Public Issue Of Suicide

I feel that the news media’s reporting on suicides could lead to copycat cases. I think that people who are suffering from depression or who are in despair may be more influenced negatively towards wanting to end their lives by hearing the reports of others who have carried out the act. I also feel that this kind of reporting of someone who intentionally takes their own life can be very insensitive and cause even more anguish to be inflicted on their family members and friends. I do understand how the reporting of suicides may be considered more necessary when it has been committed by a person of celebrity status or when the suicide has involved a young person or persons. Furthermore, I can see where suicide is a serious issue that some people

Suicides in Montana continues to take the lead amongst the greatest in the nation; unless there is more awareness and prevention it will continue to take the lives of Montanans’. This drastic self inflicted pain does not have to be the last option. Every day is the beginning of a new day; a new page in the book of life. Darkness must not prevail! It must stop taking the lives of friends and family; in order to start saving the lives of Montanans’.

The United States takes the eleventh spot in the top fifteen causes of death because of suicide. For our youth suicide is the third leading cause of death. In today’s society suicide in our youth is becoming a huge issue. Recently, youth suicide in Delaware has been a concerning topic. With the many suicides that have been taking place; we ask ourselves why is this happening to Delaware’s youth? It’s quite sad reading of all the lives taken at such young ages. It’s still questionable on the real reasons why so much of our youth want to cut their life short. There are numbers of things on why possibly our youth would want to commit suicide. There is one reason that has been proven to be the head cause and that is mental illness. A mental illness refers to a wide range of mental health conditions and disorders that affect your mood, thinking and behavior. Examples of mental illness includes depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictive behaviors. (Staff, 2012) Some other causes may be bullying, drug and alcohol abuse and physical and sexual abuse. Youth that die by suicide believes that suicide is the only option at that moment; however Delaware has several resources available to prevent youth suicide.

A reflexive process between personal troubles and the public issues is the main defining feature of the sociological imagination. Showing how individuals are placed in a society and how that society simultaneously affects the individual, helps in the understanding of the formation of social structure. Mills stated that personal troubles become public issues, needing attention from political and economic organizations not just personal judgments but from the individual (Mills: 1959). He saw this as the main characteristic of a sociological imagination. A personal trouble, such as divorce, affects the individual on a personal level causing grief and stress. Divorce rates become an issue when increased, affecting political and economic aspects of society and directly affecting individuals through policies and laws, in which they must obey. This idea is a reflexive process, meaning that one cannot occur without the other. Moore illustrates that acting reflexively is important in the search for a

Suicide has historically been and continues to be a significant issue in the United States, for civilians as well as active duty military service members and veterans. While statistics surrounding suicide appear to be just numbers on a page, I personally implore the reader of the following paper to never lose sight of the fact that those numbers represent real people. Each one of those people, be they civilian or military, represent a loss of a father or a mother, a brother or a sister, a son or a daughter, a best friend, a comrade, …a person whose life, and that life’s potential, is now forever lost. The following statistics on suicide rates in the United States do not differentiate if the individual was a civilian, an active duty

Every suicide effects more than the individual’s life, in truth it impacts families, communities and economic well-being of our nation. According, Piscopo, Lipari, Cooney, and Glasheen, (2016) “Suicide is an important public health problem in the United States and a tragedy for all involved—families, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and communities. In 2014, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death in the United States overall.1 Among people aged 10 to 34, suicide was the second highest cause of death, and for those aged 35 to 54, it was the fourth highest cause of death” (p. 2).

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (2016), found that suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in people, which means approximately 44,965 Americans die by suicide. Men, however, are 3.53x more likely to commit suicide. The group that had the highest suicide rate were middle age males (45-65 years old). The second highest group is people aged above 85 years old. For people in the 15-24-year-old age group, the suicide rate is 13.15% (AFSP, 2016).

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. There are approximately 121 successful suicides a day, and 44,193 a year. Almost 50% of suicides are committed with a firearm. Seven out of ten suicides are committed by white middle aged men. It is proven that men die from suicide 3.5 times more than women; however, it is documented that women try three times more. Over the past 17 years’ suicide rates have increased steadily. Suicide rates are higher in people who are 34 and older. Whites currently hold the highest suicide rate. The most popular form of suicide is with a firearm it accounts for 49.8%. Second is suffocation at 26.8%, then poisoning at 15.4%, and other at 7.9%. No count is kept for people who attempted

One of the major problems in the state of Alaska is suicide. It is one of the greatest challenges that needs to be solved in the state. The suicide rate in Alaska is highest among Alaskan Native males. In 2014, the suicide rate for Alaskan native males was four times the national average (Alaska bureau of vital statistics, 2015). This is a problem that we must address as soon as possible. Hospitals in the state have the answers, volunteers, and resources to bring the massive rates of death down. We understand the number might never reach zero, but any kind of number drop is a move in the right direction.

Each year in the United States approximately 30,000 or 12.93 per 100,00 (prevalence) persons die each year as a result of suicide with an additional 500,000 making a failed attempt. However, in 2013 the official number of reported deaths by suicide totaled 41,149 or 1.6 percent of all reported deaths in the U.S, thereby making suicide the 10th leading cause of death (American Association of Suicidology, 2015). When comparing global suicide statistics, the U.S. ranks 47th amongst the 116 countries included in the study, and although other countries fair far worse, it is important to note, suicide is preventable (World Health Rankings, 2014). These startling statistics are reversible if, we as a society act to dismantle the stigma associated with both emotional and mental disorders given they are often the precursor of suicidal ideation.

CW Mills shares the relationship between private and public issues in the context of sociological imagination. (Mills 1959). People have the tendency to believe that their problems are usually unique and private. They do not believe others experience the same problems. However, public issues are most likely the cause of these so called “private problems.” Sociological imagination allows us to see the relationship of the world to our personal lives (Mills 1959).. In India, the only thing expected of a child was to study hard in their free time, and receive good marks in school. However, in America, children were expected to hang out with friends, play sports, participate in extracurricular activities in addition to getting good test scores. When I came to the states, I obviously had an internal problem of the fear of not fitting in and not making any friends. I always felt I was different because my parents expected me to study all the time but the other kids played outside and hung out with one another due to my parents expecting me to study all the time, when other kids could play and hang outside. This was due to the competitive atmosphere my whole family had lived through in India, while this was not existent for children in the US.

“Even though her mother had no sense that Riley was having problems, she knew it was important to talk to her daughter about suicide, and so she did. Between 2013 and 2015, 29 kids in their county had killed themselves, many from just a handful of schools, including Riley's. There had been gunshot deaths, hangings and drug overdoses. And then there were those choking deaths the victims' parents insisted were accidental. Riley knew of at least two of the kids who had killed themselves the previous winter: an older girl at school (they had mutual friends) and a boy in her Christian youth group. Such peripheral connections are all that seem to connect most of the kids in the area who had killed themselves, and school and county officials began to worry they were witnessing a copycat effect...until copycat became too weak a word. It was more like an outbreak, a plague spreading through school hallways. About a year after Sjoerdsma and her daughter last spoke about suicide, Riley was staying at her father's house one night when she downed a small bottle of whiskey, then sent out a series of troubling texts and Snapchat messages. "I'm sorry it had to be

In recent light of Robin Williams’ passing, his death has taken the media by storm. The focus on Robin Williams has been split into two perspectives. The first is on the reflection of his life and the impact he made in our lives during his career. The second is the fact that he has shockingly taken his life under the assumption that he has been suffering from depression. Many people are heartbroken over the fact that someone who seemed to have cherished life and made a living making countless people smile, was actually suffering from depression. There are several outlets in the media who are trying to understand his reasoning for choice to end his life as well as hope to spread awareness to others who are depressed and provide contact information to prevent anyone from making the same fatal decision. What people do not seem to understand, is the underlying influence that media has on those either suffering from depression or are mentally incapable of understanding the severity of suicide. When someone who is loved as much as Robin Williams is now missed and cherished as a result of his death, it should come to no surprise how someone would be envious of the same adoration they would hope to achieve if they were to suddenly pass away. To reduce the influence of social contagion that suicide presents when reported in the media, we should present suicide in ways

The sociological imagination is to understand the distinction between a person’s troubles and public issues, it is also an ability to see things socially and how they interact and influence each other. For example, “Unemployment “, a person is having a trouble with finding a job. This issue may shift from being a personal problem to a public issue. If one person is unemployed, it will be a personal problem. However, if there are one million out of ten million people cannot find a job, that will be a public issue.

To explain the kind of job that sociology can do in bridging the private with the classical, the author differentiates between what he calls “personal troubles and public issues”. Personal troubles according to Mills are what a person senses in his “Milieu” which is Mills word for instantaneous position in which man maneuvers like the family. He makes it clear that troubles are an intimate element. Issues on the other hand, is part of a greater social construction. Issues according to Mills is a disaster in an organization, and not a disaster in a single person. To further clarify his point, Mills ask us to consider a man and his wife that might be having marital problems. This he says would be a private problem. If on the other hand, half of all marriages ends in divorce then we are dealing with a public problem. Mills believes that the same can be said for other issues that looks like personal issues, but turned out to be communal issues such as unemployment.