Teen Suicide is not Moral Cowardice!
We all inherit death. It is the only reality no one can deny. In the Paleolithic era, hunters knew little of the posthumous experience.
Yalom, in his book, talks about the fundamental nature of death anxiety, eventually giving birth to religions. Religion and culture gave meaning to life by laying various beliefs about death, i.e., "Afterlife," "Reincarnation," "an unconscious sleep," "Thetans, transforming into a new life."
These beliefs have facilitated humans to accommodate to the reality of death. Death and dying, for all people, is a unique process to the individual’s religious or personal beliefs that can alter how a person handles the process of death. These include preparing for death and the afterlife, preparation of the body, shrouding the body (male and female), washing of the body, transporting the body, burial traditions, the funeral, prayer, gravestones, and visitation, and mourning.
Death anxiety is unique to our experience of being human, and our awareness of mortality is a central part of our existence. Increasing evidence suggests that fears of death may be at the root of numerous mental health conditions, and it has been argued that they need to be addressed in order for satisfactory long-term treatment outcomes. Despite this, many standard treatment approaches, do not typically target death fears, potentially contributing to a ‘revolving door’ of mental health problems.
Last Straw
One of the very popular myths about suicidal behaviors among teens is that they are just a bid for attention or “a cry for help.”
Self-injury and suicidal behaviors — imagining, planning, or attempting suicide — are related, but the relationship between the two is confusing. Because they can look similar, it can be very difficult to tell the difference between them. But there are important differences in the intention as well as the danger: Self-injury is virtually always used to feel better rather than to end one’s life. Indeed, some people who self-injure are clear that it helps them to avoid suicide. In fact, the technical term for self-injury is non-suicidal self-injury or NSSI.
The motivation to avoid pain and injury is a fundamental evolutionary instinct, crucial to the survival of individuals and species. Yet, each year, millions of young people purposefully and directly injure themselves in the absence of suicidal intent.
If you truly get into the depth of self-harm behavior, it serves a purpose. Paradoxically to preserve life.
Armando Favazza has described self-harm as a morbid form of temporarily alleviating distressing symptoms, and attempting to heal themselves, to attain some measure of spirituality, and establish a sense of personal order.
When people hear about someone dying by suicide especially a young person, they often ask or are asked “Why would she want to die?” or “Why would he do something like that to his family?”
Those common questions, but most often they don’t lead you to one right answer about why someone you know chose suicide. Here’s a better question to ask: “What problem was that person trying to solve?”
Most suicidal teens aren’t really trying to die. They’re simply trying to solve one or many problems. The tragedy is that they choose a permanent solution to their temporary problems. The most important thing to remember is that most young people who attempt or complete suicide don’t want to die. What they want is to escape the problems they think are too big or too awful for them to solve. Their problems give them emotional and physical pain, and suicide seems like a sure way to make that pain stop.
How can we know for certain that the thousands of young people who committed suicide last year really didn’t want to die? And if they didn’t want to die, why did they die?
People who work with suicidal teens believe that most don’t want to die because of the ways they try to die. Most young people attempt suicide in their own homes between the hours of 4 p.m. and midnight. In other words, they attempt suicide in the one place where they are most likely to be found, and they do it during the time of day when someone from their family most likely will be around. The chance of rescue is high, and people who hope for rescue really don’t want to kill themselves.
But what about the young people who weren’t rescued? How can we be sure that they didn’t really want to die? We can’t be sure, but we can get clues about what they were thinking by talking to young people who survived suicide attempts that really should have killed them.
Each of these teens picked a time, a place, and a method of death that left little room for rescue. Some of them survived bullet wounds to the head, jumps from high bridges, or high-speed crashes into brick walls and trees. When they were asked, “What did you think as you pulled the trigger?” “What flashed in your brain when you jumped off the bridge?” “What was in your mind when you knew you were going to crash?” they consistently answered, “I wanted to change my mind.”
Faced with the certainty of their own death, most said they suddenly realized their problems weren’t so big that somehow they couldn’t be solved. Their problems weren’t so bad that somehow they couldn’t find a way to survive them. In that second before they almost died, they knew they wanted to live.
But what about those young people who have died by suicide?
Why did they die if they didn’t really want to? Some died because they misjudged who would be around to rescue them during their suicide attempt. Some died thinking, “I want to change my mind.” Some died because they didn’t have a friend who reached out to them and got them the help they needed.
It’s important to note that every behavior has a purpose; people’s actions don’t “just happen.”
