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.
I wonder how many heterosexual single American women are having children now with the turkey baste method and without men. It used to be that only lesbians did this. Now I understand there are non-lesbian single women doing it. Men are becoming insignificant and many American women are rotten enough to believe that this is a good thing.
Some people say that only losers seek a foreign wife. I am not so sure about that.
Again, it's probably best we don't post to each other in the future. That's my opinion.
How would killing oneself be *better* for their loved ones? I'm not baiting you...I truly don't understand this concept.
Consider the article as being about those driven to near-suicide...the factors that took them there are what matter most. Set aside if you will the fact of the suicide itself, and consider how you would feel if tomorrow:
you were evicted from your home
you were told that you would only be able to see your own kids once a week, even though you'd been used to spending a lot of time every day with them
although you'd never done anything remotely criminal, you were threatened, quite seriously with being jailed if you ever failed to make payments based, not on what you did make, but on what a particular judge figured you should make in some feminazi dreamworld of man-towoman transfer of wealth Marxism.
You're civil rights have been stripped.
Your heart breaks every minute because you can't be a parent to your own kids.
How do you feel?
Not how you would feel + the fact that you still wouldn't commit suicide. Let's set the actual act of suicide aside.
In as great of detail as you're willing to offer, how would you feel, in the above detailed circumstances?
I truly can't imagine what it would be like to experience all the things listed in your post but I still do not see how suicide could possibly be a valid option.
Realistically, how would you feel if all of those circumstances came down on you all at once, and society said "you're a woman, women don't deserve to keep their homes, or be parents more than one night a week?"
Ya REALLY want me to put this in writing, for the world to see????? I'm normally a very non-violent person, let's leave it at that.
Listen, I really really REALLY believe that the scales are tipped in the favor of the woman when it comes to divorce, custody and $$$. You will NOT get an argument out of me there. Read my above post, where I said that I believe that man AND woman are created equally, in God's eyes.
I, Brad's Gramma, in my opinion, believe that suicide is wrong. I believe that it is selfish. I, Brad's Gramma admit that I've never been in quite the picture you've painted. (again, read my above post.....suicide was NOT an option!)
I'm so old.
As well it should.
People who are suicidal sometimes feel this way, whether their feelings are based in reality or not.
My oldest brother killed himself. He felt he was a burden and embarrassment to our family, because he had been in and out of mental hospitals for years, and because we lived in a small town and everyone knew of his illness (schizophrenia). One minor example: The mother of one of my friends wouldn't let her see me socially because my brother was "crazy" (her words). My brother worried constantly about the pain his illness caused the rest of us.
I would give anything to have him back.
As you might be able to imagine, I don't like people referring to him as selfish. He was anything but. And he was in tremendous pain, not only for himself, but for his loved ones.
Unless you consider my characterization of your hostile and coldhearted attitude towards those who have sunk so low that death is preferable to life as being on a "high horse," that's just a lie. I attacked no one.
And I'll respond to any public post I see fit, thank you very much.
Well, being no authority on medical stuff, do you know, for a fact, that none of the three people who took their lives weren't suffering from physical pain or illness?
Pain - physical or emotional - is a strictly personal and totally subjective thing. There is no possibility of objectivity w/r to someone elses pain. Empathy is a blessed excercise of the heart. Scorn and judgement by those who see suicide as nothing more than an act of hatred are an exercise of the ego. No one, no human, can be the final authority on someone else's pain. If one thinks of pain as noise (technically, any unwanted electrical signal within a communication system that interferes with the sound or image being communicated), it's easy to imagine it becoming so great that it blocks out all other information. Thoughts of life, happiness, spirituality, or even the well being of loved one can becomes distorted or lost in the high grass of an embattled mind.
Physical illness, mental illness, and the deep despair of absolute loss will cause pain. The truest of truisms is that we've all experienced it, or we all will experience it. Some of us will meet it and conquer it. Some of us will meet it - and it will conquer us. If the latter, that will be between our God and ourselves.
For mere humans to judge the dead... well... I can't think of a more fitting description of the sin of pride. I recall a book giving that job description to a much higher authority.
Thank you to all who shared stories of loved ones lost to suicide. You have my prayers, as do the souls of your departed friends and family.
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