Broad Reasons for Adolescent Suicide Attempts and the Warning Signs
Following is an excerpt from the novel, The Outskirts of Redemption, set in 1965, where Buddy, the seventh grader whose best friend and classmate has killed himself, crouches unseen in the darkness backstage at the school auditorium peering through the curtains as Allie, the child psychologist character, explains to parents:
Allie continued, “I’d now like to spend a couple of minutes discussing, in a very broad sense, the principal reasons why adolescents attempt suicide. I’ll begin with a sobering statistic in that regard: About 90 percent of suicidal adolescents feel misunderstood by their parents and believe that they cannot effectively communicate with their parents.” She paused and then repeated the point to let its impact sink in.
“Adolescence is filled with conflict between feeling a need for continued parental security and guidance and a natural desire to begin pulling away. The most important thing that you can do as parents is to remain actively involved in your children’s lives and always maintain open lines of communication.”
Judging from the faces I could see in the crowd, communication with their kids sucked and they knew it. One couple was holding hands and staring at each other like they wanted to get up and run home to check on Junior.
“The reasons for adolescent suicide generally fall into three broad categories,” Allie said, “but they each have to do with a lack of communication. First, threatening or attempting suicide is seen as a means of gaining love, affection, or sympathy from someone who is denying it or as a way to punish that person by inflicting pain and guilt on them. The target is often a parent or an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend. As parents, don’t be afraid to openly show affection and say, ‘I love you’ to your child. Be especially attentive when your son or daughter is going steady—as they call it in junior high and high school—and be sympathetic if they break up with their steady. Or if the steady breaks up with them. As parents, you may be uncom-fortable with these relationships, but these are emotionally vulnerable times for your children. Please don’t demean them or brush them off as puppy love.
“Second, a suicide attempt is often a desperate cry for help. Children are generally inexperienced and poorly prepared to deal with a multitude of problems all at once. They get confusing messages from rebellious rock-and-roll music and the alarming number of bedroom scenes that are creeping into popular motion pictures. Being a preteen or early teen in the mid-1960s is very different from past eras. It’s much more pressure packed. When the weight of the world gets to be too much, these kids are no different from you or me. They need a helpful ear to listen to their problems and perhaps even a shoulder to cry on. But too often, adults, including parents, are too busy or not available, too judgmental, or just poor listeners. Sometimes, kids feel that it will take a desperate act to get our attention, to get us to see how heavy their burdens seem—to them. Most suicide attempts in this category are halfhearted, but sometimes they unfortunately succeed.
“Finally, and this is the one that is the most dangerous, suicide becomes the adolescent’s only way—in their mind—to relieve the pain and pressure of an otherwise unbearable situation. Someone, I believe it was a military officer, once said that there is a tremendous sense of freedom that comes when one realizes that he is in a totally hopeless situation. Just like adults, children can get into what they perceive to be a hopeless situation with no one to help them and no way out—except one.
“It’s also important to understand that suicide is rarely an impulsive act,” Allie continued, “irrespective of what we may see portrayed in the movies for dramatic effect. Suicide victims generally contemplate their death over an extended period, often with a great deal of forethought and preparation.
“There’s usually a defining event that occurs, a That’s it, I’m done moment in time when the conclusion is reached to go through with the planned act. This deciding moment generally occurs after less drastic options for solving one’s problems consistently fail. With Daniel Carter, however, we don’t know what event specifically committed him last week to this fatal decision. As I said, we probably never will.”
I lowered my head and thought, Yeah, unless I tell you.
“I want to discuss one more topic: the warning signs that we psychologists look for that may indicate that adolescents are potentially suicidal. Then I want to open the meeting for your questions.”
I scanned the audience as Allie paused. Like me, they had been listening attentively, often appearing surprised and disturbed by her revelations and statistics. Suicide was ugly, uncharted ground. I anticipated that there would be lots of questions.
Allie looked at the paper she was holding and read the list. “These warning signs include: changes in eating and sleeping habits; recurring head-aches, stomachaches, or fatigue; neglected personal hygiene; mood swings; isolation and withdrawal; inability to concentrate for extended periods; decline in the quality of schoolwork; loss of interest in previous activities, sports, or hobbies; recurring death fixation in written or verbal communications; reckless behavior; giving away possessions or setting affairs in order; and saying goodbyes to friends and family.”
She looked up. Everyone was thinking the same thing, so Allie said it. “Daniel Carter displayed an inordinate number of these signs over the last several weeks of his life.
“With hindsight, it’s now apparent that Daniel was a very unhappy young man and may have been suffering from a form of mental illness broadly referred to as ‘depression.’ I can’t tell you exactly why he may have been depressed. I do know that depression is difficult to recognize and diagnose in adolescents, even for professionals. That’s because developing young teens and preteens tend to be moodier than adults. We come to expect them to go through a new and different personal crisis each month. Radical mood swings in young people, like those exhibited by Daniel Carter, may actually be manic-depressive incidents. One week they’re happy and the next they’re extremely sad. We tend to remember the happy and shrug off the sad as merely having a bad day or going through a stage. Or we blame it on hormones.
“And so, in conclusion, please try not to be critical of your faculty and administrative staff at this fine school for not recognizing the warning signs and not taking steps beyond what has been described to you tonight. When a tragedy occurs, we need to pull together as a community. We need to support and encourage one another and show all the love we have for our children. I hope that’s what’s going through your minds right now.”
Allie glanced at her watch. “It’s getting late, but please allow me to make a final point. Many people—no, let me change that to most people—think there is a stigma associated with seeking help from a psychologist like me or a psychiatrist like Dr. Gibson. It’s like the stigma that used to be associated with having to wear eyeglasses. Remember those days? Well, it’s now the 1960s and we are fortunate to be living in a more enlightened time. Today, if our vision isn’t in focus, it doesn’t mean we are lesser human beings. It means we need help from an optometrist, and we need an aid—eyeglasses in this case—to see correctly, to get our vision back into focus.
“The same is true for our mental health. The way we interact with others and view our lives can get confusing, out of focus. This can be due to a chemical imbalance or a neurological disorder. It can also be due to extreme stress that comes upon us when we aren’t prepared to deal with it. Whatever the reason, there are doctors and other professionals who specialize in understanding and diagnosing these kinds of everyday human problems. Please don’t be afraid to use us.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: One of my goals in writing this fictional story was to shed light for adults, through the scene above and others in the book, on reasons why young people may attempt suicide and the warning signs of a mental health issue or disorder.
—Clayton Trier