Loading ...Along with individual mental illness,suicides also do reflect social and cultural conditions. Patrice Corriveau,a researcher at the University of Ottawa,has been analyzing and cataloguing every suicide note left by a self-inflicted death in Quebec going back more than 100 years – a project uniquely possible in the province because a coroner’s inquest is mandated for every suicide. He has found,for example,that in the late 1800s,long before “teenagers” were a recognized social category,the young people most likely to die from suicide were unwed girls who found themselves pregnant. In the 1930s,it was young men from Europe who had failed to find their fortune in the new land,or young husbands who had lost their fortunes and killed themselves out of shame.
Teenage suicide is a phenomenon of more recent and,paradoxically,more prosperous decades,coinciding with the invention of teen culture (and its inherent peer pressures),higher divorce rates and declines in religion,though researchers are careful not to blame any one cause. The rate among teenage boys is twice as high as girls,but that’s largely because boys use more lethal means – girls actually attempt suicide more often.
Global suicide statistics are difficult to compare,but Canada falls in the middle of the pack – well below Finland or New Zealand,yet higher than Britain or Brazil. Suicide rates are generally higher in wealthier countries,where,researchers theorize,a failure to measure up in the midst of relative success is more devastating to the human psyche than being poor among the equally poor.
Shockingly,Canada’s youth-suicide rate per capita is nearly triple that in the United States,although our youth homicide rates are much lower – facts partly explained by the high suicide rates in Canadian native communities,particularly in the North,and,respectively,the high rates of handgun violence in American inner cities.
Much of what we understand about suicide is the result of hindsight,finding what was missed only afterward,when it is too late to prevent it. These “psychological autopsies” have got us closer to understanding the population-wide risks,but not much better at identifying individuals.
In about one-quarter of the cases,the families report no signs of trouble until a psychologist goes digging,says Antoon Leenaars,a leading expert on suicide and past president of the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention. “I spend a lot of time with families who say,‘We never saw anything.’ But people simply are not taught what to look for.”
…Indeed,while mental illness sets a teenager on the track for suicide,the act itself is often highly impulsive. In 2001,researchers in Houston interviewed 153 young people 15 to 24 years old who had survived a serious suicide attempt. They were asked to estimate the amount of time between when they had decided they wanted to die and when they actually attempted it. In 70 per cent of the cases,the time was less than an hour. In 25 per cent,it was barely five minutes.
Edited from:
Teen suicide:‘We’re not going to sit in silence’
Erin Anderssen
Globe and Mail
September 24,2011
