This editorial first appeared in the Peninsula Clarion:
The numbers are alarming — the suicide rate for Alaskans ages 15-24 was 46 per 100,000 people in 2010, well above the national average. And even with those numbers in mind, we’re startled by the response to this week’s Clarion poll question, which asks readers if they or somebody they know have ever contemplated suicide. More than 80 percent of respondents answered yes.
While our poll is not scientific, what it tells us is that suicide is an issue that, at some time or another, will affect nearly every member of our community.
Indeed, comments from high school counselors bear that out. During a recent training session, staff at Soldotna High School shared personal stories on the subject.
“We let the teachers discuss experiences in their lives; people who had either committed or talked about committing (suicide),” Erin Neisinger, Soldotna High School counselor, told the Clarion. “And walking around the room listening to the conversations, there were a lot stories about students or friends . who had affected their lives.”
The school district’s expanded training is the result of legislation passed last session requiring at least two hours of training for school personnel who work with middle- and high-school students. It includes an appropriation of $450,000 toward school-based suicide prevention efforts.
Sen. Bettye Davis, of Anchorage, who sponsored the legislation, said the bill would help reduce the “silent epidemic” of youth suicide through educational and awareness programs. According to Neisinger, people aren’t always comfortable addressing suicide with students. The goal of the training is to give school staff more skills and confidence to talk about the issue with students, to say something, adding to protocols the district already has in place.
If just one educator is able to make a connection with just one student, to steer a student in a different direction, then the two hours of training and funding to support it will have been money well spent.
But we hope that in raising suicide awareness, and in giving school staff more tools to help, the impact will be far greater. As we said, suicide will, at some time or another, touch nearly every one of us.
Comments (6)
Add commentFor those considering suicide: My wife suffered more pain than
any healthy human could possibly relate to in her 3+ year battle with cancer. Suicide would have been a simple painless choice via an overdose with any number of mind-numbing pain killers at her disposal.
To the end she showed more compassion for those she would be leaving behind early than her own fervent desire to be released from the pain.
Life is tough. Help is available.
Suicide is selfish and I have a problem knowing someone who clung to life so tenaciously while another is so willing to throw it away. Pain? You have not experienced true pain.
Ken - pain is relative and relavent.
I am sorry to hear about your wife's battle with cancer. I believe you understand the pain she was suffering, both physically and psychologically. However, I cannot understand your lack of empathy for those that have an overwhelming need to end their life, for that type of personal struggle and pain is beyond my grasp. You rationalize that there is help available for those who need it, but you don't seem to understand that the salvation they seek to end the pain by ending their life is not a rational decision at all. We need to be a proactive society, to watch for the signs, to care enough to reach out to those who need help...not just because we were invited. We cannot assume that the people that are suffering internally have the ability to reach out. That must be real pain.
@Ken
You measure pain and suffering with a single perspective. Your writing assumes physical pain is the trigger for suicide when in fact it is emotional pain and depression which are more likely culprits. Financial struggles and hopelessness or the inability to form healthy relationships and soul crushing loneliness can drive a normally stable human being to consider the final option. I believe this pain to be the most damaging of all. And then...what about guilt and abuse? Some of these young adults are addicted and sexually abused. Imagine carrying all that around with you.
Can you imagine what feeling alone and worthless can do to your soul? Can you imagine enduring a life of sexual abuse and neglect and the pain that accompanies that? Can you imagine a hopeless future of unemployment and misery out in the villages? Add to that long dark winters, drugs, alcohol and a lack of healthy options….well there you have it!
30year resident & Mama T: Neither of you have shared with me
the personal experience I shared with you. Your 'empathy' is commendable...but you honestly do not have first-hand knowledge.
30 year: "pain is relative". "Salvation". "Proactive". "real pain".
Sounds nice. Heard it before. Come back when you have lived it.
Mama T: "I believe this pain to be the most damaging of all."
See above.
Words.
Ken
While I can't share with you an experience that equates to wanting to end life, I don't believe you can share that experience either, unless you have something more to share. Yes, you have expressed your feelings about experiencing the witness of watching a loved one cling to life, but I am not a believer in your opinion that you can justly judge another being who is experiencing an emotional pain that you have not lived. So when you state that the suicidal person is not experiencing true pain, I cannot believe you know that to be true.
And I can have empathy without first hand knowledge of your personal experience.
Unless....
You yourself have been suicidal from pain, abuse, emotions, or any of the other endless scenarios that bring a human soul to the breaking point then I really don't feel anyone should be commenting and degrading those who have hit that point.
Unless you have been on the other end of that gun, knife or bottle you have no right to judge those that have.
No one needs to hear people who commit suicide are quieters, weak, etc. Because there are people families that struggle to understand the "why" and the last thing they need to read are degrading words.
Suicide is a desperate moment when a soul is willing to do anything to stop the pain, the fear, the abuse, and in that split second you think that removing yourself will help the ones you love. In that moment you believe if you aren't there for them to take care of, to worry about, to go broke over that you are helping them too.
Before you look from the outside and judge you need to have been on the inside. If you haven't been then don't assume these people are weak quitters.