People always scramble when there is lightening but not for suicide prevention. Lightening takes less lives each year than suicide does. I think people don’t scramble because there still is this stigma that it won’t happen. People don’t want to acknowledge that suicide exists and if it doesn’t exist, why prevent it? The stigma is that you run into the old “every man has a choice”. People believe that suicidal people are just going to do it anyway so why bother preventing the inevitable. It happens to those that see it in the ER. Most people cannot fathom why someone would want to take their own life. They think life is so grand that nobody would want to take it. They believe in this bubble that if it doesn’t happen to me, it doesn’t happen at all. I have a cousin who thinks this way. She thinks that if she doesn’t pay attention to the bad stuff, maybe it won’t happen as often. She just wants to be happy all the time. There is nothing wrong with that but not acknowledging serious mental illness is a problem. They have to believe that there is always good things in their world for their sanity. Thomas Joiner, a psychologist that deals with suicidality believes that most suicide prevention would cost less if people actually believed it exists. In his book why people die by suicide, he proposes the risk of a bicyclist getting hit by a car over the prevention barrier of the SF bridge. More people die by suicide (30 per year) than someone dying by getting hit while riding a bicycle.
I think I understand why people are afraid. They still have it in their mind that suicide should not be talked about. If it is talked about then it is real. And if it is real, then something should be done to prevent it. Unfortunately, not enough people think that suicide is real despite it climbing and it being in the top 10th percentile in the U.S.
midnightdemons7 