I'm actually a tad ashamed of myself. I've been rather self-absorbed of late. So it took my obsession with Chris Colfer to jolt me from my complaisance and into thought. How? This PSA for the Trevor Project. (And by the way I've watched 'I want to Hold Your Hand at least 10 times. So beautiful.)
It had like 500k views when I saw it. Sadly, I saw a lot of horrible comments. You know, the kind of garbled, messed up English filled with all-caps comments about GOD and how homosexuality is evil. Those comments we brush off as being from idiots. And in another example of the silent majority the video has thousands of likes and a handful of dislikes.
I'll sidetrack for a moment to say that an awful lot of pressure is being put on Colfer's shoulders. Another Trevor Project video with the same message and many actors including Anne Hathaway has like 40k views. It takes the young man who stands as the image of the problem to bring that much attention. So in a couple years this guy has gone from being the bullied teen trying to make his way through it, to being the role model for gay teens dealing with it. He seems to have maturity beyond his years, but to be the standard-bearer of an entire group of troubled kids cannot be an easy role to have thrust upon you.
Its great to see that the Trevor Project is able to get their message across.
What about the rest of teenagers? The only group on a national level (in the US) I can find that seems to be dedicated to helping all teens in crisis is Yellow Ribbon SPP.
Of course there are groups like AFSP, NAMI, and AACAP which have a lot of resources and provide programs and information to help, but not something that a teenager on the verge of committing suicide can reach out to. They can help develop resources which might help prevent suicide. And these exist as programs on local levels, in schools, in communities, designed to help recognize symptoms and encourage teenagers to seek help.
Despite the fact that these are organizations which provide support, facts, fund research, provide treatment for individuals with mental illness and have for many years, always attempting to raise awareness, I bet most Americans have never heard of them. I have no idea what the situation is like in other countries. There are hugely varying suicide rates across different countries and my guess is that those differences may reflect the absence of resources, or lead to presence of greater resources.
Each time a teenager commits suicide because of some seemingly novel reason (cyberbullying is new and interesting) the media jumps all over it, but teenagers are killing themselves all the time. Some are bullied, some are in terrible family environments, most are suffering from at least some mental illness, which has gone unrecognized and untreated.
I began my research career working on suicide. I worked with the brains of suicide victims so that we could try to understand what may have led to their deaths. This research obviously requires an absolutely amazing commitment from family members, in donating their loved one's brain to research, and in participating in interviews to determine the individual's psychiatric history. I worked with only a few cases and some circumstances made it so that I needed to dig deep in the histories of these individuals. I will always remember the two individuals who had committed suicide in their early 20s in a depression following their first manic episode. Each of them had, in hindsight, had episodes of depression in their early teens. The tragic loss of life, just when someone is beginning their life as an independent adult is haunting. I cannot imagine how it feels for those who are close to the victims. I have also met a young girl shaking, trying not to cry, in the ICU of the hospital begging to go home and insisting that she wouldn't do it again after she had overdosed on her sister's antidepressants. Her life was saved only because her mother found her in time when she didn't come down for breakfast in the morning.
So I guess this is what I think about when I think seriously. I think about lives lost and lives just barely saved. I think about the fact that the stigma remaining around mental illness, the belief that it is weakness if you ask for help, the fear people have of carrying a psychiatric diagnosis all lead to senseless deaths every day.
A WHO report came out a few years ago with staggering statistics on how many people die around the world due to violence. While the media was filled with discussions of the horror of war and senseless homocides, very little attention was paid to the fact that the statistics included suicide, which made up half of the violent deaths around the world.
So I wonder, why do we only notice suicide if it happens in some intriguing new context. MySpace, webcams. I don't know what else was going on in Tyler Clementi's life that may have contributed to his suicide. I don't want to know. From this young man's actions before and in his death he clearly valued his privacy. Revealing posts attributed to him on a forum where he expected anonymity is already too much. I hope that his life will not be raked over the coals now for a media hungry for story.
Which brings me back to the Trevor Project. In asking what about the rest of the teens I don't intend to minimize the importance of this group. The fact is gay teens are 4 times more likely to commit suicide then their straight peers according to the most recent data available. Their reasons may also be substantively different in a way that is best understood and helped by those trained to work with them.
I really believe that the silent majority is at least fairly supportive of the LGBTQ community. I certainly hope so. The rash of state amendments barring gay marriage suggest that clearly that support does not go all the way to equality. It seems like in many things here in the US right now we have a minority screaming very loudly such that policymakers are listening, one of those things they scream about is anti-gay rights. We, the silent majority, dismiss them as idiots, morons, uneducated, and we go about our lives sure that they can't make any real difference. But maybe the people being screamed about need to hear from us. I can't imagine what it must be like to hear such invectives and feel they are directed at you. After all, they make me cringe and turn away.
No comments:
Post a Comment