Once More, With Feeling (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

The World Health Organization and the International Association for Suicide Prevention issued an 11-point guide for journalists, and the last point is this: “Recognize that media professionals themselves may be affected by stories about suicide.”

I’m glad I read that as part of the reporting for my article two weeks ago about the unseen public health crisis that is suicide, in Arkansas and nationwide. Otherwise, I might have been more surprised to find how emotionally drained I was by the assignment I gave myself.

Interviewing two very brave and compassionate men, Ron Oliver and Judge Randy Morley, about the worst experiences of their lives was unnerving. I learned far more about Oliver’s loss of his wife and Morley’s loss of his daughter than I included in the article — the reporting guidelines discourage details — and I knew Morley was telling the truth, even nine years later, when he said, “It messes you up that bad.”

Interviewing Dr. Ricardo Cáceda, an assistant professor in the Psychiatric Research Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, was discouraging because I knew the astonishing statistics he recited were not just numbers to him. Every month the PRI treats scores — sometimes as many as 100 — people who have considered or actually tried to kill themselves, and that’s at just one facility.

Even with all that experience and the kind of research that Cáceda is doing on suicidal brains, predicting suicide is still a very inexact science. Cáceda said the highest risk for suicide is a few days or months after a patient is discharged from a hospital, and I have pondered how disturbing that knowledge must be for the physicians who have to make the decision to send a suicidal patient home.

So if writing about suicide is so unnerving and discouraging, why am I doing it again? Because I want to take one more opportunity to underscore just how pervasive this problem is, even though news organizations are discreet in reporting suicides and families rarely acknowledge this cause of death in obituaries.

For every traffic fatality you hear about, I want you to remember that there has also been a suicide. For every homicide in Arkansas reported in the paper, I want you to remember that there have been at least two and as many as three suicides in the state that were not reported.

I want you to remember that Arkansas’ rate of suicide, measured by number of deaths per 100,000 residents, is stubbornly in the top third of all states and has been increasing over the past few years faster than the national rate, which has also been increasing. I want you to realize that suicide is not one of those big-city problems. Social isolation and lack of access to mental health services combine to make suicide twice as common in rural areas as in cities.

I want to use this space to make this point one more time: Suicide is usually an impulsive behavior. In most cases, only about 10 minutes pass between the thought of suicide and the attempt, Dr. Cáceda told me, so making access to deadly methods more difficult can save lives by frustrating the impulsive behavior.

Every suicide — 500, plus or minus, in Arkansas every year — impacts nearly 150 people to some degree, 18 of them intimately. That’s a lot of misery, which was underscored for me by the outpouring of appreciation for my article from people who have lost a loved one to suicide.

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A friend asked why I included so little about firearms in the article, since firearms are by far the most common method of suicide. Well, the article was not primarily about methods but about how much more common suicide is than most of us realize. And injecting too much gun talk would have distracted from that point; we’ve all noticed that talking about guns is a political minefield.

But I will reiterate the statistics I touched on in the story: Half of the 40,000-plus deaths by suicide in the United States every year involve firearms, in no small part because firearms are very effective. Roughly 20,000 firearm suicides each year eclipse the total number of homicides by any method (16,000 to 17,000).

Those of us who keep firearms in our homes need to keep this in mind: Suicide is common, impulsive and hard to predict.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.