WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress on Thursday easily passed a bill to help prevent teen suicide, legislation named for a senator's son who took his own life a year ago this week.
... The bill is named in memory of Garrett Smith, son of Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith. He killed himself in his college apartment one year ago on Wednesday, one day before his 22nd birthday.
He had suffered from bipolar disorder and, his father said in an astonishingly raw speech to the Senate earlier this year, felt "pain and despair so potent that he sought suicide as a release."
... More than 30,000 Americans kill themselves each year and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for people aged 10-24. In the few weeks since Smith introduced this bill, one other lawmaker, Kansas Republican Rep. Todd Tiahrt, also lost a teenage son to suicide. Luke Tiahrt was 16 years old.
Some may recall that of the 2 firearms deaths of people I knew directly, the first was the suicide of the 13-year-old son of a beau of mine. The boy was disabled and depressed, particularly over a problem with a recent surgery -- i.e. a discrete event, a temporary situation -- and killed himself with one of the household hunting weapons (a couple of years before I met the father). As is common in such situations, the marriage broke down not long afterward. It was over 25 years ago, I was considerably younger than the father, and my relationship with him lasted only the short time I lived in the small community where this happened, and I don't recall whether he discussed this much with me. I do know that the younger daughter ran away from home in her mid-teens and had not been heard from again, last I heard. And I think that all of their lives would have been quite different if the rifle the son shot himself with had been inaccessible to him.
I don't believe that anyone else I have known directly has ever committed suicide. A close friend's schizophrenic and very unhappy brother did leave the hospital he had been admitted to and walk in front of a train a few years ago, although no one knows whether his death was intentional. Suicide by train is a good deal less common than suicide by firearm, interestingly.
The bill encourages states to develop prevention strategies and identify what works best to prevent youth suicides. Grants would also be available to improve mental health services on college campuses.
Adolescent suicide in particular is a serious problem, not a tin-foil hat issue.
Because suicide among young people in particular is often an impulsive act, allowing them ready access to means of suicide that are particularly easy to use and particularly effective -- firearms -- should surely be condemned.
Some brief background to the problem and approaches to solving it:
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/165/5/634In Canada, suicide rates among First Nations people are 3 to 4 times higher than in the general population. The low level of "social integration" (family and community disorganization and breakdown, absence of opportunity, etc.) in those communities is an obvious causal factor.
I'm not sure what point good old Garry Breitkreuz MP and his journalist mouthpiece are making in this article:
http://www.garrybreitkreuz.com/publications/Article143.htmbut it seems worth noting (if there is a grain of truth in what he says) that compliance with firearms legislation (including rules requiring safe storage and rules about who may not legally possess firearms) appears to be low in First Nations communities in Canada. On the other hand, firearms ownership rates are obviously higher in those communities than in the urban centres where a majority of Canadians live:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/committees/jula/evidence/129_95-05-09/jula129_blk101.htmlthe high rate of firearms ownership among the Yukon
population. An Angus Reid poll suggests 67% of Yukoners own firearms, compared to 23% in southern Canada.
(Unfortunately, much of what I'm finding in relation to this question is largely written from the plainly racist / anti-gun control angle evident in the first article quoted.)
So there we are again ... ya got those
root causes, and ya got the firearms that people, including children, use to kill themselves while we're all waiting for the root causes of their problems to be addressed ...
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