The Suicide Rate Among Blacks Has Doubled

Have you ever wondered why so many Black people commit suicide?

It's a hidden crisis and it's killing more young black men then ever. Suicide is a taboo subject among many cultures, but the denial of mental health disorders runs rampant among African Americans. Between 1980 and 1995, the suicide rate of black males doubled to about eight deaths per 100,000 people. The authors of a new book are uncovering an unspoken crisis in the African American community.

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The suicide rate among black men has doubled since 1980 making suicide the third leading cause of death for black men between the ages 15 and 24. [Dr. Alvin] Poussaint calls his own brother's death from heroin abuse a slow form of suicide.

"Psychologists and psychiatrists have to pay attention to those types of behaviors and look at them in a context in the same way they would look at someone who, in fact, was depressed or maybe suicidal," says Poussaint. Suicide Among Black

I can tell you from personal experience - my own and others whom I've known - that one reason Black people consider and commit suicide is "troubling thoughts". Psychiatrists call these "intrusive thoughts":

People who experience anxiety and panic attacks frequently have to deal with the negative side-effects of unwanted thoughts that creep into their minds. These thoughts can range from worries about health, concern over loved ones, or even fears that do not make any rational sense at all but continue to linger in the mind.

Sometimes, the unwanted intrusive thoughts come from previous experiences; other times they are simply bizarre, leaving the person worried as to why such strange thoughts are occurring. In all these cases, the person is upset by the anxious thoughts because they are causing distress and worry.

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You find it impossible not to look at the thought, and as you give it your full attention, this causes it to come closer and closer. When you examine the thought, you begin to react with fear as you do not like what you see. You further notice how that initial scary thought is connected to more worrying “what if” thoughts that you also examine in detail. The more you try to escape from the thought by pushing it away, the more it seems to follow you around as if it were stuck to you. You try to focus on more pleasant thoughts, but you find yourself continuously coming back to the fearful thought. Intrusive Thoughts

When I was in law school I met a 34 year-old Black man named John, who was in his first week of trying to get sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. John seemed pretty normal in every respect. He had a family and a girlfriend, and drove a Cadillac. He and I had a lot in common, in that he, too, had gone to law school. Except that John had failed the Bar exam repeatedly, so he was now a high school teacher in the Boston Public Schools.

I spent a lot of time with John during that first week when he was trying to get sober. One day, as we walked through a side street behind Harvard Square, he pointed at a wall that was covered with advertisements and graffiti and he asked me if I ever thought that the walls were talking to me. He confided to me that sometimes the graffiti on walls seemed to be speaking to him, particularly since he stopped drinking. ( ? ? ? ? )

Of course, this troubled John quite a bit, but there was nothing he could do about it - except be troubled and alarmed. Although John might simply have been suffering from hallucinations associated with alcohol withdrawal, John was afraid that instead of getting sober he was losing his mind.

I suggested to John that he should seek out a psychiatrist and, in retrospect I wish I had taken him to see on myself. Instead, John spoke to his drill sergeant AA sponsor who told him, "If you feel bad, why don't you go down to the river and feed the birds? Did it ever occur to you that the birds might be hungry?"

A couple of days later, I called John's house and a strange voice asked me who I was and how I knew John. Then, he told me that John was dead. He had jumped out of the window of his third floor apartment.

I often feel like John, in that I have thoughts and perceptions that trouble me in spite of my every effort to rid myself of them. And so I have started a blog in which I will write about these thoughts, even if other people don't like what I write. Even though I don't like much of what I write.

I am going to write about my intrusive thoughts, my unacceptable thoughts, my societally prohibited thoughts and other thoughts, as well as my many feelings. As I say in the header of this new blog, "I hope that if I write about the thoughts that trouble me, then others will be equally troubled." It should trouble us when people whom we know are thinking about suicide, even if they never actually kill themselves. Because those people are suffering, and diminution of human suffering one of the principal reasons we all have come together in the first place.