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While someone screaming in the darkness may not be able at that point to reach a different level where the light of knowledge could penetrate to offer rays of hope, people who are not caught in some seemingly endless web of lost hope CAN educate themselves on a critically important piece of information about those at highest risk for suicide:
Stress, abuse damages childhood genes
Studies show that genes for suicide not only exist, but that they are not nearly as likely to be activated in people who did not suffer severe stress from trauma in their earliest developmental months and years of life.
That means that even though a person might appear to be living in a ‘grown up’ body when suicide thoughts, feelings or the act itself appears in their life – the damage done from changes in physiological development during extreme early traumatic stress is very often the destructive weapon that actually has triggered the entire suicide slide into seemingly unbreachable misery.
All trauma-triggered changes in infant-child development are in themselves signals that the early environmental conditions were malevolent. People at a point in their lives where suicide can appear as an ONLY option know in their very BODY that much in the world is very, very wrong. We need to understand that a little one’s body can grow to include trauma within it as surely as a tree might grow to incorporate a piece of wire that was tied around it when it was much, much younger in the world.
In fact I seriously doubt that suicide can show up in a person’s life as an option or reality without there having been a dangerous, toxic, traumatic breakdown in such a person’s earliest life during critical stages of development. As research is showing, it is at these earliest stages that genes for suicide become activated. Further, through epigenetic changes the risk for suicide related to genes can be passed down through future generations.
To address suicide the arms of caring, knowledgeable and informed, compassionate and wise community people must be securely wrapped around such a deeply wounded person for a lifespan. Love and caring support needs to be present – near and reachable – in the form of a living human chain of rescue and resource that not only offers immediate help when needed to those living in a world where hope has been so elusive that it has barely existed at all, but also makes sure that the strength of this companionship-in-truth is ALWAYS dependably available.
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The erosion of culture and community, of society and civilization leaves a terrible, terrifying, overwhelming burden of suffering on survivors of early trauma and abuse that really belongs to the outside world that fosters and allows traumatic stress to inflict unspeakable misery on the most vulnerable members of our species.
- Every 14.2 minutes someone in the United States dies by suicide.
- Nearly 1,000,000 people make a suicide attempt every year.
- 90% of people who die by suicide have a diagnosable and treatable psychiatric disorder at the time of their death. [My note: One could safely say that MOST so-called ‘mental illness’ can be directly tied to infant-early childhood abuse and trauma – see: Center for Disease Control – Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study
- Most people with mental illness do not die by suicide.
- Recent data puts yearly medical costs for suicide at nearly $100 million (2005).
- Men are nearly 4 times more likely to die by suicide than women. Women attempt suicide 3 times as often as men. Click here to view.
- Suicide rates are highest for people between the ages of 40 and 59. Click here to view.
- White individuals are most likely to die by suicide, followed by Native American peoples. Click here to view.
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List of Countries by Suicide Rates
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Study: US Suicide Rate Rises, Falls With Economy
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The 15 Most Suicidal Cities In America
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Why the Happiest States Have the Highest Suicide Rates
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National Child Abuse Statistics: “Children are suffering from a hidden epidemic of child abuse and neglect. Every year 3.3 million reports of child abuse are made in the United States involving 6 million children; that’s because reports can include multiple children. The United States has the worst record in the industrialized nation – losing five children every day due to abuse-related deaths.”
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