Suicide permanent fix to temporary problem

Your Letters By Your Letters The Post-Standard
on May 06, 2012 at 3:00 AM

To the Editor:

The recent suicide of football star Junior Seau serves as a reminder that self-determined death cuts across all social, economic and racial distinctions. In spite of this nation's standard of living, the United States ranks in the fiftieth percentile among all nations that maintain suicide statistics. Junior Seau's death raises two questions relevant to many among us.

Why do people commit suicide? While there is no simple answer to this question, it is accurate to say that some people commit suicide because of rage (not anger); others because of aloneness (not loneliness); and still others because of despair (not depression). Carl Jung and Albert Camus agreed on yet another cause of suicide: the loss of meaning in one's life.

How is suicide prevented? The poet Mary Karr has written, ''Your head's a bad neighborhood, don't travel there alone.'' Despairing, suicidal people tend to isolate and recycle their own hopeless thoughts unchallenged. The ancient wisdom, ''This too shall come to pass'' doesn't occur to them. There would be far fewer than this country's annual 50,000 suicides if those who accomplish them would wait just one more day.

Nearly every suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. If you are contemplating suicide you owe it to yourself and those you love to have a conversation with a mental health professional, personal physician, minister, priest, rabbi or imam.

Max Malikow