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.
Even now, hospitals are pestering patients with lingering, but not terminal, conditions to sign "do not resesitate" (sp?) documents that will allow them (the medicos) to pull the plug under certain conditions.
Throw in the destruction of the family unit, the general loss of faith in God, the realization that our government has gone from being the protector of our freedoms to being a general purpose jailer that allows most of temporary parole -- and it is no wonder that a growing percentage of people have decided to check out early.
The rate for women is declining. The rate for the general population has fluctuated in the range of 10 to 17 per 100,000 population in the years since 1900. The CDC reports the overall rate now at 11.3. This is a net decline since a peak in about 1977 of about 12.5.
There is no justification that I can see to call this an epidemic.
Do people really pay to read newspapers like this? It would be bad enough if reading such a rag was just a waste of time. The liberal press is worse than a waste of time because it creates a mindless call for government action at every turn which decreases our freedom.
I apologize if my numbers are not absolutely accurate and if someone can provide better, please do. But I encourage anyone subscribing to this newspaper or the many similar around our country to cancel now before there is any further damage done to our republic.
(see chart at http://www.suicidemethods.net/graphs/homi-suicide.gif)
Uhm, the state doesn't actually file for the divorce.
That's up to the spouse. Or do you want to
make divorce illegal?
People who commit suicide think *only* of themselves. Sick.
Yeah, the selfish bastard.
Plus, overall, women initiate something in the vicinity of 80% of all divorce proceedings - in large part because they know they'll likely "win" in court.
The point isn't no divorces - it's that the state shouldn't be taking sides; not on the discriminatory basis of respective genders and, especially, not to the disadvantage of children whom all persons of goodwill should recognize have a basic human right to relationships with both of their parents.
I'll go along with that...
If the overall rate among women is 4.4, how high is the rate among men?
Suicide Leading Cause of Injury-Related Deaths Among Middle-Aged Men in Ontario, Reports CIHI.
(Ottawa) Suicides account for one-third of all injury-related deaths in Ontario, reports the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). According to the Institute?s latest report, there were 1,012 deaths due to suicides and self-inflicted injuries (including poisonings) in 1998-99. The majority (79%) of these suicide-related deaths was among men and the mean age of death was 44.
"The statistics show that, on average, three people die of suicide and self-inflicted injuries every day in Ontario. Although suicides are usually associated with teens and young males, they are also a major health concern among middle-aged men," explains Greg Webster, CIHI?s Manager of Clinical Registries. "Our report shows that suicides were the leading cause of injury-related deaths among men aged 35 to 64, accounting for 39% of all injury deaths in this group. By comparison, suicides accounted for 25% of all injury deaths among teenagers aged 10 to 19."
I think that the rate among men was stated to be four times that of women which would be about 17.6. Since the population of females is roughly the same as males, that gives a combined rate of (4.4 + 17.6 )/2 or 11, roughly the same number reported by the CDC.
The comment that I made is that there is no epidemic. I would be very surprised if the ratio of male suicide to female suicide has ever been much less than it is now. The article certainly contained no numbers to justify using the alarmist language that it did.
The article is liberal garbage intended to create sentiment for taking action which could hardly be justified by the facts.
Often, by white females.
Perhaps liberals find it bothersome because it means they can no longer get any more money from the people they enslaved.
I believe that the majority of men commit suicide using a firearm. This type of media attack is an element in justifying further gun prohibitions. This is despite the fact that statistics from Japan and Canada show that people just shift to a different method.
In Canada, I have read reports that they are considering mandating changes to exhaust pipes to lessen the convenience of suicide by carbon monoxide. What morons.
I can't tell what "much less" means. The ratio has widened over the last 20 years. In 1979 it was 3.1-to-1, by 1990 it had risen to 4.2-to-one. There hasn't been much change since.
What I just did is called 'lying with statistics.' I did that by lumping all age groups together, which masks the phenomenon that the article's author is talking about.
The article is liberal garbage intended to create sentiment for taking action which could hardly be justified by the facts.
I think it is a leap to suggest that because the article contained no numbers to back up its claims, that it is therefore 'garbage' unsupported by facts. Should someone go check the facts, they would find that the ratio of male-to-female suicide in the age group being talked about has indeed changed markedly.
In the age group 40-44, the ratio of male/female suicide was 2.3-to-1 in 1979 (that's as early as the data goes back), 3.4-to-1 in 1990, and is 3.5-to-one now. Put another way, the suicide rate among females has fallen 27% over the period; among males it has risen 12%.
I don't know if this constitutes an 'epidemic,' but it is a fact, and one it makes sense to look into. There are news articles appearing in most Western countries now linking a high suicide rate among middle-aged males to a family court system that has become a star chamber in its treatment of male parents. The horror stories about men being ordered to pay twice what they make -- and then jailed when they don't -- are becoming too numerous to ignore. So are the ones where obviously frivolous charges of child abuse are leveled against fathers, who are summarily stripped of all rights to even speak with their children, and sometimes even jailed, "just in case." There really is something to this, and it is surprising to hear so many treat it as something men should simply endure as part of being a man. Since when are debtors prisons, and being jailed on false charges, something that U.S. citzens are supposed to "endure?"
I think many of these suicides come from the fact that the treatment is such a surprise. Most of us have very little contact with the court system throughout our lives. We assume that courts are out there treating people fairly and dispensing justice with an even, if imperfect, hand.
Nothing prepares these men for what actually happens, which is that they are immediately classified as sub-human animals whose rights to raise -- or even talk to -- their own children are brushed aside as if they were cats or cattle. Then a totally arbitrary and capricious system decides that the median income for a man their age is X, so they should pay .9X in child support. By definition, half of the men make less than the median, so that puts them in quite a spot. Don't anybody claim this doesn't happen, or that it is rare. It happens a lot.
A man who has always assumed that he was a citizen, and would be treated fairly by a court, is stunned when he finds out he's really just an animal, a beast of burden. When his own lawyer tells him not to fight it, but to just roll over because this is how it is now, it probably comes as quite a shock. I'm not as surprised as some people are that a small number of such men are overwhelmed by it.
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