Brightest Lights During The Darkest Times, Part 2

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article isn’t being written, or even approached, with journalistic structure or professionalism in mind. The topic is suicide: awareness and (hopefully) avoidance or reduction. The statistics and data listed are gleaned from various sources and listed at the end. The rest of this is the result of input and comment from family, friends and coworkers along with a huge subjective filter that runs from my brain to my fingers – with a detour through my heart. It’s my hope – throughout the process of researching, gathering comments, collating and writing all of this – that it has some positive impact on the readers. I hate to think it, but some of the readers may be in a dark place and contemplating suicide to resolve their problem(s). Other readers may know someone who is thinking about committing suicide (statistically speaking, that’s almost guaranteed).  HOPEFULLY, some of this… any part of it, will help.  Last item: Some of this, because so much of it is just my articulated outlook, might aggravate you, anger you or insult you. None of that is my intent and I beg you to continue reading past anything that you don’t like to see if I suitably explain myself.

Part One: Background

Part Two: Suicide in the United States

Part Three: Bright Lights in the Darkest Times

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Suicide in the United States

According to the research I’ve been able to do, suicide is the 10^th leading cause of death in the United States today. There are approximately 44,200 suicides per year and for every successful suicide, there are an estimated 25 attempts. Do the math: that means there are an approximate 1.1 million suicide attempts each year in our country. The research also revealed that men are three and a half times more likely to die by suicide than women and that Caucasian males account for roughly 70% of the suicides committed in 2015.

According to the National Institute for Mental Health, suicide holds the following rankings as the cause of death in the specified age groups:

            3^rd leading cause of death for ages 10-14

            2^nd leading cause of death for ages 15-34

            4^th leading cause of death for ages 35-44

            5^th leading cause of death for ages 45-54

            8^th (or lower) cause of death for ages 55 and over.

If you take a look at those bits of information, I guess it’s no surprise that suicide is the 2^nd leading cause of death for those in the 15-34 age group. Think about it – that’s when children are becoming young adults and having to learn how to handle their own lives and all the challenges that can come with it. They are then young adults who have to manage their own lives and not all of them have been properly reared or trained to do that. Becoming autonomous and independent isn’t something that you’re instantly capable of – it takes active parenting to create a successful autonomous adult. Then there are jobs to compete for, jobs to get, jobs to perform in, jobs to get laid off from and – sometimes - jobs to get fired from. None of that is stressful, right? None of that would strain finances or relationships – two of the things that we identified as major causes of suicidal behavior – right?

And is it any wonder that suicide drops in the rankings as a cause of death for those over 55? By then we’ve learned how precious life can be and how fleeting it is. We tend to appreciate each day more; find hope and beauty in things younger folks completely ignore and have learned to better manage whatever challenges come our way. Add that to the fact that as we get older there are more things that cause our death (due to aging, cancer, disease, etc) and it’s no wonder that suicide drops down that list.

The last data point I found, or made note of, was the risk rate based on race. If you look at the risk for suicide, American Indians/Alaskan Natives are at the top followed down the risk list (for males) by Caucasians, Hispanics, Blacks, Pacific Islanders and Asians. For females the list goes in the same order except at the bottom where Asian or Pacific Islander women are more likely to commit suicide than black women.

Go back and read that information about how many suicides are committed each year and how many are ATTEMPTED. With over one million people a year trying to kill themselves, wouldn’t you think this would be getting more attention? And wouldn’t you think that in the year 2017 we, as a society, would have a better way of recognizing those who might be suicidal and better systems in place to help them? Prevent them? Give them hope?

Now, before I move on, I want to talk about police and military suicides for a moment. I’ve seen many advertisements and public notices about the (on average) 22 military veterans who commit suicide each day. That’s (on average) 8,030 per year. While many folks get moved by the 22-per-day number, it takes on a different meaning, and gives it different weight, when you look at the over-8,000-per-year number. That’s a big number. There are towns in our country that don’t have a population of 8,000. There are small cities that don’t have a population of 8,000.  Think about that. Let that sink in. A small city’s worth of people commit suicide each year. 8,030 veterans on average.

Let’s be clear though: that’s not 8,030 MORE added to the national statistics. That’s 8,030 OF the national statistics. I’m not sure that makes it better. That means that veterans make up roughly 18% - nearly one fifth – of all suicides committed in the United States each year. That kind of explains two of the data pieces I was able to glean from my research. If such a large percentage of suicides are military veterans, then it’s no surprise that 70% of them are Caucasian (the largest demographic in our military) and that it’s the second leading cause of death for people between the ages of 15-34. After all, many of those veterans aren’t retired veterans; they are people who served their term of service and then got out. That means they could have gotten out somewhere between the ages of 21-24 (on average) and then have to cope with everything they saw, did and experienced during their military service time. If it takes a couple years to catch up to them; to become more than they can manage, it puts them in their mid-to-late twenties when they take their own life.

That’s the military side. What about police suicides? First off, recognize that a large portion of law enforcement professionals are also military veterans. That should be no surprise. These folks are driven to serve and comfortable in the military / para-military structure of the work. Second, there is some correlation between the jobs the two different professions do. There’s a reason so many military deployments are part of a “police action.” The risk is real. The job requires facing that risk and managing it while you attain a goal. The goal is either keeping the peace or enforcement of some kind.

On average, the United States loses a law enforcement professional to duty death (killed in the line of duty) at the rate of (roughly) one every other day. That’s about 180 deaths per year although for the past few years we’ve been a bit below that.  That’s a good thing. One line of duty death in a year is one too many, but they aren’t all avoidable and, as mentioned above, risk is part of the job.  Minimizing it and managing it are also part of the job.

But we’re also losing more than one hundred officers per year to suicide. The cause… what drives those officers to take their own lives may or may not be work related, but we still lose them. The Thin Blue Line gets even thinner for their loss and we all – the family of law enforcement – feel the loss of a family member. From the website, Badge of Life (BOL), which has been performing an on-going study of police suicide, we lost the following numbers of officers per year to suicide:

• 2008 – 141 suicides
• 2009 – 143 suicides
• 2012 – 126 suicides
• 2016 – 108 suicides

While the numbers appear to be coming down, just like with line of duty deaths, one is too many. There has been much debate about those numbers as well. Some other websites and/or organization report numbers as high as 500 per year for police suicides. The BOL study applied more control and data confirmation to their study to reach the number for 2008 and has continued to use those same controls for each of the follow on years that they published numbers.

If you take a look at the 2008 number though – 141 – that equals 17 suicides per 100,000 officers. Compare that to the national average of 13 suicides per 100,000 individuals. Look again. Let it sink in. Police officers… law enforcement professionals are 30% more likely to commit suicide that the “average” person… at least in 2008. Using the 2016 number of 108 suicides, which is 23.5% lower than it was in 2008, the rate is 13 per 100,000 officers – or about the same as the national average.

Have we lowered that number by detecting those at risk and giving them better support / assistance? Have we been teaching better stress management techniques? Has an increased level of professional solidarity in the face of an antagonistic media industry made us stronger? More aware of each other’s needs?  We may never know the answer, but it is a good thing when our loss is reduced.

Pondering that data and all of the foregoing, made me wonder what keeps some people from committing suicide. If our numbers in law enforcement are going down, that’s good – but what can we do to bring them down further? If our numbers as a nation are going up, what can we do to slow and reverse that trend? What is it that makes some people – who are in a really bad place in their mind and heart – stop and think in a positive fashion about life?

That question gave me pause. We’ve all been in the dark places. Everyone I know has had some period of their life where it wasn’t peaches and cream. In fact, it was a sh*t sandwich without the bread and they were trying to figure out what the reason was for going on. I’ve been there. Haven’t we all? When you wonder just how much worse it can get, IF it can get any worse at all… and wondered what the point was of keeping on? Why keep fighting? Why not just give up?  There are reasons…

My company CEO was nice enough to send out a companywide email and ask that very question: when you’re really feeling down, what is it that brings you back up? What keeps you positive? What puts a smile on your face? What helps ease the pain? (Quite a few folks named various types of alcoholic drinks in joking response. That was NOT what I was looking for!)

Stand by for part three of this series…