

The number of psychology M.S. degrees awarded per year - that is, the degree you need to become a therapist - has been similarly increasing over this time period.

Someone who is generous might conclude that the number of increased degrees is an active government response to this problem. However, people do not pursue an M.S. without having a non-financial desire to work in that field. The government cannot purposefully create more psychologists.

I propose the following hypothesis: the number of suicides in the US is increasing because there are more psychotherapists in the US.

1) Psychotherapists have a financial incentive to make people reliant on their services, and they have a degree in manipulating people's emotions. Thus, the psychotherapist actively worsens people's mental health in an effort to get them to spend money on them. They do this through cultural manipulation and by being insufferable pieces of shit in real life.

2) Despite the fact that economic factors are poor, historically people have emotional coping mechanisms for these things. In the US today, the coping mechanism for being miserable is to spend money on a psychotherapist - which only worsens the victim's economic situation.

3) Psychotherapists also often have personal incentives to make people miserable. It's a field where you have access to mentally vulnerable people - bad people have realized this, and often pick up the field as a chance to get more victims.

Thus, I propose the following solution to the suicide epidemic in the US: imprison all psychotherapists, and ensure that no more are created.
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