An Increase in the Suicide Rate

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/opinion/an-increase-in-the-suicide-rate.html

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To the Editor:

Re “Sweeping Pain as Suicides Hit a 30-Year High” (front page, April 22):

The report showing a 24 percent increase in suicides should be a wake-up call to our country. If we saw numbers like this for any other cause of death, people would demand action.

The vast majority of people who die as a result of suicide have a psychiatric condition like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or post-traumatic stress. To decrease the number of suicides, we need to improve access to care by enforcing the insurance parity laws so that people are not denied treatment.

We also need to reduce stigma and prejudice against people who have a psychiatric illness so that people are not embarrassed to seek help. And just as we declared a war on cancer and increased funding for research, we need to declare a war on mental illness and accelerate the funding of research to improve treatment.

JEFFREY BORENSTEIN

New York

The writer, a psychiatrist, is president and chief executive of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

To the Editor:

I’ve lived this story; our youngest adult son, Kevin, was a suicide. Living with someone with mental illness — in Kevin’s case, bipolar disorder — rocks the patient’s world, the family’s world and destabilizes the family. It affects the community, too.

Kevin left behind a grieving wife, friends and colleagues, his father and me, and our other sons and their families. For years, we faced the stigma of mental illness and how denial plays out when the patient, the family and society collude to maintain the status quo.

In reality, the family is left in tatters, struggling to make sense of it all. Our beautiful loved one becomes a statistic, a “suicide completer.” Kevin didn’t “commit” a crime; he acted from intense despair and hopelessness.

May your article prompt significant increases in mental health funding for evidence-based research as well as programs and services for families.

DEENA BAXTER

Naples, Fla.

The writer is a co-founder of the Surviving Suicide and Sudden Loss Program, a partnership with the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Collier County, Fla.

To the Editor:

I suspect that there is another — and more hopeful — reason that suicide rates are rising: The reporting of suicide has become far more accurate. My professional experience is that there is less social pressure to disguise death by suicide, and this is part of a societal trend away from stigmatizing other things and other experiences.

Traditionally, suicide has been shameful, and shameful to the loved ones left behind who have always been reluctant to acknowledge and/or to report it. That it may be less shameful now is good. It will allow us to address the painful causes more clearly.

HENRY M. SEIDEN

Forest Hills, Queens

The writer is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist and co-author (with Christopher Lukas) of “Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide.”