With the societal embrace of prejudice and intolerance, the isolation of modernity, the proximity of means to suicide and the lack of a social safety net — among other reasons — more people are turning to suicide as a solution to despair. Following the high-profile suicides of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, the conversation around the alarming uptick in suicides over the past years has garnered even more attention. An excerpt from an article in The New Yorker asserts this fact:
“Suicide is on the rise nationwide. It claims more American lives each year than do automobile accidents. It has gone up twenty-five per cent in the past two decades, with increases in almost every state. There were close to forty-five thousand deaths from suicide in the United States in 2016 alone. It is now one of the top ten causes of death in the country, one of the top three for adolescents.”
Yet, despite all this, suicide is entirely preventable — and there is more work to be done to address the issue.
Victor Schwartz, the chief medical officer of the JED Foundation spoke up on the matter: “We need to beef up our mental-health system: we are not training enough clinicians, not getting enough clinics built across the country. Many clinicians are untrained in suicide prevention. We need preventive public-health initiatives on managing depression and anxiety in the pre-crisis stage. Every school should have an approach—but so should every employer and every small town.”
Read more here.
