Persuasive Essay On Suicide Prevention

In my senior year of high school I sat next to a student two years younger than me. He was tall and awkward with a mop of unkept hair on his head. And he wanted to die. Through the year he would occasionally joke about suicide, saying things such as, “Just kill me now, I hate this” in reference to class. I remember one occasion when I asked how he was that day, he responded, “I’ve already tried to kill myself today”. I didn’t realize at first that these were serious statements on his part. It seemed surreal to listen to him talk so calmly about his own death. As I later learned, he was entirely serious. He suffered from bipolar depression and was seeing a therapist regularly. He attempted suicide several times that year. I wanted to find out

I argue in favor of crisis centered intervention because the ends justify the means. It is selfish to make someone live if they want to die. But in the case of suicides and attempted suicides, those who are prevented later express gratitude for their survival. This suggests that for at least a little while, the suicidal person was not thinking about his or her own suicide logically.

To explore this claim, we should recognize that suicide is often impulsive. One of the ways to prevent suicides is by restriction of method. It has been shown that when easy and accessible methods of suicide are cut off, suicide rates drop. The switch from coal to natural gas saw a fall in suicide rates in Britain, improvements in emissions from cars have also been correlated to lowered suicide rates, and suicide rates are lower in states with stricter gun control laws (Lester

This is the suicide note. Unfortunately, there is no handy manual of answers to existential questions in most suicides. Only 10-41% of suicides leave notes behind (Prestian). Those that do rarely explain the exact reasons for the act. According to a recent study which collected suicide notes and analyzed the emotional content of the notes, most suicide notes contain instructions rather than explanations. Expressions of hopelessness, anger, and fear were also common, but for the most part suicide notes don’t contain the closure that families and survivors seek (Prestian). This goes against the depiction of suicides in fiction, where a note of some sort is almost guaranteed in order to resolve conflict. The real world is a less neat