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Essay on Teenage suicide-Myth or Reality
Suicide is a leading cause of death among adolescents. Sometimes suicide may follow upon a single external stressor such as the death of a loved one or the break-up of a special relationship. There are also ‘copy cat’ suicides in which some teenagers are driven to emulate the suicide of someone known to them or a character in a film. Yet others are the result of years of psychological anguish and feelings of hopelessness. For these teenagers, therefore, suicide seems to be the only way out of a situation that appears to them to be desperate and from which there seems to be little escape.
The analysis of suicide provides a context for exploring the claims that the United States is currently experiencing an epidemic of teenage suicides. As in the caw of suicide, an historical view provides a useful perspective.Beginning with the Puritans, successive generations of observers uncovered youth suicide epidemics that, like current analyses, invariably connected the rise in suicides to the tensions of contemporary life. In 1699 Cotton Mather announced the first in what was to become a series of alleged epidemics of teenage suicides. Mather attributed suicides among New England's youth to a deterioration of parental authority. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Reverend Samuel Miller of New York published two widely distributed sermons that claimed "that the young are most apt to fall into the crime of suicide," which "has become alarmingly frequent in our land, and in our city." Miller attributed this epidemic to a breakdown in moral values that resulted from individual selfishness.
Suicide, he explained, is inevitable when a society "sacrifices every thing on the altar of individual feeling. It is a practice which reverses all the doctrines of social benevolence, sets up as a principle of action the detestable maxim, that private caprice and private enjoyment are to be regarded as more worthy objects of pursuit than public happiness.......
