Whether you know someone, have heard of someone, or yourself been an attempted victim, of suicide, the situation goes without saying that not enough social acceptance of the underlying problems of the cause of suicide is made daily. “The suicide mortality rate in 2015 was 10.7 per 100,000, which means about one death every 20 seconds”( Bilson 2018). It’s been three months since my brother took his own life and every day I wish I could go back in time and prevent it from happening. This event has personally affected me in a great amount along with my family members. There are very few words for what there is to say about what happened but there are many emotions to experience instead.
“It was found that 1–6% of people attempting suicide die by suicide in the first year”(Bilson 2018).
Growing up during my youth, now 22 years old, I experienced a lot of psychological changes, stressful situations, trauma, and confusing moments. I come from a Hispanic family and having to adjust to a daily American lifestyle while having parents with strict Mexican parenting has disrupted any easy life into adulthood. Through my own experiences and reflecting upon my brother’s death, I have come to an understanding that there is a large community of young adolescents struggling to cope with the many changing situations in their daily life.
Suicide awareness has always been a spoken subject during my four years in High School. Our district experienced several suicides by high schoolers and graduates over the decade and so our high school establishes several resources for students. And throughout those years I often thought this was the solution to preventing suicide, or so I thought…
Even though suicide affects every age of people, the youth tend to have greater risk factors that lead to a high number of youth suicides every year. Some factors include mental disorders, previous suicide attempts, and family factors(Bilson 2018). And of course, there can be many other factors that influence one’s mind to perform self-harm. And it said that attempted suicide is also on the rise as well as suicide numbers( Belz 2019).
Personally, I have been affected by the many risk factors that any young person can experience, whether that is family pressure to achieve certain goals established by family members themselves, personal identity problems, black and white mindset, anxiety, and so many more. These risk factors have strong impacts on young people the most because of the transitional period between teen/young adult to adulthood.
As I mentioned before, the solution for suicide is not just awareness and school counseling but because suicide has been such a taboo subject in many cultures, the open talk about it has made it difficult to assemble itself within the youth. And I believe we can push the steps back even further of preventing suicide by allowing youth problems to be a concern and identified as a real problem. Often times adults who have passed this transitional period from teenager to young adult have had several years separated from those life experiences and a gap in new social problems among youth to fully understand and take young peoples problems serious. I personally feel that schools should have the responsibility to not just check on the student’s health but also to be open and socially accept the problems that any young person may be having. I believe that waiting until one has attempted suicide or self-harm is long due to understanding why this person is in this situation in the first place. When we decided to ignore or not discuss our problems because of fear of any form, it can often lead to isolating one’s emotional and psychological problems. Which is never good because of the weight it can put on someone and later lead to a change in mentality and motive.
What can you or I do about this?
The answer is actually easier than one might think. And that starts with accepting that the youth have problems that need to be discussed, whether that is with a family member, friend, or even teacher, just opening up and being taken seriously is the right step to helping someone from falling down a bad path.
NationalSuicideHotline:
800-273-8255
References
Bilsen J (2018) Suicide and Youth: Risk Factors. Front. Psychiatry 9:540. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00540https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00540/full
Levi-Belz Y, Gvion Y, and Apter A (2019) Editorial: The Psychology of Suicide: From Research Understandings to Intervention and Treatment. Front. Psychiatry 10:214. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00214https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00214/full
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