"The Teen Suicide Epidemic"

[Faith No More]

In my opinion, some of the treasures in life, such as children, romantic love, etc. are worth every ounce of pain. Is that pain easy to handle? Absolutely fucking not. Depression isn't just sadness, but I think most people in this thread know that. I always imagine that I will miss something epic, like a niece's graduation or wedding and she will be sitting there going, "I wish my Aunty Shelly could have been here." That helps me pound through the chemical tantrums my brain has.

Now that I am a father, seeing my son does seem to be the one thing that was truly worth it all. When it comes to the pain of life I was referring to though, I think it's the things that exasperate the chemical tantrums that really hurt. Depression is bad enough, but when you combine it with the hardships that life can throw at it you, it can become overwhelming. Without going into details, I can tell you that I suffered from PTSD after my friend killed himself. Then just when I was getting over that several years later, another good friend of mine died from drug abuse that stemmed from coping with his depression. It can be very hard to appreciate the good things in life when life sees fit to be so cruel.

I know the above sounds corny, but it doesn't come from a position of "Hey, cheer up!" It comes from a position of knowing. It totally fucking sucks. One of the things I hate is people saying, "Just snap out of it." to people with depression or saying that their actions or thoughts are selfish. People like that have no fucking clue what it is like. It is selfish to treat a person who is in the grip of depression like an asshole. In my experience, it isn't selfish. Most people want to kill themselves because they feel like they have nothing to offer or that they are a waste of space and their pain is to great to endure. It is those emo punks who cry suicide every time they are remotely sad, but never have any intention of doing it that cause that general public opinion of suicide being selfish because those people are selfish.

I hate the 'cheer up' mentality people have, but unfortunately understanding this is a misconception only seems to come with experience in depression. We that do have experience need to do a better job explaining to others that it's not just sadness. I think the worst thing I've ever heard was when someone told me I was weak minded.

Suicide definitely has a selfish connotation to it that it doesn't deserve. First off, the person isn't completely in their right mind. Second, they see it as the only way to escape the pain. I could go on and on about the negative things I've heard people say when discussing suicide, but the most common one is definitely that it is selfish. I think part of this could be what Moros touched on which is that everyone experiences the emotion depression at some point in their life. Consequently, they think that anyone who suffers from depression the illness just isn't as strong as they are and is a selfish coward when they resort to extreme measures.

[Minimalist]

No good, Shel.. I can't find a reference to it that sounds familiar. I read it at least 7 and probably closer to 10 years ago.

[Shell B]

No good, Shel.. I can't find a reference to it that sounds familiar. I read it at least 7 and probably closer to 10 years ago.

I hate it when that happens. It doesn't sound like something that would be wildly popular, save for among a select few groups, so it probably hasn't made it to the destroyer of books, I mean internet, yet.

---

Maybe . . . Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers ??

[Minimalist]

No, these were grunts hiding in caves and bunkers, and yeah I'm sure there weren't too many normal people reading it.

The kamikazes were not so crazy. Virtually any mission from 1944 on was a suicide mission. Japanese pilots were poorly trained, flying obsolete planes that caught fire if you looked at them and going against an enemy in brand new Hellcats and Corsairs with well trained pilots and radar guidance. Its why they call the Battle of the Philippine Sea "the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot."

[BethK]

Here's a part of the article that confused me:

In November, Samantha started to cheer up, and Michele started to think she had turned a corner. Over Veterans Day weekend, she bought Samantha some new clothes, which, to her surprise, were a hit. On Veterans Day, they made plans to play football in the backyard and to grill outside. Michele and her boyfriend, John, went to the store to rent a movie and pick up some food. When they pulled into the driveway a half-hour later, John heard the gun shot.

Does anyone on this board know anything about the psychology of suicide? Is it common for a suicidal person to have a bounce back in his or her mood (or an apparent one)?

Yes, indeed. The suicidal person appears to "cheer up" as they've gone from considering suicide to having a definite plan (including time, place, circumstances, method, obtained needed "supplies" or "equipment" for chosen method). It's like they're no longer considering ending it for themselves. It's no longer perceived that the intolerable situation will go on "forever". They now have a goal and a purpose - to ensure they can follow through with their plan, and prepare for it.

Beth - survivor of my own suicide attempts, had several friends (teen and since) commit suicide or attempt suicide, plus psychology classes

---

People are concerned about this when the rate of occurrence is usually less than 13/100,000?!

Mother of my left ankle... as if we didn't have more to be concerned about.

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".

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...

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

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

[quote='Minimalist' pid='158647' dateline='1311731591']

[quote]It wasn't all that long ago in historical terms that kids were married off at age 12-14.[/quote]

Indeed,and often dead by age 30, especially if female

.In England, the age of consent was 12 until the twentieth century. England was still hanging and transporting 12 year old miscreants well into the nineteenth century.
The concept of childhood we know today did not develop until Victorian times, by which time there was a large, prosperous middle class resulting frome the Industrial revolution.

Teenagers were invented in late 1950's and became a force as "baby boomers".

I guess adolescent angst had always existed but was ignored.I read that in our society, male teen suicide could in fact sometimes be over reported. It seems some apparent suicides are the result of auto erotic asphyxiation.It seems some parents would rather believe their child killed themselves rather than accept he was a sexual being.

I would argue that being a teenager would be only one factor in a decision too commit suicide(iE a corellation) and not necessarily THE deciding factor. It's worth noting that severely depressed people of any age tend to become irrational,unable to think clearly about realistic choices available.
The desire to die may not even be conscious in otherwise healthy people who kill themselves. Underlying is deep, overwhelming emotional pain. The desire is to end the anguish, not necessarily to die.

I am not aware of a teenage suicide epidemic in my country,nor indeed if there is an overall increase..In his seminal work 'SUIDE' (suicide) Emile Durkheim argued that suicide rates tends will rise at times of social unrest and insecurity. He coined the term "anomie" to describe such a societal state. The full article is worth reading (his book is pretty dry)


[quote]Suicide (French: Le Suicide) was one of the groundbreaking books in the field of sociology. Written by French sociologist Émile Durkheim and published in 1897 it was a case study of suicide, a publication unique for its time which provided an example of what the sociological monograph should look like.[/quote]


[quote]Findings

Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. There are at least two problems with this interpretation. First, Durkheim took most of his data from earlier researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli,[1] who were much more careful in generalizing from their own data. Second, later researchers found that the Protestant-Catholic differences in suicide seemed to be limited to German-speaking Europe and thus may always have been the spurious reflection of other factors.[2] Despite its limitations, Durkheim's work on suicide has influenced proponents of control theory, and is often mentioned as a classic sociological study.

Durkheim established that:

Suicide rates are higher in men than women (although married women who remained childless for a number of years ended up with a high suicide rate)
Suicide rates are higher for those who are single than those who are married
Suicide rates are higher for people without children than people with children
Suicide rates are higher among Protestants than Catholics and Jews
Suicide rates are higher among soldiers than civilians
Suicide rates are higher in times of peace than in times of war (the suicide rate in France fell after the coup d'etat of Louis Bonaparte, for example. War also reduced the suicide rate, after war broke out in 1866 between Austria and Italy, the suicide rate fell by 14% in both countries.)
Suicide rates are higher in Scandinavian countries
the higher the education level, the more likely it was that an individual would commit suicide, however Durkheim established that there is more correlation between an individual's religion and suicide rate than an individual's education level; Jewish people were generally highly educated but had a low suicide rate.[/quote]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_%28book%29

[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