Suicide: Unseen Public Health Crisis

Longtime political consultant Ron Oliver divides his life into before Aug. 31, 2013, and after. That’s the morning he discovered that his wife of 31 years, Floy, had hanged herself in the garage of their North Little Rock home. “Since this happened to me, I wonder now when I read obituaries how many of them might have been suicides,” Oliver said last week. “Before, I never thought about it.” Some of them undoubtedly are. Suicide is the 10th most common cause of death in the United States, and Arkansas’ rate of suicide, 17.4 per 100,000 residents in 2014, is 30 percent higher than the national average of 13.4. In Arkansas, suicide is as common as traffic fatalities and three times as common as homicide. But both of those causes of death are reported routinely, while self-harm is not, making suicide seem far more rare than it really is. In any given year, according to the American Association of Suicidology, 147 Americans know someone who died by suicide, and 18 of them are intimately affected by a suicide. The impact, then, spreads far beyond the individual or household and into the workplace, where employers need to be prepared for work disruption. Families rarely reveal suicide in paid obituaries — Oliver didn’t — and news organizations are selective in when and how they report suicides. The Associated Press, whose reporting policies are widely adopted by member newspapers, “does not cover suicides or suicide attemp...
Source: Arkansas Business - Health Care - Category: American Health Source Type: news