Suicide Prevention Across the Globe

Next week, September 10, is World Suicide Prevention Day as designated by the World Health Organization (WHO). I've written about suicide a few times on this blog - it's a topic that too many people would prefer to avoid. If we don't talk about it, acknowledge it, then it isn't really a problem, right?

According to the WHO, every 40 seconds, there is one death to suicide somewhere in the world, one million people each year. In 2005, my brother was one of those 1 million people. He was only 35 years old. "The number of lives lost through suicide exceeds the number of deaths due to homicide and war combined," says a WHO fact sheet. It is one of the leading causes of death among young people. These numbers are just the successful suicides, not the attempted ones.

Thousands of people are dying each day because something has broken inside them. In many cases, with the right resources, what was broken could have been fixed.  You may want to read this blog post I wrote in 2007. I think it's pretty relevant still today: Suicide, not a disease, so no walkathons, ribbons, or research race.

Too many people have opinions about suicide. They may say that those who choose to die are cowards, unable to man-up and face the world. Others say that they are to be pitied. Others get angry at the person who died, because of the pain they left behind, feeling that the dead person took the easy way out. After my brother died, I was speaking to a priest who was president of the high school my sons attended at the time. As a Catholic, I know what the Church says about suicide. The priest asked if I wanted him to say a prayer at JP's grave. When I said something about the Church's view of suicide, this older man, well beyond retirement age, got angry and said, "Anyone who takes his life is ill. He died of an illness and that is not to be condemned in any way." I've never forgotten his words. Sadly, he died himself, suddenly, before he could say that prayer. But as someone who is not really religious, I took a lot of comfort from his words. Here was someone who understood.

How can you help reduce the suicide rate? Acknowledge that it happens. Talk about it. Don't dismiss the topic if it comes up. It may be unpleasant, but it's important. Often, when people find out that I have a brother who died young, they are shocked that I will tell him that he committed suicide. They aren't so much shocked about the suicide itself, but that I will openly say it. Why? Because it's an uncomfortable reminder that this occurs, even to people they know. But it has to be said. It wasn't all that long ago that the words "breast cancer" were whispered. Why should "suicide" be whispered?

The WHO offers suggestions on how you can help fight the stigma of mental illness and the risk of suicide. If you can do only one thing, you've done something important and may save a life.

On September 10, at 8 pm, please consider joining us in lighting a candle of hope.

It’s not the most wonderful time of the year

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! People are smiling and greeting each other in the store, lists are checked, cash registers are ringing and parents are asking each other “Did you find everything you need?” But if you look closely, it’s the adults who are smiling and anticipating the day to come; the children aren’t. They’re dreading it – or so a certain big box office supply store wanted you to think for several years as they ran this ad campaign. Because we’re not talking about Christmas, we’re talking about going back to school.

To me, September was always a reminder that my children were now another year older. Their birthdays never made me feel melancholy or nostalgic. But when they got dressed in their first-day-back-to-school clothes, my heart experienced a tug each and every year. To me, the crisp weather of fall reminds me that my children would again encounter new experiences and move another step towards independence, away from their father and me.

Since when did having our children around become such a chore? Of course, the parents who delight in having their children back in school and back into their routine do love their children very much, but it makes me sad to read every May and June comments like, “ugh, the kids are home from school now for a couple of weeks until day camp starts. What am I going to do with them?” And then the summer ends with delight that school is about to start yet again. Some of those comments are from parents who work outside of the house and who have to arrange daycare, but often the comments also come from stay-at-home parents who don’t have to worry about such issues.

To me, summers meant no routines other than perhaps sports practices and games. It meant not having to get the kids up out of bed and letting them wake up on their own. It meant not stressing about the kids getting to bed at a certain time or having to worry about making lunches. Getting homework done was in the past and in the future, not a concern now. It meant living at our own pace for two full months.

I wasn’t the perfect mother, far from it. My kids irritated me at times just as I irritated them. They annoyed me at other times, just as I annoyed them. There definitely were moments when I got angry and snarled at them to go find something to do. But there were other times when we were at the park or the kids were outside playing with a friend. Or, as befit for this generation, they were settled in the playroom with a bowl of usually forbidden snack food and a bunch of movies. And no-one cared about what time it was or where we had to be when.

Rainy days meant going out on the balcony in bare feet and trying to dance in between the raindrops. They also meant being trapped in the house sometimes and getting bored, leaving driving your sibling crazy as the only appealing option at hand. Breakfast could be pizza and supper cereal, just because we could and we had the time to do so.

Of course, we knew every summer that this freer time would end and reality would set back in, but until that day reached us, we enjoyed the magic that was ours.

No. To me, September isn’t the most wonderful time of the year. It’s a reminder that another year has passed and another has begun.

This Is News? Psychological Abuse as Bad as Physical Abuse

I get my news from various sources. In the morning, I listen to the radio, read the paper, and skim the Internet. All the news sources I consulted this morning had this story: Psychological Maltreatment Can Be as Harmful as Physical Abuse. My first reaction was, really? Wow. I'm glad that someone wrote a paper on that, otherwise we would never have known. But as I began writing this post, my sarcasm waned and I began to understand the importance of putting this out into the news.

Physical abuse is horrible and inexcusable. Thankfully, these days people tend to step in when they see it or learn of it. Children must be protected from those who are bigger and stronger - and there is never an excuse for causing physical harm to a child. But psychological abuse is another animal. It is often tolerated, brushed off, explained away. We close our ears and turn, because there seems like there isn't a lot we can do about it, we believe.

I knew a young mother who wasn't very nice to her children in public. She called them names, told them they were "retarded," and screamed at them. We never saw her physically hurt the children, but we definitely heard her go at it with her words. Many of us tried to talk to her about it, even people who worked with the children, but she didn't get it. She said that she loved the kids and they knew it. If we didn't approve of her child rearing, that wasn't her problem. There were no physical marks of violence. But you could see in their eyes, they were beaten down - I recognized it because I know what it's like. I often wonder if I could have done more and it haunts me sometimes.

After my initial "wow, thanks for telling us" gut reaction to the news, I began to think about it and understand why this is important news. It wasn't that long ago when people did not report sexual or physical abuse. It just wasn't talked about. If a child is going through something like that, once he or she starts trying to reach out to people - it's very difficult for them to understand why no one is trying to help. Now that the topic isn't as taboo as it used to be, help may be possible. As this type of abuse is talked about, the children may learn that it's not normal and it's not acceptable.

But psychological abuse isn't yet at that point. When a child experiences psychological abuse and no one steps in, it becomes normal. After all, if no one is trying to stop it, then - in the child's eyes - it must be ok and the adults who are doing this must be right. They must be stupid, ugly, fat, bad... But it's not right and it has to stop just as we want to stop other types of abuse. Maybe news like this will help raise sensitivity, maybe people will speak up. The problem is, what happens when you do and nothing changes?

The Lasting Effects of Tragedy

This recent tragedy in Colorado and the year marking of the violence in Norway last year had me thinking about how people are affected by violence, even if they aren't directly related.

Several years ago, I began writing a book about abuse. It wasn't the typical type of book that one might expect, like a tell-all or exploration into the minds of an abuser or victim. It was a look at how a single act by one person on one person can affect so many other people, even years later. I likened it to shattered glass. You drop a glass in the kitchen and it shatters. You clean it up as well as you can and you think you got it all. But, one day, you move the fridge and you step on a sliver that you missed. Or you find one in the corner one day while you're washing the floor. Slivers of glass can be found far away from the actual accident and can still cause pain weeks, months later.

The summer just as I finished grade 7, which would have been the last week of June, a classmate who lived around the corner from me was raped and murdered. Her body was left in a field not all that far from where we lived. At the time, it was only the second such crime in our sleepy suburb of Montreal. A year earlier, another girl about the same age had been raped and killed - as it turns out by the same person. He was only 17 years old, we found out later.

The day Debbie, my classmate, went missing I remember the crowd around her house and I heard a low-flying helicopter. It took over a day for Debbie's body to be found so there were a lot of helicopter passes as they searched. To this day, 37 years later, whenever I hear a low-flying helicopter, I'm transported back to the time. I automatically think a child may be missing.

I don't think of Debbie often and I don't know why I thought of her yesterday. We weren't friends, we were just people who passed each other in the hall at school, took the same school bus - that sort of thing. But every so often, her 14-year-old face flashes into my mind, as I imagine the faces of those who died on Thursday in the theatre massacre will flash in others' as time passes.


It's often said that people will forget and move on with life. And we do move on, but I don't think we do forget, even if we're only touched peripherally. Those splinters of glass can still be found, when we least expect it.