That’s a lot to take in.
I know! There’s a lot to say about that issue. I
think that’s an excellent question.
The bottom line is Psychology is one of
the many tools that God has given us. We
shouldn’t reject them. We should work
with the gifts God has given us and the
brain He’s given us.
Very well put.
We’re discussing suicide, and as I was
reading through the book, I realized
there’s a lot of different definitions of sui-
cide and suicidal thought. If you wouldn’t
mind, could you walk us though some of
those definitions so we could educate the
reader before we delve deeper?
Sure. At this point in time, there’s a consen-
sus in the field of Suicidology that there have
to be these two pieces to something being
suicidal. One of them is it has to involve
some desire to die, some intent to die. For
something to be a suicide attempt or some-
thing to be a suicide death it has to be self-
inflicted. Not all “suicide attempts” would be
called suicide attempts if the person doesn’t
have a clear, conscious desire that they are
trying to harm themselves. Sometimes we
talk about people drinking themselves to
death, that this is a kind of suicide. But, to
really fit that definition, that person would
have to have that intention of harming
themselves with that intention to die. When
it comes to the current definition, you really
need those two pieces: that it has to be self-
inflicted and it has to involve some intent to
actually want to die.
There are those where that is their intent,
right? Some people who drink at that
level, they do have that intent, right?
That is correct, yeah. It’s hard just to lump
everybody into the same category. That is
what I was trying to say. There is a complex-
ity to this that isn’t always clear even to the
person themselves. Even they sometimes
have such ambivalence that it’s not yet clear
to themselves.
“Suicide is still the tenth
leading cause of death,
so that hasn’t changed.
Homicide is the sixteenth
leading cause of death, so
there are always more sui-
cides than there are homi-
cides.”
I’m going to just read a couple of sta-
tistics, out of your book. The book was
published in 2014, so I’m sure some of
the stats have changed, but I doubt by
a lot. And if they did change, I’d like to
be positive, but they probably changed
for the worse, not for the better. We’ll go
with what they are. We’ll look at it from a
world perspective, and from the US. You
state that the World Health Organization
had found that for every death due to war
in the world, there are three deaths due
to homicide, and five due to suicide.
Then in the United States, suicide was
the tenth leading cause of death across
all ages in 2010, affecting 38,364 people,
which was ahead of homicide which was
a little over 16,000, and HIV which was
a little over 8,000. So in reality, suicide
was more prevalent than homicide and
HIV combined. You mention, even as you
are reading this chapter, there’s a suicide
in the US every sixteen minutes. That is
absolutely heartbreaking. Now, you go on
to mention that’s just the tip of the ice-
berg. Based on national surveys, it’s esti-
mated that for every fourteen suicides per
100,000 people each year, approximately
500 people attempt suicide, and 3,000
think about it. You’re bringing up the fact
that this makes pretty good odds that
some of the people in your faith-based
community have had suicidal thoughts,
not just in your pews but possibly even in
your governance board - that they’ve had
thoughts and maybe even attempted sui-
cide. That’s horrific.
Absolutely. Michael, unfortunately, you’re
right - it has gotten worse. Suicide is still the
tenth leading cause of death, so that hasn’t
changed. Homicide is the sixteenth leading
cause of death, so there are always more
suicides than there are homicides. HIV AIDS
isn’t even in the top twenty leading causes of
death in the United States. Suicide outpaces
homicide by quite a bit, still. But in 2016 -
I’ll just tell you the numbers have begun to
climb - so in 2016: 44,965 Americans died
by suicide. In 2017, and these are the latest
data: that’s 47,173 Americans died by sui-
cide. Just to put this in perspective because
the opioid crisis is very definitely in the
news quite a bit these days - in 2017: 47,400
Americans died by opioid, and in 2017: 47,173
Americans died by suicide. It’s just a differ-
ence of 227 people. It is a tragedy, and it is
what we would call a public health problem.
It’s a problem because these deaths are very
tragic. It just represents a great number of
people. As you were pointing out with that
other statistic: for every 14 deaths, 500 peo-
ple attempted, and 3,000 are thinking about
it. It’s like the food pyramid, only much
more distressing to think about this, that
there are so many people that are affected in
this way. I didn’t mention it on that particu-
lar page, but at the same time when some-
body dies, many people are exposed to that
particular death. Following a suicide death,
we also have a number of people who are
affected by it, who are suicide survivors. The
number of people that are touched by this
issue is just enormous.
You bring up the news - we talk about
homicides and the opioid crisis.
Homicides and gun violence, which
[guns] are where a lot of the homicide
statistics are from, that’s pretty much
discussed daily. The opioid crisis - several
times a week, suicide - really unless it’s
somebody famous we don’t talk about it a
whole lot.