Signs of societal sickness
 

Suicide: Cost to the Nation

Every 17 minutes another life is lost to suicide.
Every day 86 Americans take their own life and over 1500 attempt suicide.
Suicide is now the eighth leading cause of death in Americans.
For every two victims of homicide in the U.S. there are three deaths from suicide.
There are now twice as many deaths due to suicide than due to HIV/AIDS.
Between 1952 and 1995, the incidence of suicide among adolescents and young adults nearly tripled.
In the month prior to their suicide, 75% of elderly persons had visited a physician.
Over half of all suicides occur in adult men, aged 25-65.
Many who make suicide attempts never seek professional care immediately after the attempt.
Males are four times more likely to die from suicide than are females.
More teenagers and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia and influenza, and chronic lung disease, combined.
Suicide takes the lives of more than 30,000 Americans every year.


very sobering to say the least.

from here

Losing a friend is one of the hardest things I ever had to go through. He was 18 at the time.

this coupled with our huge jail population... it shows SOMETHING is ntoo right with our society, and we need to fix it. But it's easier to try to cure the symptoms not the problem.

I'm currently talking to someone dealing with serious depression, and that has attempted suicide. I'm hoping that a friendly ear will help her out.

I whole-heartedly agree

It's always been my belief that American culture doesn't take mental disease seriously. If we did take things like depression more seriously, I believe we would see our losses due to suicide decreased.

Agreed. I think there's a certain belief in the power in individual will and rugged individualism in American culture that leads to the discounting of mental illness. I think a lot of people think that one can fix one's self without help (hence the success of self-help books) and most of the time it's not true. So people are less willing to seek help and less willing to see the need for help in others.

Not that America is the only place with a suicide problem. Japan's got a huge one, of very different etiology in my opinion.

The thing is, they just don't take it serious enough. These days it's: Got a problem, take a pill.

It has been argued that suicide rate > homicide rate is actually a sign of a healthy socieity.

Or, more accurately, those societies where the homicide rate is greater than the suicide rate are not very nice places to live in.

it depends though, if both are terribly high, then its not a good society.

If homocide levels decrease to meet suicide levels then society is fine, but when suicide levels increase to the point of homocides, then there is something seriously wrong.

Losing someone to suicide is the hardest thing that any person can ever endure. I will never forget my friends.

It's really a sad thing when someone takes there own life. In my job I have seen too many young folks take there own life for what I think are petty things. But obviously they werent too petty for them.

o but you forget something it takes a lot of money to get help adn your more likely to try sucdie if your poor

Personally, i used that suicidals were cowards who could´t deal whith reality, until a few months ago when a friend of mine tried to take his own life. He seemed to be a perfectly normal and happy people, and then, all from the blue, bang! It turns out that he sufferes from depression and sadly nobody had realize it. There is nothing wrong about accepting one has problems, what is wrong is to keep those problems unspoken.

Personally, i used to think that suicidals were cowards who could´t deal whith reality, until a few months ago when a friend of mine tried to take his own life. He seemed to be a perfectly normal and happy people, and then, all from the blue, bang! It turns out that he sufferes from depression and sadly nobody had realize it, not even him. There is nothing wrong about accepting one has problems, what is wrong is to keep those problems unspoken.

It is sadly ironic that the richest natoin in the world has by far and away the highest rate of clinical depression...