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Washington
10 September 2008
In her book, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order, Wickersham tells her story, hoping her family's painful experience will comfort others.
"I think there is a kind of shame and a kind of taboo attached to suicide," she says. "We would prefer to think it doesn't happen. I think we have to acknowledge it does happen. We have to acknowledge that it's a mystery, that we don't understand it very well. I just wanted to give a sense of what it is really like to go through this."
Wickersham says there is a reluctance to talk about suicide, adding, "I would love to see more honest conversation about it."
Jerry Reed, the director of Suicide Prevention Resource Center, encourages such honest conversation. He says that shared experiences can help put a face on the numbers and break the silence around what he considers one of the world's most serious public health issues.
"Across the planet, we lose about one person every 33 seconds to suicide," he says. "Here in the United States, every year, we lose about 32,000 Americans to suicide. Out of the 32,000, approximately 6,000 to 7,000 are older adults, approximately 4,000 are younger individuals, the remaining 20,000 to 21,000 individuals are between the ages of 24 and 64. And behind each and every one of those numbers is a family, an individual, a community, a school, a workplace, that's touched by the loss of someone to suicide."
Across the United States and around the globe, campaigns are planned this month to raise awareness and support for suicide prevention. September 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day.
"We encourage activities, whether here in the United States or abroad, to do what they can in their own communities," he says, "whether it is a public service announcement or working with the local administrators of the jurisdictions, maybe working with the schools, reaching out to the media to just bring attention to the preventable public health problem of suicide."
Through such campaigns, Reed says, people can get more information about why someone would commit suicide and ways to prevent it.
"Certainly in the United States, it's suggested that about 90 percent of completed suicides have a mental illness or a substance abuse disorder connection," he says. "So, really, depression is a factor both here in the United States as well as abroad. That must be something we look at."
"We know so more today than we knew earlier about effective treatments, effective diagnosis," Reed says. "Early intervention and prevention can be life saving for people who struggle with depression or other mental illness or substance abuse disorders."
Reed says he hopes more attention is given to this serious problem not only during Suicide Prevention Month but all year long. This way, he says, more people will be aware of the warning signs that a loved one is thinking about suicide so they can provide the support and help to turn their loved one back towards life.
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