Let’s start here: suicide is not a fun topic to talk about. To be honest, I hesitated to even put the word “suicide” in the title of this article, because I know that it means that a large swath of people looking for a different kind of Internet scrolling experience simply will not click it.
But there are few topics more important to take a hard look at and to talk about. Mental health issues, including depression and suicide, do not discriminate. Rich, poor, famous, non-famous. No one is safe from it. We prove this as a society over and over and over again. Every day.
Eric Kussin, Founder of the mental health advocacy firm, Same Here Global, which does a lot of work in the sports field, recently pointed out that we need to do a better job talking about the epidemic of suicide:
A month ago we lost Stanford D1 national champ goalie Katie Meyer to suicide. Now a month later, we lose lax goalie from D1 Binghamton, Robert Martin, & no media is tying these together. No connection despite the obvious similarities. It’s an epidemic & media needs to do better. pic.twitter.com/mQdmITdqfq
— #SameHere Global Mental Health Movement 501c3 (@SameHere_Global) April 4, 2022
In March, Katie Meyer, a soccer star at Stanford and team captain who led the Cardinal to the 2019 national championship, died by suicide.
The Stanford community has suffered an unimaginable loss. Our thoughts & love are with Katie’s family & friends. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/3qXOyx7atO
— Stanford Athletics (@GoStanford) March 2, 2022
As the Head Coach of the University of New Mexico women’s soccer team, Heather Dyche, said about Meyer’s death, it is a reminder that “everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”
In April, former Syracuse and current Binghamton lacrosse star, Robert Martin, died by suicide. Martin was a goalie and an impressive one at that. Many thought he had a real future career in the sport; and by all accounts, he was known for being a stellar person.
“Every suicide creates a vacuum. Those left behind fill it with stories that aspire to rationalize their ultimately unfathomable plight. People may blame themselves or others, cling to small crumbs of comfort, or engage in pitiless self-laceration; many do all this and more.” – Dr. Andrew Solomon, The Mystifying Rise of Child Suicide.
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And it happens to self-aware mental health advocates too. In 2019, University of Buffalo law student, Matthew Benedict died by suicide.
Prior to that, he had written one of the most compelling posts about mental health, I’ve ever read:
“‘Start the conversation. No more hiding. No more silence. Speak up. Reach out. Tell people you love them. Make the community and the world a better place. Mental health is no fun but it is necessary to talk about. Don’t be like me. Don’t wait. Be brave.'”
Earlier this year, the legal world was rocked by news of the death by suicide of Cheslie Kryst, a 30 year old Black lawyer and social justice advocate who had been crowned Miss USA in 2019.
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The “high profile,” nationally reported deaths by suicide, of course, tell just a fraction of the real story. My town recently suffered the loss of a high school student, as did a local college and law school. All were high achieving, successful people, from good stable families.
Writing at the time of Robin Williams’ 2014 death by suicide, friend of The Good Men Project, Dr. Andrew Solomon explained that:
“The same qualities that drive a person to brilliance may drive that person to suicide. Highly successful people tend to be perfectionistic, constantly striving to meet impossible standards. And celebrities tend to be hungry for love, for the adoration of audiences. No perfectionist has ever met his own benchmarks, and no one so famished for admiration has ever received enough of it.”
Before her death, Cheslie Kryst also wrote specifically about this drive for achievement and an earlier time that she landed in the hospital after nearly working herself to death:
“I discovered that the world’s most important question, especially when asked repeatedly and answered frankly, is: why? Why earn more achievements just to collect another win? Why pursue another plaque or medal or line item on my resume if it’s for vanity’s sake, rather than out of passion? Why work so hard to capture the dreams I’ve been taught by society to want when I continue to only find emptiness? Too often, I noticed that the only people impressed by an accomplishment were those who wanted it for themselves. Meanwhile, I was rewarded with a lonely craving for the next award. Some would see this hunger and label it ‘competitiveness’; others might call it the unquenchable thirst of insecurity.”
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The numbers Dr. Solomon shared in that 2014 article are startling, and they’ve gotten far worse since:
“Every forty seconds, someone commits suicide. In the United States, it is the tenth most common cause of death in people over ten years of age, far more common than death by homicide or aneurysm or aids. Nearly half a million Americans are taken to the hospital every year because of suicide attempts. One in five people with major depression will make such an attempt; there are approximately sixteen non-lethal attempts for every lethal one. The rate of suicide is going up, especially among middle-aged men. These statistics get dragged out over and over again, but they bear the endless repetition. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it is one that beckons with burgeoning seductiveness.”
This past week, Andrew Solomon wrote a long-form New Yorker Magazine piece that takes a hard look at another difficult pattern within this issue: the rise of child suicide:
“The average age of suicides has been falling for a long time while the rate of youth suicide has been rising. Between 1950 and 1988, the proportion of adolescents aged between fifteen and nineteen who killed themselves quadrupled. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of children aged ten to fourteen who did so more than doubled…In 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States suicide claimed the lives of more than five hundred children between the ages of ten and fourteen, and of six thousand young adults between fifteen and twenty-four. In the former group, it was the second leading cause of death (behind unintentional injury). This makes it as common a cause of death as car crashes.
Some other very troubling and more recent statistics were included in the article, courtesy of the CDC:
- In 2020, mental-health-related visits to hospital emergency rooms by people ages 12-27 years old increased by 1/3 from the same in 2019.
- During the first seven months of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, U.S. hospitals experienced a 24% increase in mental-health-related emergency visits for children aged 5-11, and a 31% increase for those age 12-17.
Among Dr. Solomon’s conclusions in that article were that treatment can be effective but that – due to a combination of stigma and our collective discomfort addressing this topic, particularly as it relates to our own children – young people and children remain, in his words, “radically under-treated.”
The statistics bear that out:
“According to the National Institute of Mental Health, of the three million American adolescents who experienced major depression in 2020, almost two-thirds received no treatment.”
Getting ourselves to a better place is going to take a huge effort.
Failure is not an option. It’s literally a matter of life and death.
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We need our media to do better.
We need to do better as parents.
We need to do better in the workplace.
We need to do better by each other.
Failure is not an option. It’s literally a matter of life and death. Ours.
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Photo Credit: ShutterStock
If you or someone you know may be struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) any time day or night, or chat online.
Crisis Text Line also provides free, 24/7, confidential support via text message to people in crisis when they dial 741741.