There are about 33,000 suicides in the United States every year.
There are about 18,000 homicides in the United States every year.
Now, ask yourself this: If there are nearly twice as many suicides than homicides, how come I don’t hear about more suicides in the news?
Because the media doesn’t think it’s appropriate to cover suicides. We don’t want to cause any more anguish to the friends and family of people who kill themselves. (Imagine that, the media is concerned about causing anguish!)
That’s the unspoken rule in newsrooms across the land – suicide is personal and private and covering it would cause more pain. Unless the person who killed herself is famous, there is no news value. But homicide is fair game. Doesn’t matter how obscure you are. If you’re dead and somebody killed you – it’s news.
Which is why the cover story in the New York Times’ Sunday Styles section yesterday, the Mysteries of Tobias Wong, is such a big deal. It is about the suicide of Tobias Wong, a brilliant young designer in New York city.
This is a thoughtful, carefully written story that balances the man with his suicide. For those of us who live in the realm of Rooms-to-Go, the author, Alex Williams explains why Wong’s work was important. Wong was “deeply influenced by subversive art…and went on to produce an acclaimed and influential body of work that questioned concepts like luxury and consumerism in a business that was about promoting them.”
Wong hanged himself. Most authors would have left it at that. Like so many men who kill themselves, no one saw it coming: “This was no tortured artist locked in a downward spiral…he had no history of mental illness, no health problems and no substance abuse issues…unlike many Manhattanites, he wasn’t even seeing a therapist.”
The second half of this lengthy story delves into the pathology of Wong’s suicide. “Mr. Wong was, clinically speaking, asleep. For years, he had suffered from a variety of sleep disorders known as parasomnias: in layman’s terms, he was a serious, chronic sleepwaker.”
We then learn about the bizarre world of sleepwalkers, night terrors and the odd behavior that fill the hours that should be spent in deep sleep. Wong’s own episodes and his battle to conquer his sleep disorder are punctuated with comments from experts about the disorder.
“Given this history, many people who were close to him believe that his death was not an act of will, but, like other sleepwalking episodes, a bizarre out-of-character act that ended tragically.”
Why is this article a big deal? Because the New York Times has published no less than four other articles about suicide in the last month: “In Midlife boomers are happy and suicidal” on June 11; “New leader of DDB must bring luster back” on June 10; “After suicide, scrutiny of China’s grim factories” on June 6; and “Rise of suicides in middled aged is continuing” also on June 6.
Countless newspapers around the world subscribe to the New York Times wire service. Subscribers are allowed to reprint articles in their own newspapers. At a time when newspaper staffs around the country have been slashed, the wires play an even more important role, providing readers with feature stories and editorials that might not have been picked up in the days when newspapers had the staff to write their own stories, features and editorials.
This is how the stigma of suicide will be eliminated: One article at a time. Talking about suicide is not enough. Much of the talk is either gossip or too touchy for an in-depth conversation. But when a newspapers such as The New York Times decides that suicide is “fit to print,” then it becomes news.
And God knows we can’t seem to get enough news.
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These people are too afraid that they rather choose to end everything and never taking that chance to be happy again. People suffering tremendous stress should not be taken forgranted. Try to reach out to them so that we can all save precious lives.
People are mentally weak are more likely to face depression in their life. Today life has become a tough world where normal man face many stressful and tense moment.
It is important for people to take things easy and not rush or be to emotional attached with any issue.
Being calm and talking to people around you would help for someone to think more rational and not considering suicide as the answer to their proble.
Tolstoy observed that all happy families are alike; but unhappy families are unique in their unhappiness. This suggests that suicides might also be committed based on unique, individual experiences. So what can we learn from N.Y. Times’ efforts to explain urge behind suicide?
We fail in our emotional health analysis if we look for just one precipitating factor or characteristic. Look at the armed forces scrambling to explain the rising rate of military suicides. Youth suicide might be the most tragic case of destroying your life when you’ve lived so little of it. Seniors are the second age group at risk of suicide (following teenagers).
In my efforts to understand and prevent youth violence using emotional health education in schools — particularly to reduce school shootings by teens who also are suicidal — I concluded in my 2000 book, “Emotional Honesty & Self-Acceptance”, that both self-harmful behavior and the urge to harm others might stem from a common, set of personal issues.
The single factors that appears in nearly all teen school shootings involving suicide and massacres of peers is their inability to deal with everyday emotionally “wounding experiences.” In effect they suffer the “double jeopardy” of not only just experiencing pain, but converting it into a self-punishing belief that they “deserve” to be hurt. Thus these indiscrimate mass murders that also end in suicide might possibly be avoided if our schools provided a new kind of health education coping skills that teach kids how to deal with everyday emotionally wounding experiences.
We know that this kind of program can change the lives of kids if we begin coping skills education when they are pre-teens, before the tumultuous time of teenage transition. This is why the “coping skills for kids” is now a free, online program that helps kids understand how their brain causes them to suffer needlessly by harming themselves and others if they fail to understand why they are upset. The research over the past 8 years shows 9-12 yr. old kids are eager to learn safe and healthy skills like this. It is transforming for pre-teens to realize their own brain can cause them to “avenge” their emotional wounds if they don’t use higher brain abilities to understand and get over these upsetting events without hurting others or themselves. In less than 18 months, these free Internet resources have been accessed by over 73,000 youth and adults from over 170 different countries.
It applies to everyone who are suffering pain and stress in some point of their lives. Everyone should be prepared for it when it comes. Emotional stability and open communication is necessary to avoid suicide.
Nancy at 3:29 pm on
July 1st, 2010Some people have absolutely no clue about depression or suicide. Being mentally weak is a cause for depression? I don’t think so. Do you think that soldiers coming home from any war and who are depressed are mentally weak? Do you think that someone who has lost everything in the world, including their family, is mentally weak? Do you think that someone who has been raped, beaten, shot or otherwise harmed in the extreme and becomes depressed is mentally weak? I think you need to consider your own mental strength or weakness and get educated before you say something so far off track.
Extra careful is necessary when you try to talk to these people. Make sure that you are giving them inspiration and making them slowly realize the things that should matter in their life. It wouldn’t be an easy talk though but your thought counts a lot.
Happy Now at 9:24 am on
July 3rd, 2010Ronald Brill’s comments (above) show a possible route to change for young people who have not become permanently “unhappy.”
I am glad that mainstream media are starting to report what some of us have lived with for many years. Responders to this thread who think that suicidal people can be nudged out of their bleak world view are just being naive.
My first husband was a Vietnam vet who went over there an artist and Sunday School teacher and came back in a permanent state of rage. There are all kinds of labels that we can pin on him (PTSD, bipolar, self-medicating, crazy), but the truth is that _nothing_ he could see in his life made it seem worth living to him after the war.
He struggled and suffered and made other people struggle and suffer until he finally killed himself almost 20 years after he came back.
I had enough sense to leave him after awhile (the who-can-you-save-in-a-drowning boat question—answer: yourself, if you can swim), divorced him, found a wonderful, sweet, caring, balanced adorable husband, finished a Ph.D., had a nice academic career, where I nurtured young people who had opportunities and goals–and lived happily ever after. When husband #1 killed himself (hung himself in the hallway of the home he shared with his second wife and child instead of “blowing up 40 people and himself in City Hall”–his continuing horrifying refrain when I was married to him, I had already been married to husband #2 for six years–and my sweetie made an appointment for me at the Vietnam Vet Center, where the counselor gave me some books to read that were therapeutic and life-changing.
She assured me that there was absolutely nothing I could have done to transform a life that had been so shattered. I may still have a photo of him in his West Point “Duty Honor Country” sweatshirt, staring sadly into the camera. It doesn’t matter whether I own it or not, because that image is engraved in my brain.
Suicide survivors are haunted forever, but we can find peace and beauty in the world. We will never understand suicide because _we_ choose to live and make the best of what is handed to us.
May all of you have a glorious day, filled with gratitude for your good health and coping skills. May the suffering find peace.
Zenangst at 1:03 am on
August 8th, 2010I am depressed. The only thing that keeps me from suicide is a partner and child who rely on me as the only breadwinner. They would lose their home if I died. If it weren’t for that, I would hang myself.
For today, they save my life. I can’t do it myself.
Hi, Christine, greetings from a former Palm Beach Post colleague (1994-1997)! This was a great post. It’s so important for reporters to get it right when they cover suicide, because getting it wrong can lead to more deaths. Here are some reporting tips for journalists who find themselves having to cover suicide: http://bit.ly/cOieJB
Take care,
Barbara Feder Ostrov
Deputy Editor, ReportingonHealth.org
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