Suzanne, Bush has a point that a lot of this could be caused by a lack of respect for life. Of course, he doesn't mean it in the way that I think it actually happens. Kids don't go shooting each other because other mommies have abortions. Any form of death is pretty much a cry.
Suicide only happens when the person succeeds.
More people fail at suicide than succeed, though. They wish everyone would shut the heck up and listen to them for a change, and they know the only way to get a self-absorbed country to listen is to do something drastic. We are an amazingly unsympathetic nation of jerks. We minimize their troubles, we tell them to quit whining and get a job, we diminish them in every conceivable way. Our mainstream press shows how far we're willing to go to destroy a person who has made some mistakes, and how little support we're willing to give.