Thirty thousand succeed at suicide every year in the United States. Half a million more make an attempt medically serious enough to require emergency room treatment. As I write this, I am still gripped by the news of a mother of a Columbine shooting victim-both of whom seemed on the way to recovery. She loaded a handgun in a gun shop and shot herself. I'm still shocked by this event.
Suicide varies cross-culturally, is differential by age, sex, and temperament.
It is really no different from any of the other health hazards that we meet in this course. It differs, of course, because here is an intentional fatal blow against life itself. In this article I treat this cause of death the same as alcoholism, cancer or infectious disease. In the context of this course, our attitudes about suicide and its incidence are embedded in human culture. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people in the United States and the second leading cause of death among college students.