I'm not sure this is what GP was addressing, but there is a very real phenomenon of getting so depressed that you can't even manage to kill yourself. You actually see increased risk of suicide at the beginning of therapy for some patients, where they come up enough to get just enough mental energy to successfully kill themselves.
But we have no evidence that this is the case. At first people kept saying "Foxconn employees kill themselves a lot, so they're depressed", and now they're saying "Foxconn employees don't kill themselves as much as we do, so they're depressed". It seems to me that people here are simply predisposed to believe that Foxconn employees are depressed, and are willing to take pretty much anything as evidence for that belief.
> You actually see increased risk of suicide at the beginning of therapy for some patients, where they come up enough to get just enough mental energy to successfully kill themselves.
This is something that happens (mostly with bipolar people who go into manic states, it actually doesn't typically happen with severe depression cases), but in terms of risk, no you are wrong, statistically you see decreased risk immediately after starting any kind of depression treatment:
It seems a little to easy to reduce the situation to a "Once Foxconn employees stop killing themselves at X rate we can consume Apple products guilt free." type of equation, doesn't it?
Wait, so now the issue isn't "Foxconn employees kill themselves too much", it's "Foxconn employees don't kill themselves enough"?