<p>sax—you make a valid point, there is no way to know if in fact this young man was depressed. those of us posting here are probably inferring that he was depressed as two-thirds of those who die by suicide suffer from a depressive illness.</p>
<p>^ Agreed. Which depends on how you define “depressive illness”, “underlying mental illness”, and who is defining it.</p>
<p>So, so sorry. Heartfelt sympathies to the parents, it really does not matter what you are as a professional . All that matters is that you are a parent. As one parent to another, my prayers go out to the bereaved parents.</p>
<p>Young people this age can be so impulsive. They seem to feel the sting of lifes ups and downs so much more than older adults. They seem to see things in terms of black and white with no gray area. Breakups, pregnancies, sexual problems/orientation, unexpected legal trouble, school and grade issues can all seem so overwhelming at this age. A little booze or pills in the mix and you get impulsive and unexpected acts from kids without any great underlying mental health issues.</p>
<p>This family, this boy, can be any of us at any time.</p>
<p>I am so, so sorry for all the people this touches.</p>
<p>I agree… there but for the grace of G-d go I</p>
<p>^I must say that at least once a day.</p>
<p>This is so terribly sad. I speak as someone who’s experienced intense suicidal ideation myself during a number of periods of my adolescent and adult life. My heart goes out to his family and friends.</p>
<p>As a child & adolescent psychiatrist I believe that one must consider suicide in this age group to be related to a serious mental illness until proven otherwise.</p>
<p>ClarkAlum. With all due respect I’m not sure it’s fair to label at all at this time. I worked at an emergency psych crisis /suicide prevention center for years with a m.a. in counseling (nope, not an MD but lots and lots of experience and background).</p>
<p>One of these Ivy schools with a recent suicide was found to have given a student a number of different drugs because he was having trouble concentrating.They layered on other drugd to treat the side effects of the first drug. The parents had no idea their student was taking all these meds. Physical problems (hormone levels off the chart for example) can mask themselves as mental health issues. </p>
<p>My point is education. Parents need to know that any kid this age can kill themselves if they are in a certain frame of mind and all the problems come together at the wrong moment.</p>
<p>"ClarkAlum. With all due respect I’m not sure it’s fair to label at all at this time. I worked at an emergency psych crisis /suicide prevention center for years with a m.a. in counseling (nope, not an MD but lots and lots of experience and background).</p>
<p>One of these Ivy schools with a recent suicide was found to have given a student a number of different drugs because he was having trouble concentrating.They layered on other drugd to treat the side effects of the first drug." ^^^^^^^</p>
<p>With all due respect I’ll stand by what I stated. Suicide in this age group is almost always related to an underlying mental illness. The example you give above only serves to reinforce this. Substance use and abuse are forms of mental illness. Many times adolescents and young adults self-medicate in various ways to try to alleviate symptoms of all kinds. The unsupervised use of multiple prescription medications for uses for which they were neither precribed nor indicated is often a sign of pathology. Polypharmacy with psychotropic medications can also unmask symptoms of underlying psychpathology. Difficulties concentrating can be due to many factors related to mental illness, whether ADHD, anxiety, stress reaction, even psychotic symptoms, and drug/alcohol use and/or abuse. </p>
<p>I’m surprised that someone with your background appears to trivialize the pervasiveness of mental illness and its relationship to suicide, especially in this age group (ref Surgeon General Satcher’s report on mental illness a decade ago). This is not about “labeling” but about recognizing that mental illness is ubiquitous and presents itself in many ways. Recognition of symptoms and warning signs is critical to prevention of suicide. </p>
<p>A premeditated suicide like this case, in which a note was written, and a plan carefully outlined (jumping off of the GW Bridge or the Empire State Bldg) indicates that this young man was in serious distress and anguish, clearly a sign of underlying mental illness, and not simply due to popping a Halcion or having a bad day. We don’t know what else was in the note, but I will guess that it describes the symptoms that this young man could not handle.</p>
<p>“With all due respect I’m not sure it’s fair to label at all at this time”
Unfair to label?? Sounds to me as if you are promoting the idea of mental illness as an undesirable trait. It’s an illness, not a character fault.</p>
<p>I took that to mean you might not want to make a diagnosis based on a newspaper article. With all due respect, I’ve lost track of what the disagreement is about.</p>
<p>I for one am not saying that mental illness does not carry a stigma or that suicide seems on the rise for certain age groups, but I find disturbing sometimes how we so quickly classify as illnesses and disorders a great majority of things in our lives.
I recently was watching a show about psychic kids, whose behavior was classified by the investigator (who happens to also be a psychiatrist) in one manner, but an average mental health professional would have classified it as oppositional behavior.
Not everything has an underlying mental illness or disorder, unless we are all suffering from some form of mental illness that we have not recognized yet. Sometimes you just don’t see a place for you in this world anymore, after considering all things in your life. That does not make you mentally ill necessarily.
If you suffer a traumatic accident that leaves you a quad, and you were earning your life as an artist, working with your hands, and you can not see yourself “rehabilitating” into accounting, and going to dialysis for the rest of your life, and been fed and dressed by an aide, thus decide to end that life, I don’t think that person was mentally ill, I think that person chose the path that he felt was best for him.
This young person MIGHT have been suffering from depression, we don’t know, but choosing a different end to his life than was envisioned for him, does not make him necessarily ill. I know many religious people will object to anyone choosing ending their own lives, but I personally don’t think it is objectionable in every single case and narrowing down every suicide to depression as a cause, is perpetuating the stigma of wrong doing when choosing how your life should end.
This young man’s action is appalling and surprising to many and we empathized with the parents, but I for one can’t say that his actions were wrong or that he must have been mentally ill or drugged, because that is the only way we can explain this action to ourselves to make sense of it.
I for one can not see the reason, for example, why someone in their 90’s would be subjected to a cardiac bypass or liver transplant, instead of just accepting that their path in this world has reached its culmination. We would accept this decision from an elderly person, but not from a younger person.
This is just my view of the world, not trying to criticize, but do find disturbing that a psych classification is readily available for almost anything.<br>
I hope the parents find comfort and spiritual peace.</p>
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<p>I think it’s probably good that we promote the idea that mental illness is undesirable.</p>
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Now this I do believe–I think all of us have some quirk, issue or whatever that if closely examined could be “labeled”.
ms–not sure what you meant but I agree that mental illness is undesirable just like diabetes or cancer are. But it is not something that one can choose to avoid, nor is it something to be punished for by society. Support, understanding and help is what is needed.</p>
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<p>My sentiments as well. Let’s offer the family of this young man our heartfelt sympathies. And in the event they are parents who have visited this forum, I would hope that we would respect their grief. </p>
<p>I have not stopped thinking of his family since we received the news from the Dean. I cannot begin to imagine putting one foot in front of the other if something like this happened with one of my children.</p>
<p>I don’t know about you, but I made sure to call my DD at school this week and remind her of how much we loved her.</p>
<p>mantori - I didn’t make myself clear. I feel that people frequently regard mental illness as something that should be discussed in hushed tones - similar to popular attitudes toward cancer about 50 years ago or AIDS more recently. Adding this particular burden of isolation certainly does nothing to help the person suffering from such illness. (Although frankly, I think I made myself quite clear in the last sentence of my previous post. But go ahead, pick and choose as you want.)</p>
<p>IVe - These young people who have recently taken their own lives were not 90yo end-stage multi-system failure patients, they were not quadriplegics, they were not facing years of unrelenting suffering or hardship to their families.</p>
<p>Clarklalum…not the first time nor the last that I have gladly disagreed with a psychiatrist. </p>
<p>I did find your remarks (#30) to my post to be both condescending and a bit pompous and I will let it go at that.</p>
<p>Again to this family and boy and to all others touched by suicide I am so sorry.</p>
<p>“I did find your remarks (#30) to my post to be both condescending and a bit pompous and I will let it go at that.”</p>
<p>Of course you did. I’ll let it go at that.</p>