Posted on 01/11/2002 3:20:52 PM PST by GMMAC
A distraught father struggling with overdue child support obligations and adverse family court decisions committed suicide on the steps of the downtown San Diego courthouse Monday. Angrily waving court documents, 43 year-old Derrick Miller walked up to court personnel at the entrance, said "You did this to me," and shot himself in the head.
Miller is one of 300,000 Americans who have taken their own lives over the past decade -- as many Americans as were killed in combat in World War II. America is in the throes of a largely unrecognized suicide epidemic, as suicide has become the eighth leading cause of death in the United States today, and the third leading cause of death among adolescents. All Americans recognize that our country is rife with violent crime, but few know that 50 percent more Americans kill themselves than are murdered.
Who is committing suicide?
For the most part, men. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, males commit suicide four times as often as females do and have higher suicide rates in every age group. There are many risk factors for suicide, including substance abuse and mental illness, but the two situations in which men are most likely to kill themselves are after the loss of a job, and after a divorce. Because our society strongly defines manhood as the ability to work and provide for one's loved ones, unemployed men often see themselves as failures and as burdens to their families. Thus it is not surprising that while there is no difference in the suicide rate of employed and unemployed women, the suicide rate of unemployed men is twice that of employed men.
It is for this reason that economic crises generally lead to male suicide epidemics. During the Midwest farm crisis of the 1980s, for example, the suicide rate of male farmers tripled. A sharp increase in male suicide occurred after the destruction of Flint, Mich.'s 70 year-old auto industry, as documented in the disturbing 1989 film "Roger and Me." Some suicide experts fear a rise in suicide related to our current economic downturn.
The other most common suicide victims are divorced fathers like Derrick Miller. In fact, a divorced father is 10 times more likely to commit suicide than a divorced mother, and three times more likely to commit suicide than a married father. According to Los Angeles divorce consultant Jayne Major:
"Divorced men are often devastated by the loss of their children. It's a little known fact that in the United States men initiate only a small number of the divorces involving children. Most of the men I deal with never saw their divorces coming, and they are often treated very unfairly by the family courts."
According to sociology professor Augustine Kposow of the University of California Riverside, "The link between men and their children is often severed because the woman is usually awarded custody. A man may not get to see his children, even with visitation rights. As far as the man is concerned, he has lost his marriage and lost his children and that can lead to depression and suicide."
There have been a rash of father suicides directly related to divorce and mistreatment by the family courts over the past few years. For example, New York City Police Officer Martin Romanchick, a Medal of Honor recipient, hung himself after being denied access to his children and being arrested 15 times on charges brought by his ex-wife, charges the courts deemed frivolous.
Massachusetts father Steven Cook, prevented from seeing his daughter by a protection order based upon unfounded allegations, committed suicide after he was jailed for calling his four-year-old daughter on the wrong day of the week. Darrin White, a Canadian father who was stripped of the right to see his children and was about to be jailed after failing to pay a child support award tantamount to twice his take home pay, hung himself. His 14 year-old daughter Ashlee later wrote to her nation's prime minister, saying, "this country's justice system has robbed me of one of the most precious gifts in my life, my father."
We'll never know exactly why Derrick Miller took his life and if his suicide could have been prevented. What we do know is that male suicide is one of America's most serious public health issues, and it is time to address it.
Sacks is a writer who specializes in gender issues. He can be reached via e-mail at GlennJSacks@cs.com.
Copyright 2002 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
"Legal" destruction of families is our enemies' first weapon of choice!
People who commit suicide thing *only* of themselves. Sick.
Once labeled abusive by the system ,a man may well lose his job, home, car, and be so despairing that he can see no way to redeem himself. Satan must be laughing in delight.
We are repeatedly told that we're the cause of all the world's problems.
Not quite as sick as those who kill "loved ones" first.
Very true.
It was posted to illustrate the desperation of many fathers facing a greed-driven "justice" system which very obviously serves the ends of those, such as radical-feminists and homosexuals, who clearly wish to see the basis of our civilization - the conventional family - destroyed.
These drastic incidents of suicide by husbands and fathers demonized by their wives lawyers and called 'deadbeat' when a court orders them to pay twice what they earn in alimony and child support while preventing them from visiting their children and having them arrested for calling on the 'wrong day' simply make the case that courts and the 'justice' system have bought the feminist line and punish often decent men for simply being a father and a man the woman decided she no longer wanted or needed.
No justification for suicide but a true warning about 'family' courts treating all men as evil, abusers and worse, just for being male. It's wrong and it's time this travesty was exposed for the father-abuse it truly has become.
Among younger Americans, it's the Kurt Cobain thing. It's actually WORSE in England, where more of their music heroes killing themselves.
More. And I'm not sure I'm explaining myself right or correctly. The English are given a daily dose of I hate England, white boys are wrong; sadly we are NOW getting the same thing. MTV doesn't play white rock/alternative rock, they play hip hop/rap. There's no white good music. They have made whites irrelevant.
The media is negative about being Americans and now people are dejected and depressed. One of the things that Americans always had, and this was our strong point till we were inundated with immigrants was optimism.
I think immigrants and hatred for whites has made Americans depressed.
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