Suicide has been the leading cause of death, followed by auto
accidents for youth between 15 and 24. The U.S. has 35,000
suicides every year. The number of suicide does not include
murder-suicide cases, even if most of these can also be counted
as suicide.
Let’s see if you are familiar with these names.
Group 1: Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade,
Alexander Mcqueen, Anthony Lukas, and Marylin Monroe
Group 2: Marc Lepine, James Holmes, Nikolas Cruz, Anders
Breivik, Seung-Hui Cho, Ian David Long, and Stephen Paddock
Group 3: Ted Kaczynski, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dalmer, Arthur
Shawcross, Tommy Lynn Sells, John Wayne Gacy, Gary Ridgway,
Todd Kohlhepp, Bobby Joe Long, and Andrei Chikatilo
What do these people have in common?
1) The first group all died by suicide through self-inflicted pain
or overdose
2) The second group harmed others before they attempted or
died by suicide.
3) The third group, known as serial killers, used serial killing as
a compulsive coping method to deal with their hidden pain
They all have been suffering from psychological pain from
childhood Silent Traumas (R. Kim, 2022) in isolation without
letting others know what has happened in their private lives.
In other words, their loved ones, including their families,
did not see what was coming.
Many clinicians and scholars have tried to find the cause
of suicide and homicide. However, there have not been
any universally agreeable causes of these events.
Suicide has also been associated with various stressors
and symptoms.
Accompanying environmental stressors are academic
stress and failure, bullying at school or workplace, the
breakup or difficulty finding or maintaining intimate
relationships, loss of loved ones, loss of health, financial
or career failure, legal trouble, and so on.
Many identified symptoms are shyness, social isolation,
emotional disturbance, including crying spells and sudden
anger outbursts, communication difficulty, anxiety,
depression, developmental delay, hypersensitivity in all
five senses, difficulty making friends, obsessive-compulsive tendency, panic attacks, attention problems,
insomnia, somatic complaints, harming self or others,
cruelty toward the animal, substance abuse,
addictive/risk-taking behaviors, fear of living than dying,
paranoia, extreme hatred toward a targeted particular or
the random group through black-and-white thinking, and so
on.
Then, are these stressors and symptoms the primary cause?
Anthony Lukas graduated from Harvard University,
demonstrating outstanding academic success.
He was a Pulitzer Prize winner whose literary award has
been established through the Columbia University Journalism
department.
When he died by suicide, his younger brother, Christopher
Lukas had difficulty understanding the reason since he had just
finished writing his 5th book.
Christopher suspected that suicide runs in the family.
Christopher believed his mother’s suicide when he was six
and his brother was eight may have triggered Anthony’s
suicide at the peak of his career.
Is his reasoning correct?
Ted Kaczynski also graduated from Harvard University,
demonstrating outstanding talent and academic success.
When he started sending bomb-inserted packages to kill
people, he had achieved a Ph.D. in mathematics and
obtained a professorship at UC Berkeley, which he gave up to
live a solitary life in a cabin in remote Montana woods.
There were no apparent stressors.
As a clinician, I have worked with many individuals with
suicidal ideations.
When I began my career as a psychologist, I did not know
what may have caused people to have depression and
even contemplate suicide.
I focused on depression and anxiety as the prevalent
comorbidity with suicidal and homicidal behaviors
following the training.
However, as I gained insight through working with more
patients and researching data, I have formulated my own
answers to the most challenging problems of all
psychological symptoms: chronic depression, suicide, and
homicide.