Preventing Adolescent Suicide

Dave Capuzzi, Larry Golden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138415317
• eBook ISBN: 9781135059569
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1988. Many people absolutely reject suicide under any circumstances. However. most of us can sympathize with the suicidal motives. let's say. of an elderly person afflicted with terminal cancer. But it disturbs the core of our being that a child would find this life so empty of hope that death would be preferable. Teenagers are so full of pain. pleasure. sexuality. energy. curiosity. idealism. bravado. vulnerability. rebellion. and promise! This book comes to grips with the reality of adolescent suicide. In the book are fifteen chapters organized under five major parts.

PART I

PROBLEM

OF

ADOLESCENT

SUICIDE

CHAPTER 1

ADOLESCENT SUICIDE AN INTRODUCTION TO ISSUES AND INTERVENTIONS

Dave Capuzzi, Ph.D.

and

Larry Golden, Ph.D.

EDITORIAL ABSTRACT: The purpose of this chapteris to introduce the reader to issues and interventions connected with the topic of adolescent suicide and the prevention of adolescent suicide. The developmental problems of adolescence, personality, and behavioral disorders, dysfunctional relationships and societal provocations and pending catastrophes are overviewed to provide the reader with an understanding of the adolescent suicide problem in the United States. Predicting adolescent suicide is addressed through discussion of the myths connected with adolescent suicide, signs and symptoms and a presentation of the profile of the suicidal adolescent Prevention, crisis management, postvention, and approaches to counseling/therapy are also over-viewed to provide the reader with a point of departure for the focused follow-up chapters of this book.

Matt Reiser had a date with Cheryl Burress last Tuesday night in Bergenfield, N.J., near New York city, but at 6:30 Cheryl called to cancel. “We can’t get together tonight,” she told Reiser. “We’re going to visit Joe.” Reiser thought he knew what she meant. Joe Major, a friend of Cheryl’s, had fallen 200 feet to his death off the Palisades cliffs along the Hudson River last September in what police considered an alcohol-related accident, and Reiser figured that Cheryl was planning to visit Major’s grave that night, as she had many times before. Reiser was wrong.

Instead, Cheryl, 17, and her sister Lisa, 16, went driving around the Bergenfield area with two companions, Thomas Olton, 18, and Thomas Rizzo, 19. At about 3 a.m., the teenagers stopped at an Amoco station and bought $3 worth of gas for Olton’s brown Cámaro. They asked if they could take the hose from the station’s automobile vacuum cleaner, but the attendant refused.

It was a short drive from the gas station to Foster Village apartments, a housing complex. The place was well known. Garage No. 74, vacant at least a month, had been serving as a hangout where groups of Bergenfield teenagers came to drink and to smoke marijuana. The youngsters drove into the darkgarage, shut the door and locked it. They left the car idling, its windows open. Then they sat back and waited.

The steadily burning gasoline did its job, releasing deadly carbon monoxide fumes. Within an hour all four were dead. (Wilentz, 1987, pp. 12–13)

The story above appeared in the March 23,1987, issue of Time. The day after the bodies of the four teens were found, two more adolescent girls killed themselves by the same method. One of them, karen Logan, was found holding a stuffed animal and a rose.

Adolescent suicide has become a critical problem in the United States. Recent yearly estimates report as many as 7,000 completions and 400,000 attempts among the adolescent population in this country. Five years ago, suicide was the third leading cause of death among the 11 to 24 year age group. Now it is the second leading cause. Only accidents, usually automobile accidents, rank higher. Suicide among the nation’s youth, particularly white males, jumped 40 percent during a 10 year period, 1970–1980. The full extent of the adolescent suicide problem is difficult to quantify because many suicides are reported as accidents because of family embarrassment, religious beliefs, or community discomfort.

While the statistics that describe adolescent suicide can be interpreted in various ways, the fact that more and more young people are killing themselves can only be understood in one way: as a terrible waste.

UNDERSTANDING ADOLESCENT SUICIDE

Teenagers are just starting out in life. They are anxiously and excitedly planning for career or vocation and exploring relations with the opposite sex. A small minority are planning on a suicidal career! It disturbs the core of our being that a child would find life so empty of hope that death would be preferable.

While most adolescents accumulate a few psychic scars along the way to adulthood, most can cope with the stress of daily living. In an attempt to understand the contingencies which make some adolescents vulnerable to suicide, we will explore four factors: (a) developmental problems of adolescence, (b) personality and behavioral disorders, (c) dysfunctional relationships, and (d) societal provocations and pending catastrophes.

Developmental Problems of Adolescence

With the exception of infancy, no period is so fraught with change as adolescence. Forsaking the security of childhood, the adolescent grows with considerable ambivalence towards the awesome responsibilities of adulthood. School is no longer merely a place to learn and play, but has become the training ground for earning a living and mate selection. Home is no longer the source of endless sustenance and support, but is a place to leave, a trap to struggle free of. Sexual and physical maturity propels the child into the adult world. However, physical development belies the reality of emotional immaturity. Adolescents simply cannot bring sufficient perspective to the problems they face.

Suicidal youngsters are subject to the same stressful circumstances that all adolescents are, but more so. These at risk teens are less resourceful in their ability to cope. During times of stress, they obsess about suicide as an escape, devoting more and more energy to planning the details of the act.

The stressful events that precipitate a suicide may not be of overwhelming proportions. Such events are failure of a subject in school, rejection by a friend, a disappointing romance, or a family argument. Even pleasurable experiences can cue suicidal fantasies. For example, high school graduation, for many, symbolizes the transition to young adulthood and the initiation of a life more independent of other family members. Even though adolescents will tell friends and family that they are thrilled to graduate, they may be apprehensive.

For teens to indulge in suicidal fantasies is not abnormal. Further, normal adolescents are easily influenced by their peers. They are in search of an identity that fits. A youngster who is “barely getting by” is especiallyvulnerable when another person in the immediate community commits suicide. Therefore when a suicide occurs in a school, we can expect a rash of suicidal “copycats” to follow (Berman, 1986). These multiple suicides occurring in a brief time are called “clusters.”

Personality and Behavioral Disorders

In his masterpiece, Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse (1974) invited us to investigate the personality traits of individuals at risk of suicide, “Just as there are those who at the least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides, and who are always very emotional and sensitive develop at the least shock the notion of suicide.”

Why do some succumb and others survive, indeed thrive, under similar environmental conditions? The “suicide note” is but a morsel of information, what Pfeifer (1986) calls “iceberg” talk. The whole truth lies deeper and is more complex.

An understanding of the “suicidal personality” begins with an understanding of depression. The majority of suicidal individuals of all ages are basically depressed (Toolan, 1984). Depressed adolescents complain of feelings of sadness, isolation, fatigue, and boredom. They may have trouble getting up in the morning, cry easily, and daydream excessively. They may suffer from melancholia, a loss of pleasure in almost everything. Depressed individuals feel helpless, unable to change their life circumstances. The consequent feelings of rage are turned inwards. However, depression may be masked by overactivity, participation in a constant round of social activities, sexual promiscuity, or drug abuse (Emery, 1983).

Holinger and Offer (1982) suggested two models: (1) competition and failure, and (2) progressive isolation. According to the first model, some teenagers who fail in the competition to play sports, earn high grades, gain entrance to good colleges, or socialize with the “right” peers, seek relief in suicidal fantasies. The pressure to achieve academically, vocationally, and socially is one that is keenly felt by adolescents. In the competition for success, some teenagers will win, some will lose, and a few of these “losers” will become suicidal. The second model envisions a fragile, isolated adolescent who bases an assessment of personal inferiority on a narrow, and thereby, distorted perspective. “Nobody wants me,” becomes a pervasive theme. The individual becomes increasingly isolated and undefended against feelings of despair.

Poor problem solving ability is another characteristic of many suicidal adolescents. This trait is epitomized by a lack of resourcefulness in generating options, coping with a difficult relationship, or planning for the future.

A lack of problem solving skills is particularly troublesome in conjunction with another trait which is part of the suicidal pattern—total commitment to a relationship or a goal for the future. Suicidal adolescents develop a tunnel-visioned perspective. A relationship may become so important that other friendships are dropped; a goal may begin to dominate every decision. Commitment, total and unswerving, often becomes the theme for the patterning of daily, weekly, and monthly activities and priorities. When an important relationship ends or agoal becomes unachievable, self-esteem plummets, feelings are kept secret, achievement is roadblocked, and the behavioral repertoire becomes frozen in maladaptive patterns. The result is an escalation of stress and anxiety. Suicide becomes an extreme method of ending the crisis. The person can see no other way find relief at the time the suicide takes place (Berman, 1986).

The United States is experiencing an epidemic of drug use and abuse. Drug abuse goes “hand-in-glove” with suicide. Opportunities to experiment with marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs are presented to fifth and sixth graders in most school in this country. Suicide prone adolescents are especially vulnerable to peer pressure; it is common for parents of suicidal adolescents to report that their child seemed to lose control and judgment in the presence of peers and that they dreaded the arrival of their child’s friends for an afternoon visit or a weekend stay. Since problem-solving ability, self-esteem, communication skills, etc., which may already be inadequate, are never enhanced through the use of drugs, suicide prone adolescents become even higher risks as drug experimentation and dependency increases.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, a suicide attempt is seen as an acting out of sadomasochistic excitement (Furman, 1984). Suicidal adolescents provoke rejections and misconstrue the words and behavior of others. Violence and mutual hurting provide gratification and death may take the place of surrender or orgasm (Furman, 1984).

Dysfunctional Relationships

No evidence exists that suicide is genetically inherited. Further, children have committed suicide when no apparent psychopathology is within the family. That is, some of these families are normal. However, suicide does tend to run in families, just as physical and sexual abuse does. Members of families share an emotional climate since parents model coping skills as well as high or low self-esteem. According to McAnarney (1979), “In societies where family ties are close, suicidal rates are low and and conversely, where families are not close, suicidal rates are high.” A close relationship with parents has been found to be inversely related to depressive mood in adolescence (Kandel & Davies, 1982).

Poor Communications

Typically, families of suicidal youngsters are troubled by dysfunctional communication. These families report great difficulty in communicating clearly and consistently with one another (whether between parents or between parent and child). Even when the family eats breakfast or dinner together, quite often the meal is eaten in silence or with attention directed to a television program. Very often, parents have not modeled a positive, articulate communication style for their children to imitate. Parents may have little knowledge of the tribulation experienced by their adolescent child. The adolescent may have difficulty talking with peers and siblings; talking with parents may seem unthinkable. As time passes, the easier thing to do is to keep feelings buried. The suicide comes as a surprise.

A striking feature of communication in “suicidogenic families” is the presence of overt and covert messages about suicide and death (Richman, 1984). Examples of overt messages would be, “I wish you’d never been born,” or “Croaking was the best thing your father ever did for this family.” Covert messages, of course, are more difficult to decipher. According to Richman (1984), the isolation and loneliness of the suicidal individual is invariably related to unconscious family rules. Both an absence of any warm, parental figure with whom to identify and a sense of aloneness exists. The individual is trapped within the boundaries of the family while intimacies with persons outside are seen as a threat and, therefore, forbidden. Consequently, many suicidal adolescents have a relatively small network of social support.

Separation and Loss

Social isolation makes these adolescents vulnerable to the loss of any love object, which may trigger the suicide attempt (Rice, 1987). These youngsters are not only vulnerable to loss, they are likely to experience it. In fact, suicidal adolescents are more likely to have experienced the loss of a parent through separation or divorce by their twelfth year than “normals” (Berman, 1986). In what Litman and Diller (1985) called the “classical crisis case,” even an individual with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Part I: Problem of Adolescent Suicide
• Part II: Profile of The Attempter
• Part III: Assessing Lethality
• Part IV: Prevention and Intervention
• Part V: Legal Issues
• Index
• About the Authors