Understanding suicide and why people would wish to end their own life has been an ongoing issue for many decades. Those who know someone who committed suicide are often left with more questions than answers and more heartache and pain than peace. They wonder “was there something I could have done?” “Did I say something wrong?” “Did I miss their cry for help?” and many more questions that swarm their brain after losing a loved one or friend to suicide. More often than not however for those individuals, the answer is no.
There wasn’t anything you missed, said, or could have done in order to prevent that loss and its simply because you didn’t know. You didn’t know that you needed to learn those warning signs you saw at the end of your favorite show. You didn’t know that you should have attended that prevention program you heard about through a coworker last year.
The information about suicide is all around and is open access to anyone who needs it, but the stigma behind receiving help for a mental illness and the stigma behind what kind of people are at risk of suicide is restricting the possibility of all those individuals who need help receiving the help that they require. In order to lower the number of lives taken so abruptly, we must first look into all aspects of this controversial topic. We must look at history, the risks and warning signs, the methods of prevention, and finally, if there is something within all of this that needs to be changed and reasons why despite all our efforts suicide rates are still climbing.
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In majority of the sources adolescense has been described as individuals aging from about 10 to 24 years old, making up about 15-25 percent of the population for the world, not just the United States. This stage of life is not only associated with the apperance of secondary sexual characteristics and reproductive maturity during the onset of puberty but it has an association with psychological changes also. Adolescents are seen as “gateways to health” because the behavioral patterns they learn throughout this stage tend to remain throughout adulthood (Dehne 2001).
Lets look at this objectively, in the ratings of 2010 suicide was ranked as the third leading cause of death in individuals aged 15 to 24 which is the older range of adolescents (Heller 2014). This means that there is only two other major causes of adolescent deaths before suicide. It is estimated that were there is onew suicide there are about 100 to 200 individuals who make a suicide attempt and thousands more who are contemplating suicide (Miller 2016). This is inpart because studies have shown that suicides tend to occur in clusters, especially showing a spike after media coverage of a suicide (Abrutyn 2014). Suicidal behavior involves a lot of different categories there is suicidal ideation or thoughts about suicide, suicidal threats, suicide attempts, and the worst of them all the actual act of committing suicide (Miller 2016). Prevention is the second most important part following knowing what the warning signs and risk factors are.
However, it has been thought that the two must coexist in order to truly be successful. Prevention programs are providing individuals with the knowledge of how to reduce the risk of another individual committing suicide and encouraging them to spread awareness for protection from it spreading (Wagner 2009). Though formal suicide preventions in the United States began in the 1950s and was recognized as a major public health problem it was still relatively new in 2013 following the release of the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention, an alliance established to implement high-value objectives, develop nessacary resources, and make suicide prevention a national priority, in September of 2012 (Heller 2014).
There are many different types of prevention programs also: primary prevention, secondary prevention, tertiary prevention, universal programs, selected interventions, indicated interventions, and postvention programs. These prevention methods range from involving people with no risk factors to helping those who have lost someone to suicide. To look at the first three primary preventions are aimed at individuals without risk, secondary prevention is intended to prevent further progression among those showing early signs, and tertiary is aimed at those who clearly have symptoms and mitigating their negative consequences (Wagner 2009).
Majority of these work from the beginning to the end, trying to prevent an individual from committing suicide who is presumed to be at risk or could possibly become at risk. However, one of these prevention methods works from the end to a new beginning by trying to prevent a cluster of suicides or a suicide outbreak. Postvention is aimed at individuals left behind by a completed suicide and its goals are to quickly identify and assess the needs of those negatively affected by the suicide, minimize the risk of an suicide cluster outbreak, and help the community of friends and family come to terms with the loss Wagner 2009). Apart from just having programs that introduce ways to people of how to help prevent suicide, there have been many other prevention methods established as well. For example, for three consecutive years, there were advancements made toward the prevention of suicide.
In 2002 the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration funded the establishment of the Suicide Prevention Resource Center to provide information and resources to both private and public groups(Wagner 2009). This was followed by annual World Suicide Prevention Day on the tenth of September each year to encourage further prevention methods and raise awareness, initiated by the International Association for Suicide Prevention and the World Health Organization.
However, tragedy struck for a family during 2003 leading to the third of the consecutive advancement in 2004, the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act the first youth suicide prevention bill enacted into law in memory of Senator Gordon Smith’s son (Wagner 2009). There is another major component behind the high rate of suicides in Adolescents in the United States and that is simply our approach is not working. The leading factor in this is our approach to the prevention of suicide and educating people on the warning signs. There are several programs that were discussed throughout these articles and many different techniques that have been in place since before the nineties. To start the dig into this subject lets discuss the targeted group of people these programs are geared towards, “at risk youth”.
Prevention is mostly the programs used to educate parents of “at-risk youth” about the different risk factors around their home such as firearms, prescription medication, non-prescription medication, and many other things (Wagner 2009). These prevention methods need to be done for all parents of adolescents not just the ones with an “at-risk youth” because people with a “low-risk youth” won’t always recognize if they are actually an “at-risk” before it is too late. In a study done in 2014, they found that out of the adolescents that were categorized as a “high risk” only 3 percent of them are expected to commit suicide but there was a 60 percent group of adolescents who were expected to commit suicide that was categorized as “low-risk” (Heller).
Which leads you to wonder about the testing individuals go through in order to see if they are likely to commit suicide or if their risk factor is low and therefore unlikely to be an issue. In a survey of physicians, less than 25 percent of the ones questioned said that their adolescent patients are routinely screened for suicidal symptoms (Wagner 2009). Suicidal behavior is not something you have one time and it never goes away and likewise, it’s not something that you can never develop. The screenings they perform should be periodically and consistently performed on their patients in order for them to be aware of any changes in their potential or non-potential to be suicidal.
Though it is not just the assessments or screenings the physicians and others who work with adolescents need to work on, it is also their training. In a research study about social workers and their work dealing with adolescents and suicide, it was discovered that during their training to become social workers very few reporting learning or hearing anything about working with suicidal clients outside of receiving their degrees (Heller 2014). With situations like this, it is no wonder why in a research study found by Wagner the researchers had found that 80 percent of a group of adolescents in their sample were found to have made warning signs, verbalized threats, to their peers and family members a week prior to them committing suicide (2009). “There is no one population called ‘young people’ and therefore no one strategy to be developed to provide for them(Dehne 2001).”
