'LEST WE FORGET THE PEOPLE..........AND BUILD A TOWER !' Monday July 9, 2007

DADSINDISTESS INC. COFFS HARBOUR REMAINS IN NEED OF ASSISTANCE.
Compiled and Written,( as one who was at the edge.)
By Colin Spratt.

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Forum writer and Moderator.


SUICIDE PREVENTION IN MEN WOMEN AND TEENS and would you believe ,...Kids!
It is the horrific pain they suffer , life holds no life , it becomes an existence , not real living.

We kill ourselves more often than we kill each other. If that surprises you, it's no wonder. Suicide hides behind whispers. Newspapers rarely write about it. Authorities cover it up. As if by turning our faces, we could make it go away. It hasn't. Suicide has outpaced homicide for at least 100 years. Few paid attention - until now.

IT WAS A WHOPPER of a backup - even by City standards. Traffic stretched for 10 kls, snaking through the city in both directions of a ribbon of steaming cars and frustrated drivers. YET WHY FRUSTRATED?
Few would ever find out what the trouble was that day in April. A 21-year-old woman had pulled over on the High- Rise Bridge, stepped out of her car and climbed over the guardrail of the 105 METRE-high span.

Police shut down the bridge. As they tried to talk her out of jumping, she inched over the side until she dangled in midair, far above the surrounding treetops. There, framed by the gritty smokestacks, she began to lose her grip on the steel. The woman screamed and the officers dove forward.

Fingers closed around her arms - bruising flesh, desperate for a hold. As her weight threatened to pull them down with her, the officers formed a human chain, one locked on to the next, until they slowly muscled her back from the brink.

That high-drama moment was one of thousands of suicide attempts that take place every year in AUSSIE LAND Most unfold more privately - in shuttered homes, quiet backyards, lonely woods.

Too often, those who try finish the job. In an average week, at least three of our neighbors die by their own hands.


Suicide: The mere word has the power to make most of us shudder. Steeped in taboo and shrouded by silence, it has taken a terrible toll.

Now, after a long history of guesses at the carnage, suicide is coming out of the darkness.

For the second year in a row, a handful of states, including NSW CAG have taken part in a national survey that's yielding the most comprehensive look ever at how Australians die. Reports were tracked down from police, medical examiners and emergency rooms across this country alone.


FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT LONG READERS, PLEASE REMEMBER TO LOOK FOR EARLY SIGNS IN YOUR OWN FAMILY, AND FRIENDS. CHANGES WHICH SEEM ODD , KEEPING TO THEMSELVES , LOW MOOD AND DEPRESSION. BROKEN RELATIONSHIPS, AND LOSS OF COPING SKILLS. Thank you for proceeding this far. cs


In other places in our world.

In 2004,in America alone the most recent year of complete records, there were nearly twice as many suicides as homicides. Nationwide, 17,357 people were killed by another person; 32,439 killed themselves.

No doubt, the gap is even wider. The survey counted only clear-cut cases. Many experts believe the real number of suicides is double that: close to 60,000 a year.

So many more people go right to the edge. Roughly 65,000 turn up at hospitals in Australia every year after trying to do themselves in; thousands upon thousands more make an attempt, survive and keep quiet about it.

OUR role in the survey gave the best snapshot yet of our own backyard. Across the state, homicide claimed 377; suicide officially took 816. 117 to homicide, 170 to suicide.

Is suicide an epidemic? Hardly. According to a 2002 report by the National Academy of Sciences, rates have held steady for 50 years. Most of us cling to life. We climb to our feet after the toughest blow. But sooner or later, we will know someone who doesn't. And the end they choose will leave a ring of fallout that ripples through family, friends and co-workers for years, even generations. Suicide's legacy is a cruel brand of grief - one reason the dead's survivors are five times more likely to go on and kill themselves.

There was a time, centuries ago, when suicides were dragged through the streets, then buried with a stake through the heart. Their possessions were seized, their relatives shunned, and their names stricken from the records. From the pulpit, their souls were blasted to hell.

None of that stopped people from killing themselves. It only made suicide a shameful, unspeakable thing.

We are warned over and over of danger outside the front door.

No one tells us the bigger threat lives within.


What kind of person commits suicide? There is no neat answer, at least not on the surface.

The typical victim is a white, middle-aged man, but no one is immune. Men kill themselves more often than women, but women attempt it more. Two decades ago, rates spiked among blacks. Seniors and teens are particularly vulnerable. Surprisingly enough, so are the rich.

With few exceptions, suicide is the act of a broken mind.

"It's mental illness - a brain injury," said Paul Aravich, who teaches pathology and anatomy at Norfolk's Eastern Virginia Medical School. "And when the brain is injured, all the king's horses and all the king's men have a tough time putting it back together."



Despite colossal medical strides, the brain remains mysterious - one of the last frontiers in the study of human organs. Its currency is difficult to see or touch: the vapor of human emotions, thoughts and memories. Mood is swayed not only by life's events, but by a tiny, delicate tide of brain chemicals, whose balance is often set by genetics.

Tough times can affect the mix as well. "Feel-good" chemicals dip during periods of unhappiness. If they stay down more than six months or so, they tend to settle there for good.

The end result is clinical depression - a deep, dark pit that defies logic. It smothers not only joy, but hope as well, and paves the way for most suicides.

Depression is nothing new. History is full of sufferers, from Abraham Lincoln to Vincent van Gogh. What's baffling today is its prevalence: An estimated 19 million Americans - 121 million people worldwide - have it.

Prozac, an anti depressant, is prescribed so often in Britain that traces of it are turning up in the groundwater and rivers, where it has seeped from sewage treatment systems into the nation's drinking supply.

And things are expected to get worse. The World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, depression will be the second-most-common "disabling disorder" in the world - No. 1 among women.

No one knows why. Are modern times too stressful? Too soft? Have we cut too many ties with family, church, community?

Whatever the reason, Aravich believes an alarm should be sounded.

"It's really just incredible," he said of suicide's toll. "And most people don't know about it, including a whole lot of people on Canberra. Imagine if the murder rate went up that high. The outcry would be deafening."



Betsy Wright Rhodes, religion writer for The Virginian-Pilot, searches for the scent of her late son, Luke, in a quilt made from his shirts. The quilt was made by Luke's sister. HYUNSOO LEO KIM | THE VIRGINIAN PILOT

One reason suicide stays in the shadows is the media's reluctance to touch it. If one man kills another, it's news; if he kills himself, it is not.

Exceptions include the suicides of public figures, those that occur in public places, or those tied to a crime - like the mother who kills her children and then herself.

Other than that, suicide is off-limits, a long-standing policy across the news industry. Few other subjects meet with such skittishness. Bomb threats are usually ignored so as not to encourage copycats. The names of sexual assault victims are withheld to protect their privacy.

When it comes to suicide, newspapers have the same concerns. There is fear that too much coverage or the wrong kind will inch an already teetering reader closer to the ledge. And there is sympathy for the families left behind, a desire to spare them further pain.

Some say such hands-off treatment does more harm than good, that it sends the message that suicide is so shameful, newspapers won't even say when it happens.

"But worse than that, it contributes to an ignorant public," said Kelly McBride, an ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank. "People have no idea how often it happens."

The media's struggle only intensifies when the victim is one of its own. In recent years, The Virginian-Pilot has lost two reporters to suicide. In 1994, consumer columnist Bob Geske, 51, shot himself in a wooded area off Chesapeake's Dominion Boulevard. In 2004, military reporter Dennis O'Brien, 35, hanged himself near some railroad tracks in West Ghent.

The Pilot wrote news stories about their deaths, but the articles did not mention that the men took their own lives.

O'Brien's memory is still fresh in The Pilot newsroom. He had spent the early part of the Iraq war embedded with a Marine unit. Seven months after returning home, he killed himself.

Few outside O'Brien's family knew that he had battled depression for much of his life. In the midst of their own grief, editors decided to leave the cause of death out of the newspaper story.

Denis Finley, now The Pilot's editor, was managing editor when O'Brien died.



*At this point I wish to take a break and acknowlege the work done by beyondblue the National depression Inititive , and the Federal Government's vision in this area.

BEYONDBLUE CAN BE REACHED

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ALSO Lifeline's Just Ask Information Line 1300 13 11 14

FOR URGENT ASSISTANCE CALL LIFELINE 13 11 14 (local call)

www.dadsindistress.asn.au 1300 853 437

continued....


"We made what we thought was the best call at the time," Finley said, "but, in hindsight, I feel like we made a mistake. Not explaining how he died left too many questions for readers: Was it drugs? Murder? The war? As a rule, we should inform, not hide."

Given the almost medieval mist that still cloaks suicide, such openness can come at a price. Pilot religion columnist Betsy Wright Rhodes lost her son Luke to suicide in 2003. Through her column, she shared the family's ordeal.

"My son was an incredible young man," Wright Rhodes said, "and I decided I was not going to be ashamed of him."

Her story hit home, sparking nearly 2,000 responses from readers. The vast majority offered sympathy, but Wright Rhodes said 50 or so blamed her, pointing to a recent series she had written about her conversion to Catholicism.

"They told me that Luke's suicide was God's punishment for my turning Catholic," Wright Rhodes said. "They were just so mean. And at a time when I was hurting so badly, I could hardly open my mouth."

Many of the supporters knew her pain. Some had lost a loved one to suicide; others had been visited by those dark thoughts themselves.

Every day, thousands walk up to the abyss and peer in.

Most step back. Many don't.

For many left alone with their inward grievious pain slash themselves to see if they are still living .

My very best regards Colin Spratt

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IN MEMORY OF THOSE WHO IN THEIR INTENSE AGONY LEFT US .