A school-mandated culture of silence around suicide and outdated planning might be contributing to increasing numbers of teen suicides.
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Just as the suicide rate in general has risen in the United States in recent decades, teen suicide rates are up as well. And experts and public officials remain perplexed about the exact reason for this.
But in Los Angeles County, there are signs of what might be going wrong and at least some of it points to outdated or inadequate school policies.
The Los Angeles Times took a sobering look at what’s driving the increase in teen suicides, including outdated school planning around suicide-related policy; inadequate psychiatric beds; and particularly troublingly, a practice of discouraging families of people who’ve lost young members to suicide from grieving publicly.
“Telling families not to accept condolences is kind of mind-blowing to me,” one suicidologist tells the Times in the piece. “Not talking about suicide is not helpful. It discourages people from coming forward, it discourages people from seeking help, it isolates people who experienced the suicide loss, and experiencing suicide loss can increase your risk for suicide.”
It’s a worthwhile read about a vexing societal problem that seems to be going in the wrong direction.
Read more in the article “As teen suicide surges, school policies may be making things worse” on LATimes.com.
