"The Teen Suicide Epidemic"

[Violet]

Suicide is grossly underreported. Coroners and police are very reluctant to call a death a suicide unless there really is no other explanation. Many so-called accidents are actually suicides, including auto accidents, swimming accidents, falling accidents, and other such things. Many "accidental drug overdoses" are actually suicides. Some fatal shootings by police officers of suspects are actually "suicide by police".

If a thing is not reported... then how are we to know of it? If a thing is not reported: we have zero information to go off of and suggesting that it is higher than reported is naught more than arm-waving on our part.

The reasons are such things as stigma. There's a great deal of stigma on all of your relatives if "someone in their family" died of suicide. Undertreating for depression has its problems, but so does having to convince the doctor that "no, I'm NOT depressed", wasting your precious minutes seeing the doctor trying to convince him that you are not depressed with him trying to diagnose your depression and have the real problems you came in to see the doctor for be brushed off, ignored, or even not get mentioned because he just writes a prescription for Prozac and walks out onto the next patient. This is a bad use of healthcare dollars, time, resources, and personnel...

And yet we seem to be frothing at the mouth to identify who is and isn't gay, who's pro-abortion, which ones of us dress in clothing that befits our sex not... our world loves the disgrace of others, making it rather difficult to hide such things. Once the rumor mill gets ahold of something juicy: how could it not be reported? Deaths are rather public things these days, and our tools for identifying what occurred are supposedly good.

It's pointless to "treat" depression. It is attempting to cure a symptom, and leave the problems lie. Since when did placing blush on one's cheeks stop them from bleeding out?

It effects social life. It effects perception of you if you're close family member "was a suicide". (HOW I hate suicide being used as a pronoun!) It effects people's life insurance paying if their death is deemed a suicide. It effects new laws being proposed to keep the method out of future people's hands. It effects lots of things.
Thanantology (Philosophy of Death and Dying) classes.

Beth

It does not always affect social life, and in many circles does not affect the perception of you. You did, after all, have very little to do with their suicide. What it affects is a social circle of minute import: the circle of the masses. Which should be of precisely zero importance to anyone that likes themselves overmuch

And I should think it would affect life insurance. Otherwise we'd see poor people obtain life assurance and then kill themselves for their wives/husbands/children. Cashing out on one's demise is an incentive better not added to the luxury of eternal escape