Adolescent Suicide Is A Preventable Public Health Issue

Suicide has been rising at alarming rates; the overall suicide rate for children and adolescents has increased over 300% since the 1950s. (Miller, 2009) Adolescent children are screaming out for our help, are we just ignoring the signs or do we not care? For young people, an average 1,800 take their own lives and 85,000 are hospitalized for attempts nationally (CDC, 2008). With this kind of statistics we need to step in and take some action.

The rate of suicide, the act or an instance of taking one's own life voluntarily and intentionally, increases each year. “More adolescents die each year from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, influenza, and chronic lung disease, combined” (Preventing Teen Suicide, 2016, p.2). These facts show suicide is a serious problem among teens. Last year, teen suicide became the second leading cause of death in the United States confirming the significant increase in teen suicides.

According to Fowler, Crosby, Parks, and Ivey (2013), suicide and nonfatal suicidal ideations are significant public health concerns for adolescents and young adults. While the onset of suicidal behaviors is observed as young as six years of age, rates of death and nonfatal injury resulting from suicidal behavior are moderately low until 15 years of age (Fowler et al., 2013). According to Fowler et al (2013), the most current available statistics in the United States (U. S.) reported suicide as the third leading cause of death among youth aged 10-14 and 15-19 years, and it was the second leading cause of death among persons aged 20-24 years.

Suicide is the act of taking one’s own life willingly. Suicide is a growing epidemic in America and many other countries, especially amoung adults and teenagers. Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States. There are many factors that play a role in why people commit suicide and they are impulsive decisions, biological factors, psychological factors, and sociocultural factors and just like mental illnesses, suicide has treatments.

T.E. Joiner of Harvard has established a widely accepted theory as to how an individual can come to consider suicide as his or

Another theory mentioned in the article was Henry and Short’s theory, where they take the frustration-aggression hypothesis and combine it with psychoanalytic approach. They suggest that if the individual within a society has another person to blame, then they will be more assaultive, compared to those who have no one to blame. Those who have no one to blame will be more likely to have higher rates in suicide. The example they used in the article was the oppressed and the oppressor. The oppressed have limited resources which caused them to be angry, therefore leading to assault and homicide. The oppressors have more resources and advancement, therefore, leading to depression and suicide. The last theory of Naroll’s theory, where social suicide is relative to stress. In this theory, the stress must be done to themselves, such as divorce or murdering of a spouse, versus losing a spouse due to medical

2008). According to most of the researchers who studied suicide, the assumption is totally wrong or unacceptable. Even though, the suicidal person might have own reasons to end their life, it is still unacceptable. Suicide is not acceptable because it is not the answer for all our problems. It is true that we live in a high pressure world, which sometimes forces us over the edge. Problems and sufferings are something common in our lives. All of us will face a difficult situation in our lives. In those situations, if everyone started to attempt suicide then there will be no one left in this word. Suicide is a tragic experience, not just for the victims, but for those they leave behind struggling to understand what went wrong and what they could have done to prevent it. As Edwin Shneidman points out in his Ten Commonalities of suicide, “The common purpose of suicide is to seek a solution”. Thus, we should view problems as something can be solved. Moreover, through suicide we can’t actually solve a problem. We can just release our self or escape from the problem, but our loved will suffer later. Therefore, suicide is just a stupid decision that people make in their

To begin with, as mentioned earlier, Michael R. Phillips in his early works mentions the eight-fold theory of the suicide prediction, which mainly focuses on the psychological issues, such as depression symptoms, acute and chronic stress, or low quality of life (2002). These factors are also the frequently stated psychiatric and psychological explanations around the world. Nevertheless, Phillips does highlight the importance of stress factors in his research and agrees that mental illness

Suicides can be tempting and result to many causes to why one would think of taking such action. Suicide attempts can be overlooked. Suicide can be defined differently based on one beliefs or feelings. Suicide attempts are actions and instant behaviors that takes one’s life away. Some people look at suicide attempts to be related to murder. Today, suicides are viewed as a leading cause of youth deaths. These attempts of suicide can be prevented. Thio, Taylor, and Schwartz state “about 31,000 American die by their own hand every year. Every year there are far more individuals likely to kill themselves by the fact that the U.S. suicide rate is nearly twice as high” (Thio et al, 2013, p. 144). There are several reasons why one decides to commit

“Each year in the U.S., thousands of teenagers commit suicide” and thousands more consider doing it (Otsuki-Peterson-Kim). Younger children typically the ages 10-14 do not attempt suicide. However, children in their late teens and possibly early twenties are more likely to do so. Overall, suicide has always been a concern, but recently the rate has

Suicide is a very serious issue. A person who commits suicide must be doing so under extreme pressure and in very complicated circumstances. It is clear that there is no single factor or cause responsible for suicide, but there is a course of such factors. We will discuss the factors as under:

“Following a decline of more than 28 percent, the suicide rate for 10- to-24-year-olds increased by 8 percent, the largest single-year rise in 15 years, according to a report just released in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's, CDC, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, MMWR” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). This clearly shows that teen suicide is on the rise. “Data shows that between 2007 and 2015, there’s substantial increases in suicide rates for both young males and females,” said Tom Simon, an author of the report and associate director for science in the division of violence protection at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention”, “for young males, there was a 31% increase in suicide rates, and for young females, the suicide rate doubled”.

Emile Durkheim was the one who laid the foundation for this theory during the late 1800s through his book entitled Suicide which explains that people commit such act because of external factors like society. It means that society highly affects the behaviour of an individual.

Suicide, to Durkheim, is “an exaggerated form of ordinary practices,” and they arise from “comparable states of mind” in people, with the only difference between daily and suicidal behavior being the “chance of death” (Durkheim 20-21). Durkheim spends the majority of the work dissecting the “apparent motives” for suicide (Durkheim 151) and observing the varieties of suicide, a feat made difficult by the inaccurate reporting and misunderstandings of investigators. Thus, to understand the types of suicide, we must “reverse the order of our research” for “There can only be as many different types of suicide as there are differences in the causes from which they derive,” (Durkheim 149). He says “if they were all found to have the same essential characteristics, they would be grouped in one class” but “observations that we would need to have are more or less impossible obtain” (Durkheim

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the US. The percentage of gun deaths by suicide is 64%.Youth suicide rates are going up at an alarming rate in the years. The number one method that people go to is firearms, 49.8% of suicidal people chooses this method.They found that in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 had caught up to their death rate for traffic accidents (source 1). In all, 425 children ages 10 to 14 killed themselves in 2014 (source 1). For 5 to 14 year old kids suicide is the 5th leading death among youth. Youth ages 10 to 14 suicide has doubled in the last two decades from depression problems with them. Youth with suicidal thoughts are more likely to go