Comments about ‘Peers, parents, pros step up to tackle suicide discussion taboo’

This is a helpful, well-done article. For some reason, though, there is missing punctuation in the online version I'm reading (quotation marks and apostrophes) which makes it a little distracting to read.

Suicide is a problem that affects many people, not only the person who does it.

I had a friend commit suicide at 22. She'd been sexually molested by a family member since she was a very young girl. Her mother was left to face the fact her daughter had killed herself, and blame herself for what happened in the years prior.

The son of a boss committed suicide. His parents (my boss and his wife) joined a Suicide Prevention group and made a huge committment to their community.

Two employees at that company also committed suicide that year. Talk about affecting morale at work, it was somber at that place for a very long time.

It's time we stopped avoiding the issue and take a good long hard look at it and remove the 'taboo' about talking about it.

Very good article.

People commit suicide because their level of emotional pain exceeds their coping capacity. Some depression is so severe that on MRI's the pain center is located in the same part of the brain that feels the pain of a broken back, or broken leg - a location some call the "agony center" of the brain. It's a different location than for more moderate levels of pain.

So imagine someone lying with a broken leg for weeks or months, untreated, unable to advocate for themselves or ask for help. If that person committed suicide people wouldn't say that he had used a permanent solution for a temporary situation. They's say - he was in such agony he couldn;t take it anymore. And everyone would understand that it was difficult for him to advocate for himself, or seek help.

A Leading scholar on suicide calls these times of extreme distress - pyche-aches. Just like we have headaches, a pyche-ache is an episode that has a begining, but sometimes for the patient, feels like it is unending. So it isn't necessarily the constellation of problems the person is having, it is the unmanagable levels of pain.

There is no taboo on discussion of suicide, however trying to force people at a personal level to make private disclosure is a matter of legality and parental and individual rights to their privacy.

I think what this report is trying to do is make health and mental health records public information by trying to sway the public in to writing laws to force doctors and psychiatrist to release privilege information on their patients.

This is information that schools, educators and law enforcment would love to get their hands on as they try to strip us of more of our privacy.

I have to wonder too if the education system has considered the fact that forcing mental debilitating drugs to suppress independent minded students might have something to do with high student suicides? Why doesn't the news media pick up on these drugs used in toddler to graduation are force fed for 18-20 years and the subsequent affects on them? Suicides is clearly labeled on these drugs as 'side affects' yet we allow our children to be enrolled in forced government testing in our schools.

Perhaps having 7 children (by the age of 31) and a total of 9 people living in a trailer may have contributed to this.

"She was sure she wasn't a good mom, that she couldn't handle the task of raising seven little people"

The question to ask in this case is why have that many kids? Family or Religious pressure? No access to birth control? Unsure of where babies come from?

I am positive that if I had 7 kids, I would be a poor parent.

While there are exceptions, the stress of having that large of a family would take a toll of ones parenting ability. Few people are equipped to handle it well, although most probably think that they do.