YSPP Press Releases

Letter to the Editor: An opinion from a survivor

by Jonathan Manheim, Bainbridge Island
November 8, 2004

Up until a few years ago, like most people, I knew very little about suicide. In spite of the fact that my wife’s grandfather and cousin had taken their own lives, I found the subject of suicide dark and uncomfortable and I was blissfully ignorant of the scope of the problem and the reasons people chose to end their lives. That all changed for me on July 11, 2001 when my son Garth died by suicide at the age of sixteen.

Garth was the product of a whole and loving family. He had two sisters, an extended family of grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. He did not do drugs or drink alcohol. He loved tennis, video games, writing, chess, and fantasy novels. He had two parents who loved him as much as it was possible to love a child.

Garth’s death was a devastating blow to all of us. We all cast about for the reasons, since none were obvious. . His mother and I knew, that Garth was deeply dissatisfied with himself, and in a peculiar way we could not define, he seemed singularly ill-prepared to face modern life. The ordinary disappointments of his interactions with the world deeply disturbed him and generated great anger and self-disgust, out of proportion to the importance that they seemed to have to us.

We realized that Garth probably suffered from clinical depression. What we didn’t realize was how dangerous that was, and we did not get him psychiatric help. We know now that he was contemplating suicide for at least a year before he actually accomplished it, and we face this knowledge with great bitterness and regret. Unfortunately, Garth chose to reveal none of his suicidal thoughts with us, his friends, teachers, or anyone else.

Garth was by no means unique. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among the 15-24 age group. Since 1950, the suicide rate among young white men has tripled, and among young white women it has doubled. Suicide takes more than 30,000 lives a year in the US alone, making it the 11 th leading cause of death. Twice as many people die of suicide than of AIDS each year. This is not just a problem in the US, suicide is an epidemic problem around the world.

Suicide represents a serious global health issue. It is rooted in mental illness, chiefly the poorly-understood mood disorder we call clinical depression, but suicide rates are also high among sufferers of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and alcoholism. The good news is that these disorders are clinical in nature and treatable through medication and counseling. The bad news is that we are sadly lacking in the requisite knowledge we need to systematically diagnose and treat these disorders and the result of that ignorance is the appalling suicide rate I’ve outlined here. To be sure, we have made great progress in recent years, but much work needs to be done before we can significantly reduce the suicide numbers and save lives like Garth’s.

There are many organizations that seek to provide education and support services with the goal of reducing the suicide rate, including the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) ,, National Alliance for the Mentally ILL (NAMI), and the Youth Suicide Prevention Program (YSPP) of Washington State. My own focus is on the clinical side. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has a research program that provides grant money for independent groups studying various clinical aspects of the suicide problem. AFSP is only able to raise about $7 million per year to cover all of its programs, of which about $1.5 million goes to the research grant program. Compare that to the more than $500 million the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated over the last four years to help fight AIDS, or the $100 million the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation raised last year, and you get a sense that our willingness to support research into the root causes of suicide is way out of proportion to the size of the problem. We must change that.

There are two things that need to happen right now if we are to significantly reduce the suicide rate. One is that we need to increase, by several orders of magnitude, the funding we give to both educational, support, and clinical research areas that affect mental illness and suicide. The second is that we need to change the way we think about mental illness and suicide. We need to stop thinking of these disorders as character flaws, and start thinking of them as diseases, and no more than we would tell a diabetic to “snap out of it”, neither should we expect that of a depression sufferer. By doing these two things, we can finally make progress on this huge global health problem of mental illness and suicide.

This November 20 will be National Survivors of Suicide Day. Every year, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention sponsors this nationwide event to provide an opportunity for the survivor community to come together for support, healing, information and empowerment. There will be conferences held in dozens of cities on that date and will all be linked by a live national broadcast by satellite and on the web. Our local conference will be held at the University of Washington’s Bothell campus. If you are interested in participating in this event, or would just like more information, go to the Youth Suicide Prevention Program website at www.yspp.org.

Jonathan Manheim
Bainbridge Island
November 8, 2004

Download release as PDF (14k)