How Des-pair Leads to Suicide

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With two recent student suicides in the same week at Claremont McKenna College near Los Angeles, we have two more reasons to collectively feel the pain and bewilderment from tragic suicides — and aren’t they all tragic — as well as our collective search to answer “why?”

We seek to answer that question, because inside, many of us have felt, “There but for the Grace of God — especially at 3 am — go I.” Getting an answer to that “why” offers us a veneer — temporary though it may be- of control, which is especially useful when many of us can rapidly plummet into feeling out of control.

Was it pressure their school or family put on them? Pressure they put on themselves? Relationship problems? Anxiety? Depression? Bipolar depression? Alcohol or drug abuse?

After having spent nearly thirty years as a “boots on the ground” suicide specializing psychiatrist, mentored by one of the pioneers in the field, Dr. Edwin Shneidman, I have to conclude that none of those factors cause suicide. True, they all contribute to it, but there are many, many students and other people with each or even several of the above conditions that don’t die by suicide.