Editor’s Note: September is National Suicide Prevention Month, and Wednesday was World Suicide Prevention Day. This is the second part in a three-part series looking at youth suicide. The Indiana Youth Institute April report on “Youth Suicide in Indiana” suggests some minority groups may be more prone to suicide than others. The report states that historically Hispanic youth are more likely to report attempting suicide than their peers, but in the 2011 survey, black youth showed high rates of attempting suicide. Another group at risk of attempting suicide includes those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The IYI report states, “These youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. Even those youth who are questioning their sexuality are three times more likely to attempt suicide, especially if coming out is likely to cause family conflict.” Bowen Center Corporate Training Coordinator Huntter Randall said, “If we’re speaking to our communities, if we’re speaking about our communities and we have racial mixtures ... from county to county, do we really want to have a discussion about targeting different shades of the skin, or do we want to have a discussion making sure we get this stopped across the board?” Psychologist Dr. Richard Ruhrold, Bowen Center senior vice president, clinical services, said, “One of the risks is, if we focus too much on a certain ethnic or racial group being high risk, then we’re failing to paint a complete picture because suicide risk among youth knows no color, it knows no ethnic background.” “If it’s youth, it’s all of our kids,” Randall noted. “They’re our kids so we have to do something.” As far as the LGBT youth, Ruhrold said there are some groups that will be at a greater risk, and kids struggling with their sexual identity would be included. “We also have to think about some of the most common events that tend to trigger suicide attempts among youth, and there are quite a few,” Ruhrold said. Two triggers mentioned often in studies of teen suicide are bullying and the end of an important relationship. “Adolescents are prone to black-and-white thinking, all-or-nothing thinking, even more now than in the past because we live in an era when technology dominates our culture and technology is based on binary principles. Binary code is at the heart of every computer and smartphone. On/off. Yes/no. In a technological society, people tend to think more technologically – on/off, black/white, yes/no, all or nothing,” he explained. If a young girl in a relationship with a guy is convinced he’s the only one for her, and he dumps her, Ruhrold said, she’s probably not going to be thinking there are other people out there for her. She’s probably thinking, “my life is over.” “Because in this binary thinking world of on/off, yes/no, all/nothing, she’s thinking, ‘now that he’s dumped me, I’ve lost the one and only love of my life. My future looks empty so my life is over,’” he said. After a relationship is over and a person thinks their life is over, it’s not a huge leap to thinking about how a person may make it come true, Ruhrold said. As for bullying, he said, in the era of social media it takes on whole new proportions. “They may have been struggling with something, and it got plastered all over social media, and it went all over their school, and they become so afraid to even show their face among their peers, that they consider suicide as a way to escape a situation they can’t see another way out of,” Ruhrold said. Awareness of what youth are going through is important, but Randall said that can’t just be dropped in the parents’ lap. “We can’t exclusively drop it back on the parents. It’s bigger than that. So we have to, as a community, as a society, become aware of one another, whether that’s with youth, adults or the elderly or whoever they may be. We have to be more aware of one another so that we can pick up where those people who would have, should have, could have – didn’t. ... We have to get back to a place where we’re all watching out for one another,” Randall said.
