September marks Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and it provides us with an opportunity to rally around the common goal of preventing suicide in our communities. The issues that divide us have received national headlines, but the issues that lead to death by suicide are ones that we must all face equally. No one is immune from depression, PTSD, substance use disorder, illness, job loss, or any of the myriad risk factors that can lead someone to considering suicide. To help end this epidemic, we must put aside our preconceived assumptions and biases about suicide and the people who may be at risk.
Help is available.
As a trusted local behavioral healthcare provider, our team at Palmdale Regional Medical Center is dedicated to changing the national narrative about suicide in a manner that promotes hope, resiliency, equality and recovery. Mental health services that utilize proven evidence-based treatments and support are available.
If you or someone you know is experiencing an emotional crisis or thoughts of suicide, no-cost 24/7 confidential support and crisis resources are available from the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention:
— National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or via Chat from www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
— Crisis Text Line – text HELLO to 741741 to connect with a Crisis Counselor
Additional resources to utilize:
— Trevor Lifeline, the only national 24/7 lifeline for LGBTQ youth: call 1-866-488-7386.
— Veterans Crisis Line, for U.S. Military Veterans: call 1-800-273-8255, press 1.
Recent events demonstrate that no one is beyond the reach of mental health struggles. Olympic athletes, musicians and fashion designers are not immune, and neither are you, your friends or your family members.
It’s time that we stop assuming who is and is not at risk, as these assumptions can cause us to disregard warning signs. Just because someone seems to be doing well at their new job, we should not ignore the fact that they have stopped communicating with friends and pursuing their hobbies. Just because someone appears happy/content in their social media photos, let’s not ignore their increased substance use and social isolation.
A simple conversation can save a life.
It’s time to stop thinking certain people in our lives are above this epidemic, and time to start seeing everyone around us for what they are – humans. Humans with complex lives, potentially unknown traumas, and an equally important worth and value to the world. Stop assuming, and start asking, “Is everything ok?” A simple question and conversation can save a life. Effective treatments and compassionate and knowledgeable mental health professionals are ready and waiting to help.
We all need to join together to educate ourselves, #BeThere for our loved ones, and take the suicide prevention fight beyond September and into our everyday lives.
About the author: Richard Allen is the Chief Executive Officer at Palmdale Regional Medical Center.
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William says
I had a discussion with my 90 year old aunt who was about to start dialysis which she hated to do. She said that if she didn’t want it, she could decline and stay home to die instead.
I told her that she had a choice. The ‘she’ being not her thoughts and feelings and what others said but ‘she’ the one listening to all that imput. She choose life and started her dialysis the next day. It was her choice. She still didn’t like dialysis. And she lived to complain about it. She complained about a lot of other things too. She didn’t let those other complaints tell her not to live.
That goes for everyone. First you have to distinguish who is doing the choosing. It’s not our brains. Our brains tell us that death is better than whatever the pressing circumstance is that’s causing grief or despair. Don’t listen to your brain. It’s not always on your side. You are the one observing and listening to it carry on.
The pitfall for humans is to identify with their brains or mind or whatever that thing is that talks constantly to you when no one else is around. Your “brain” is what says “Take the pills”, “Pull the trigger.”. What kind of friend is that?
Would you listen to someone else tell you to kill yourself if you were despressed. Why listen to your “depressed brain”? Would you listen to a depressed or drunk friend telling you to kill yourself. Your brain isn’t the place to trust this choice. It’s depressed.
You brain/mind is not you unless you say so. Or, the same “you” can say otherwise and choose freely. Life or death? Choose.
Care to discuss?
Willard says
… OLS models for suicide we social scientists tinker around with in SPSS never correlate to a particular parameter. Everything from Arctic suicide to skyscraper suicide always correlates to a recent noise component affecting the subject, sometime during the last month. Or, two –
Dr. Suaad says
Suicide doesn’t have it’s own OLS model, per se. We typically pivot off the addiction severity index for postpartum depression, tweaking its parameters. Whensoever we have something to run with sufficient degrees freedom, the regression’s always devoid periodicity, devoid cyclicality, devoid drift, punctuated by a structural break, nothing but noise, leaving us nothing to ponder beyond recent exogenous shocks to the subject. No issues with suicide at McMurdo, Arctic suicide we suspect was induced by top secret military atmospheric experimentation, about the arctic circle.
Alfred says
We rationalize antecedents (e.g., recent trauma) to be our sovereign determinant of suicide because, applying our principle of parsimony, the more we parse out our other determinants, the more it unweights our Y-intercept (e.g., the unexplained aspect of our model). Modeling antecedents as a binary parameter (e.g., 0=f; 1=t ) returns robust T-calcs. Denote, in suicide, in common with addiction severity in pregnant and postpartum depression, negative in polarity is our Y-intercept. Why do you suppose that is? Show your work.
Joseph says
By definition, the y-intercept’s negative. Not just a little. Functional form:
Suicide_completion^ = Beta_sub_1 +/- Beta_sub_2(X_bar) +/- …, whereas:
B_sub_1 = -33.133 (Y-intercept)
B_sub_2 = -0.188 (education)
B_sub_3 = +1.014 (Phys/Sexual Abuse)
B_sub_4 = +1.759 (drug problem)
B_sub_5 = + 2.371 (mother died early)
AR1 = t/f (recent trauma)
This is evidenced modeling our antecedent as a lag, FALSE = O, extinguishing our entire model (e.g., you may infer no suicide). Ipso facto, our logical equivalent, the contrapositive argument (e.g., if not B, then not A) becomes, “…IF there was(were) no antecedent(s), THEN there was(were) no suicide(s).”
Henceforth, the sovereignty of recent trauma.
Spatial analysis, we whisk our data points above into our GIS, and normalize, perhaps with census block group partitions, atop crime data, demography; religion, ethnicity, population data, atmospheric data; whatnot.
Signal indication when a suicide’s not a suicide, positive Y-intercept (e.g., no specie ever commits suicide, because mother died early, education notwithstanding).
Point of contention, in adapting our addition severity index to model suicide, that illicit drugs serves as an outlet blunting or displacing stress, I respectfully disagree on polarity of our beta_sub_4 parameter. It should be indirect. That variation in drug problems account for variation in depression, but that it does not account for variation in suicide, IMHO, the beta sub 4 parameter should be a value between negative 1 and zero.
Height of absurdity, extent of intellect of the mental midget who wrote the accompanying article: “… suicide is a pandemic! which doesn’t discriminate!” Why we don’t sleep particularly well, these are the nitwits running your country.
Samuel says
Human beings the only specie in the known universe incapable of dealing with their emotions — constitutes the fundamental basis upon which makes self-termination remarkable. Nothing to correlate, dead end, nothing statistically significant to ponder, but simple environmental reasoning better suited to detective work, than our feckless, dysfunctional mental health profession. What makes the Arctic suicide paradox remarkable: a specific geography to correlate it to, yielding an immeasurable 0.999 r^2 guaranteed to get you a knock at the front door from big brother. I once made a career ending mistake, publishing on threshold performance shortcomings of Lockheed’s F-22. This is another one of those things. Keep your big mouth shut; look the other way. Zero likelihood I’ll ever going to print on Arctic suicide.
Hugo says
Rule of thumb: if the suicide was public, primary motivation was humiliation. If the suicide was private, primary motivation is guilt. If you have a geography parameter, it’s neither.
C. Thomas says
Two predominant emotional factors of suicide completion — shame; guilt — the two lesser determinants — frustration; despair — bear little correlation to method. But, in men, method is observed to correlate to place and location.
Gender differences in suicide completion rates have been attributed to the differences in lethality of suicide methods chosen by men and women, but few empirical studies delve into factors other than demographic characteristics to explain away the differential.
Data from the 621 suicides in Summit County, Ohio, 1997-2006, were disaggregated by gender to compare known correlates of suicide risk on three methods of suicide: firearm, hanging and drug poisoning. Compared to women, men who completed suicide with firearms were more likely to be married and committed the act at home. Unmarried men were likelier to hang themselves than married men, but unmarried women were less likely to hang themselves than married women.
Men with a history of depression were more likely to complete suicide by hanging, but women with depression were half as likely to hang themselves compared to the women without a history of depression.
Men with a history of substance abuse were more likely to suicide by poisoning than men without such history, but substance abuse history had no influence on women’s use of poisoning to suicide. For both sexes, the odds of suicide by poisoning were significantly higher for those on psychiatric meds.