What can we infer from this passage?

The suicide rate in America is up to 18% since 2000. This is not merely a tragedy; it matters politically, too. The rise is largely among white, middle-aged, poorly educated men in areas that were left behind by booms and crushed by busts. Their deaths are a symptom of troubles and those troubles should not be ignored.
   Nonetheless, beyond America’s gloomy trend is a more optimistic story: that at a global level, suicide is down by 29% since 2000. As a result, 2. 8m lives have been saved in that time — three times as many as have been killed in battle. There is no one reason. It is happening at different rates among different groups in different places. But the decline is particularly notable among three sets of people.
   One is young women in China and India. In most of the world, older people kill themselves more often than the young, and men more than women. But in China and India, young women have been unusually prone to suicide. That is decreasingly the case. Another group is middle-aged men in Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, alcoholism and suicide rocketed among them. Both have now receded. A third category is old people all around the world. The suicide rate among the elderly remains, on average, higher than among the rest of the population, but has also fallen faster since 2000 than among other groups.
   Why are these people now less likely to take their own lives? Urbanization and greater freedom have helped. As people move to cities and the grip of tradition loosens, women have more choice about whom they marry or live with, making life more bearable. Leaving the village helps in another way, too. Because farming involves killing things, rural folk are likelier to have the means to kill themselves — guns, pesticides — to hand.
   Social stability is also a factor. As economic crises recede and employment rises, so suicide tends to ebb. And falling poverty rates among the old, which have declined faster than among other groups globally, are reckoned to have contributed to the drop in the number of elderly suicides.
   Efforts to curb access to the means to kill oneself can help, too. Suicide is surprisingly impulsive. Of 515 people who had survived the leap from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge between 1937 and 1971, 94% were still alive in 1978 — which suggests that a suicide postponed is likely to be a suicide prevented.