The Neglected Suicide Epidemic

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last May, citing the “substantial” rise in suicide among the middle-aged, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described suicide as “an increasing public health concern.” That realization has begun to spread: in the same month, Newsweek ran a cover article called “The Suicide Epidemic,” noting that, around the world, self-harm takes “more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined.” In America, these numbers—which many experts believe are lower than the actual figures, owing to under-reporting—cannot simply be attributed to the toll of a long recession, or increasing gun ownership: clinical depression is also on the rise. Suicide rates declined in the nineteen-nineties, but since 1999 more Americans have killed themselves each year than in the one before.

Alan Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology and the president of the International Association of Suicide Prevention, has said that in the developed world ninety per cent of those who attempt suicide suffer from psychological ailments. “We have effective treatments for most of these,” Berman said last year. “But the tragedy is, people die from temporary feelings of helplessness—things we can help with.”...
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Styron wrote, “Depression’s saving grace (perhaps its only one) is that the illness seems to be self-limiting: Time is the real healer.” If you need someone to talk to, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 1-800-273-8255, which will connect you to a counsellor at a nearby crisis center.'

Related: Men’s Suicide Rate is 3 Times That of Women

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