An Unpleasant Truth About Youth Suicide?

Joe Flood, an English teacher at Pine Ridge, tells an important story.

Suicide epidemics come to the Pine Ridge reservation every few years with varying degrees of national media attention and local soul-searching. What the news media often misses though, and what tribal members understand but rarely discuss, is that youth suicides here are inextricably linked to a multigenerational scourge of sexual abuse.

This is an insightful and important essay that has relevance to First Nations people and other youth suicides.

Read: What’s Lurking Behind the Suicides?

May 17, 2015 New York Times

The Last Days of Her Life

When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when?

"Sandy Bem, a Cornell psychology professor one month shy of her 65th birthday, was alone in her bedroom one night in May 2009, watching an HBO documentary called “The Alzheimer’s Project.” For two years, she had been experiencing what she called “cognitive oddities.”

NYTimes article Sunday Magazine, May 17, 2015

Sandy Bem and her daughter

How to Save Your Life

A Response to Leelah Alcorn's Suicide Note

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

NY Times, January 7, 2015  

"They placed an unlit candle in my hands. Hundreds of people sat quietly in chairs. This was at the L.G.B.T. Community Center in Greenwich Village in November, at an event called the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

It happens every year, people coming together to mourn trans individuals lost to murder or suicide. As a trans woman, I wish that the one day on the calendar that recognizes transgender experience was about celebrating the successes of our diverse community, rather than counting the lives we’ve lost. But the losses go on, year after year. And so I lit that candle."

Kathy McKnight who is auditing this class alerted me to this essay.  It highlights what we discussed in class on January 6.

Also see Poems 1.8.15

Suicides Spread Through a Brazilian Tribe

By Charles Lyons

"Indigenous peoples suffer the greatest suicide risk among cultural or ethnic groups worldwide. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men ages 25 to 29 have a suicide rate four times higher than the general population in that same age group in Australia.

In the United States, suicide is the second leading cause of death, behind accidents, for American Indian and Alaska Native men ages 15 to 34, and is two and a half times higher than the national average for that age group, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Among the indigenous in Brazil, the suicide rate was six times higher than the national average in 2013, according to a study released in October by Brazil’s Ministry of Health. That translates into 30 suicides per 100,000 people per year. Among members of the Guaraní tribe, Brazil’s largest, the rate is estimated at more than twice as high as the indigenous rate over all."

NY Times article, 1.4.15

Deborah Alecson Poetry Reading

Deborah Alecson's recent Poetry Reading in Great Barrington.

On December 20, 2014, Deborah Golden Alecson read from her recently published collection of poems entitled Complicated Grief  (Finishing Line Press, 2014).  These poems were generated out of her bereavement following her mother's suicide.  

The term "complicated grief" is used to describe a grieving process that goes outside the boundaries of normal grief.  This can be the result of the psychological state of the bereaved and/or the nature of the relationship with the deceased when he or she was alive and/or a death from suicide.  

What makes the grief complicated are the plethora of emotions that are not just errupting because of a single loss, but include a cascade of frightening feelings that come from a lack of resolution or comprehension.  

In Alecson's case, the complication came not only from the shock of the suicide, but from a history of abuse from her mother.  A manifestation of complicated grief can be an inability to concentrate that can then result in an inability to work.  In her experience, she had to take a few months leave of absence from teaching.  This time was necessary for her to integrate her loss; and one of her ways she did so, was to write these poems.

How A Woman's Plan To Kill Herself Helped Her Family Grieve

Five years ago, after doctors told her that she had Alzheimer's disease that would eventually steal her ability to read, write and recognize people, Sandy Bem decided to kill herself.

Sandy was 65 years old, an unsentimental woman and strong willed. For her, a life without books and the ability to recognize the people she loved wasn't a life she wanted.

And so she decided there was only one thing to do. Sandy's plan was to wait until the last conceivable moment that it was physically possible for her to commit suicide alone, then go off and kill herself.

Dr. Bem wasn't a stranger to suicide. She and her husband, , were both psychologists, professors emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Both had volunteered at a suicide hotline, and so had an intimate appreciation of just how destructive the act of suicide could be.

This NPR piece is worth listening to. (June 2014)  8 minutes.

About Sandra Bem.

The Bridge of Sighs

by Thomas Hood

One more Unfortunate,  

  Weary of breath,

Rashly importunate,       

  Gone to her death!       

Take her up tenderly,              

  Lift her with care;       

Fashion'd so slenderly    

  Young, and so fair!       

See full poem 

Suicide: Talking About Attempts

The nation’s oldest suicide prevention organization, the American Association of Suicidology, decided in a vote by its board last week to recognize a vast but historically invisible portion of its membership: people, who tried to kill themselves but survived. About a million American adults a year make a failed attempt at suicide, surveys suggest, far outnumbering the 38,000 who succeed, and in the past few years, scores of them have come together on social media and in other forums to demand a bigger voice in prevention efforts.

See NY Times Article, April 14, 2014:  "Suicide Prevention Sheds a Longstanding Taboo: Talking About Attempts"

This is a helpful and informative article which discusses attempts to give voice to the many suicide-attempt survivors.