This year’s most trendy legislation is about suicide. Surfacing in Congress and in many state legislatures, suicide bills call for grants to various agencies, the opening of centers, the promotion of awareness programs, and putting courses and strategies into the public schools. These bills talk vaguely about prevention, but there is customarily nothing whatever in the bills to do with prevention. They are designed only to provide costly services that require large and growing amounts of taxpayers’ money. These expensive experiments are merrily moving forward without any evidence that they are beneficial, and without the legislators hearing from witnesses who could explain why the programs would be counterproductive. Many people believe the bills have no merit whatsoever in preventing teen suicide and are actually harmful.
A National Conference on Prevention and Interventions in Youth Suicide was held this past summer in Oakland, CA. If any one message came out of this conference, it was that there is no clear and consistent evidence that suicides can be prevented by any of the programs now being offered. Dr. David Shaffer, director of the Division of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University and one of the conference participants, reported that he had made a major review to identify studies which have used reasonable methodologies to evaluate the success, or otherwise, of youth-suicide prevention activities. He concluded, “We have identified no such studies.”
The TV networks broadcast four dramatizations of teen suicide, with much advance publicity stating that they were intended to promote public awareness of the problem. They even offered coordination with local community services. Afterwards, several studies were made comparing teen suicides before and after the programs with the expected suicide rate. Results showed that suicides increased significantly during the ten days after three of the four television programs. The conclusion of the researchers was, “Television programs are effective in publicizing the availability of services. However, they do not reduce the number of suicide attempts and may, in fact, increase them. They also appear to have a provocative effect on suicide deaths.”
Anyone who watched the ABC-TV program called “Surviving” could easily understand why. The program dramatized teen suicide as romantic and painless (a customary false belief of teen suicides) and the parents as totally devastated (a purpose of many teen suicides). Now let’s look at suicide courses in the public schools, which are becoming increasingly frequent, established either by state legislation or on the school’s own initiative. Is this a good or bad idea?
At the Suicide Conference in Oakland, the experts reported that there has been almost no evaluation of in-school programs. Many experts believe that suicide courses in the schools are sources of harm. Such courses may be designed to identify signs of potential suicides, particularly depression. But many experts think this approach is bad because depression affects 1,000 to 3,000 times more teenagers than suicide does. To link the more common problem of depression to the uncommon problem of suicide may serve to promote referrals to agencies (thereby increasing the need for tax-funded services), but it may also introduce the notion of suicide to teenagers who were not suicidal at all.
Can we afford to take this chance? The suicide curricula in the classroom really consist of group therapy by unlicensed psychologists, an extremely dangerous exercise. It is clear that the prominent display of the news of a suicide leads to an increase in suicide deaths during the period immediately following. There is also the phenomenon known as suicide clusters, where children imitate what they have seen others do. Studies show that young suicide attempters have had more close contacts with those who had made a suicide attempt than nonsuicidal teenagers.
Classroom discussions will surely raise awareness of the topic. But we must also consider the real possibility that, in so doing, these discussions will, as the conference report stated, “introduce de novo suicide into the range of contemplated behaviors for the teenage pupil.” In laymen’s language, that means, “put ideas into their head” that weren’t there until a classroom discussion required them to focus on suicide and discuss it (perhaps even role-play about it) as though it were a rational and normal response to circumstances. Teen suicide is not an area where government-funded personnel or teachers should tread. They are more likely to do harm than good.
