Among talk during the presidential election about the heroin epidemic and ongressional battles over Zika, another public health crisis has gone ignored. We are more comfortable, in fact, talking about guns and porn as health crises than we are in even bringing up a real and growing problem — suicide.
Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in America, higher up the list than overdoses or murder, gun-related or otherwise. Among teenagers and college-age adults, it is the second-leading cause of death, topped only by unintentional injury. It has been estimated that once every 40 seconds, someone dies from suicide. That’s about 2,160 people per day, worldwide. Of those 2,160 suicides a day, roughly 117 of them occur here, in the United States. And our suicide rate is on the rise. Despite this pressing need for action, we simply are not putting our time and effort into keeping suicide deaths down. Cancer has been the subject of a global push (headed in this country by the esteemed Joe Biden) to find a cure, and we’ve been fighting drug use on a governmental level for the entirety of living memory in this country, going back at least as far as Prohibition. But suicide has never been our focus.
That is not to say that those causes are unimportant, or that we have never put any effort into curbing suicide rates. The Surgeon General’s office laid down a suicide prevention plan in 2012. We have a national suicide hotline,1-800-273-8255. But the federal government's efforts to prevent suicide has been lukewarm at best. For the most part, laws surrounding suicide prevention have been left up to the states, with obviously mixed results. Montana, Alaska and New Mexico had the highest rates of suicide in the nation in 2014, while New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey have the lowest. All six states have suicide prevention plans, which read very similarly, but suicide rates differ wildly between them — New York, which has the lowest suicide rate of any state in the nation, clearly has legislation and initiatives which work, while Montana, which has the highest suicide rate, does not.
But asking the federal government to analyze these differences and do something about it might be difficult when we can barely bring ourselves to talk about it among ourselves. I, and many other people, was not taught about suicide warning signs, risk factors and prevention tactics in school — how can we be expected to know what to do in a situation where someone we know is suicidal when we’ve never been taught?
We’ve been fed a lot of myths about suicide over the years, one of the worst of which is this: There are no warning signs. We see this frequently on T.V. — Kutner in House, whose death is so unexpected that even the hyper-observant Dr. House spends an episode thinking it was a murder — and in the news, when the grieving family and friends of a victim of suicide are interviewed and say that there was no warning.
The truth is, there are warning signs. We just don’t know what they are, so the death is hard to see coming. Preoccupation with death, lack of hope for the future, talking about suicide, seeking items that can be used in an attempt, withdrawing from friends and getting affairs in order are a few of the common indicators that someone you know may be considering suicide. There’s a common misconception about people who are suicidal that they will not talk about it if they are serious, but it’s not true — 70 percent of people who attempt suicide told someone about it first. Take your friends seriously if they say something to you. And don’t keep it to yourself — give them the resources to get help, and if they refuse, call someone for them. If you suspect that someone’s thinking about it and they don’t tell you, ask them. It’s awkward and personal, but whether or not they’re thinking about it, it’s better to know than not.
Suicide does not happen because someone is weak, or crazy, or selfish. It happens because someone can’t see a way out and didn’t get help. One in 10 college students has considered a plan for suicide — so learn the warning signs. The federal government has to have a hand in this, just like any public health crisis, but until they get on top of education legislation and throwing support behind research and prevention programs, we have to learn about it for ourselves and fight our own misconceptions.
Suicide is a painful, awkward issue. But it’s one we have to educate ourselves about and demand government action on.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org — 1-800-273-8255
Crisis Text Line — http://www.crisistextline.org — Text “start” to 741-741
The Trevor Project — http://thetrevorproject.org — 1-866-488-7386
Veterans Crisis Line — http://veteranscrisisline.net — 1-800-273-8255 or text 838-255