It’s important to remember that suicides are usually committed by people experiencing not just the severe symptoms of a serious mental illness AND a significant level of social isolation, but also a trigger or crisis that sends them past some point of no return. It’s a triple whammy most people thankfully never experience.

It’s also important to know that the vast majority of people who commit suicide seek help multiple times, and usually let someone know their plans first. That is, suicide is usually preventable but the support network often fails to recognize or take seriously the signs, such as increased depression or sudden mood improvement, giving possessions away, sudden excessive drinking or drugging, statements of hopelessness and helplessness, endless crying, isolating behaviors, and explicit threats of suicide.

It is understandable that some stand outside and criticize the choice to end one’s life; certainly anyone who has lost a friend, relative, or client to suicide knows that those left living often feel hurt, betrayed, confused, or angry at the departed, and these feelings are surely valid. Suicide is often a passive-aggressive act, and is by definition selfish – although sometimes people believe they are doing us a favor by leaving this world – and it especially hurts those who have tried to help and who have been there to support the suffering person so many times.

At the same time, if you’ve never been severely depressed, or never experienced auditory hallucinations every day for many years, or never felt or been utterly alone in the world, or if you’ve never been, for any reason, at the point of feeling your suffering and the suffering you believe you cause others would decrease if you were dead, if you’ve never experienced these thoughts and feelings then, yes, it is virutally impossible to understand how someone could make this tragic choice.

If I had to identify two *social* factors that contribute to our culture’s high rate of suicide (it’s double the homicide rate in the United States, year after year!) they would be:

1. Alienation of all of us, as individuals, from the group, ie: a hyperindividualistic society that expects personal acheivement at a high level from all its members, values an impossible level of material wealth and physical “beauty”, and discourages extended family systems, clan networks, etc – the traditional means of caring for one another. This is inhumane and unnatural.

2. The failure to honor all emotions; the tendency to dismiss “negative” mood states and alienate people who express them; a demeaning of “weakness” or fear and an overvaluing of violence, power, fame, status, sexuality, etc. This is unbalanced, unfulfilling, and unhealthy.

These, along with the prevalence of undiagnosed or misdiagnosed mental illnesses, and the over-reliance on medications to treat those illnesses when they are identified, have helped to create a society replete with barely functioning, unhappy, isolated people.

Maybe President Obama will fix it.