Word: Rethinking suicidal thinking

Bruce Levine - In 2016, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the overall US suicide rate had increased by 24% from 1999 to 2014, with the US suicide rate surging to a 30-year high. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention states that in the US in 2015, there were 44,193 reported suicides and that this number is likely higher because stigma surrounding suicide leads to under-reporting; and it also noted that for every completed suicide, 25 attempt suicide.

A US sub-population with an especially large increase in suicide and with high antidepressant use is middle-aged women. The suicide rate for women age 45 to 64 increased by 63% from 1999 to 2014, and by 2008, 23% of women 40–59 years of age were taking antidepressants (with more recent estimates of antidepressant use in this population stating, “the figure is one in four”). . . . .

Suicidal teenagers and young adults—the group for whom suicide is the second leading cause of death—are people whom I have worked with for over thirty years, often after unsuccessful treatments in which their suicidality was viewed as evidence of mental illness. Many of these young people are anti-authoritarians, and so for them, similar to Webb, the idea that they are experiencing a crisis of self rather than a mental illness opens them up for dialogue.

For many young people, the healthy crisis of self can involve their sexuality, religion, family role, and other aspects of their identity. Many sensitive and critically-thinking teenagers become suicidal because of overwhelming pain from authoritarian school. On several occasions, I’ve seen school failure and the threat of not graduating high school make a teenager suicidal. Teens’ pain of failure is exacerbated by their parents’ anxiety over failure, and teens become hopeless that all of life will be as miserable as high school. They are then routinely told that they are suicidal because they are mentally ill, and that makes some of them even more hopeless. The pain of their school misery and suicidal thoughts are rarely validated as a common emotional experience of many sensitive anti-authoritarians experiencing a healthy crisis of self. That validation, from my experience, can both reduce their pain and increase their hope—and open them up for dialogue.

For many people, especially anti-authoritarians, it is often counterproductive to focus on the symptoms of one’s pain as evidence of mental illness. Society itself stigmatizes mental illness, so how can one expect a person overwhelmed by emotional pain not to self-stigmatize once they’ve been labeled as mentally ill? And this stigma creates more pain and more hopelessness.

MORE