RIP Jeff

This article was in my local paper today. A kid from my high school killed himself this past December and the newspaper is doing a section on Mental Health. Its interesting. I don’t agree with all of it, and I think someone who has never suffered from depression wrote it. But its interesting.

When someone commits suicide, they leave skeletons in someone else’s closet.

“We feel responsible for the people we love,” said Shelly Tatelbaum, a grief counselor.

For every person who dies from suicide, there are six emotionally involved relatives left behind, said Dr. Kenneth Glatt, Dutchess County’s Commissioner of Mental Hygiene.

Their grief is compounded by guilt and shame that comes with the stigma of suicide.

In Dutchess County, suicides have declined since 1993 to about 5.2 for every 100,000 people in 2002, according to the state Department of Health. In Ulster, there hasn’t been a consistent trend. Suicide rates were about 12.5 per 100,000 in 1995 and 7.8 in 2002, which is up from 6.4 in 1993. Statewide the rate has leveled off at 6.7.

“I’d like to think we played some role in that” decline, Glatt said. His department began its annual suicide awareness campaign this spring.

Contrary to popular belief, most suicides occur in the spring — not the winter. The holidays are stressful, but despite the stress, there still is a sense of joy.

“My sense is your spring suicide might be your winter depressive,” Glatt said. In the winter, “There’s a certain consonance between how one feels inside and how it looks outside. In the spring, there’s discordance between everything coming to life around you and you’re feeling dead inside.”

Often, people who commit suicide have a sense of hopelessness. They cannot see options, or different ways of coping with a problem. They have tunnel vision and believe the only thing that will end their problem is suicide.

“It also has been said suicide is a cancer of the mind,” Tatelbaum said. They are in pain and their pain distorts their thinking, she explained.

Help is available.

“Depression is an illness that’s treatable,” Glatt said.

Late bid for life

Most people who are considering suicide often reach out for help at the last minute.

Glatt pointed to the number of calls made on the call box on the Mid-Hudson Bridge. During the last 15 years, 62 people were brought from the bridge to the Emergency Psychiatric Care Center at St. Francis Hospital. Of those, 52 had used the bridge phone.

A total of seven people jumped from the bridge; only one of those used the bridge phone. Six died, including the one who called.

Of the 10 people who did not use the phone, six of them jumped off the bridge.

“There’s that box there and invariably, the person will open the box and talk to our staff on the other end,” Glatt said. “And they are usually talking long enough that they can be brought to help.”

Parents who lose a child to suicide “beat the hell out of themselves,” Glatt said.

But it’s not unusual for them to be surprised by the suicide.

“Friends often know; parents are shocked,” Glatt said.

Parents may miss the signs of depression, or they may think their teenager is going through a phase, and they’re reluctant to discuss it at the dinner table — or maybe they don’t even have dinner together.

“We often miss the cues and often it’s blatant and we don’t want to believe what we see or what we hear,” Glatt said.

Affected for life

A suicide is not something a relative ever gets over.

“There’s always this empty spot,” Glatt said. “You get on with your life, but you don’t get over that kind of loss.”

Suicides, Glatt said, often are viewed as an indictment of a parent or anger focused at someone — if you loved me I wouldn’t be killing myself.

But those who commit suicide are not thinking about the people they will leave behind, Tatelbaum said.

“They’re not thinking of loved ones. They just want to be out of pain because living hurts too much,” she said.

It’s a myth that talking about suicide causes someone to attempt it. And someone threatening to commit suicide or even joking about it may be serious.

Some “80 percent of people who have killed themselves have let people know they were intending to die,” Glatt said.

Family history of suicide is a risk factor and it is true that there are suicide clusters — a group of suicides at the same time that seem to be caused by each other.

“Once that notion has been entertained, it becomes a possibility,” Tatelbaum said. “It comes into awareness” and teens begin to think “if they can do it so can I.”

There is no “suicide gene,” but suicide may run in families because depression may be hereditary or because the knowledge of someone’s suicide opened to the door to that possibility.

Don’t hide a suicide from a child, Tatelbaum said. That can cause fear. Explain it matter-of-factly and concretely — that death is part of life and that suicide is one way of dying, but that “it is not an appropriate way of dying,” Tatelbaum said.

Written by Elizabeth Lynch

Suicide facts

More than 90 percent of suicide victims have a significant psychiatric illness. The illness often is undiagnosed, untreated or both.

When open aggression, anxiety or agitation is present in depressed individuals, the risk for suicide increases significantly.

Warning signs

* Threatens or talks about hurting or killing himself or herself.
* Seeks access to firearms, pills or another means of suicide.
* Talks or writes about death, dying or suicide, when these actions are out of the ordinary for the person.
* Expresses feelings of hopelessness.
* Rage, uncontrolled anger, seeking revenge.
* Acting recklessly or engaging in risky activities, seemingly without thinking.
* Feeling trapped, as if there’s no way out.
* Increased alcohol or drug use.
* Withdrawing from friends, family and society.
* Anxiety, agitation, unable to sleep, or sleeping all the time.
* Dramatic mood changes.
* Expressing no reason for living; no sense of purpose in life.

Facts

* Suicide is preventable. Most suicidal individuals want to live; they are just unable to see alternatives to their problems.
* Most suicidal individuals give definite warnings of their suicidal intentions, but others are either unaware of the significance of these warnings or do not know how to respond to them.
* Talking about suicide does not cause someone to be suicidal.
* About 32,000 Americans kill themselves annually.
* The number of suicide attempts is much greater and often results in serious injury.
* Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people ages 15-24, and it is the eighth leading cause of death among all persons.
* Four times as many men kill themselves as compared to women, yet three times as many women attempt suicide as compared to men.
* Firearms are the most utilized method of suicide by all groups.
* Surviving family members suffer the trauma of losing a loved one to suicide, and may themselves be at higher risk for suicide and emotional problems.

How