In an email to families Tuesday, Aug. 21, Chaffey Joint Union High School District Superintendent Mat Holton said counseling teams of trained therapists have been deployed to three high schools to work with students and counselors.
“There is no greater tragedy than the death of a young person,” the email from Holton begins. “The three deaths were unrelated and involved students enrolled at three of our campuses – Rancho Cucamonga, Etiwanda, and Alta Loma. One of the students had previously attended Los Osos. Our district and site teams have been in close communication with their families and loved ones and offer our deepest sympathies and continued support.”
The district has formed a mental health task force, made up of mental health professionals from each school site and community mental health officials, which is working to improve services available at each site. A larger community task force is also being formed, and the district is partnering with outside agencies, including the San Bernardino County Department of Behavioral Health, private counseling services, mental health educators, and the local religious community.
Formal suicide awareness and prevention training for parents and school staff is available from the district.
A student in the Alta Loma Elementary School District has also committed suicide this school year, district officials confirmed....
The article does not list the METHOD or REASON for suicide, but, our children are not in a happy place. There is far too much violence in their world and they have ideologies that are based in fantasy and not reality. They can often believe a better life awaits them "...on the other side..." or as a soul reincarnated.
In March 21, 2013, (click here) in Southgate, Michigan, Tyler Nichols left his first period class at Davidson Middle School. He went into a bathroom, where he shot and killed himself with a handgun.
He was discovered by another student who alerted school staff.
The school of approximately 800 students was put on lockdown.
Students hid in their classrooms; police officers roamed the halls.
An hour later, parents were allowed in five at a time to pick up their traumatized children.
Tyler left an open suicide note in which he wrote about the difficulties of being a young teenager.
According to his mother, Tyler had only recently showed signs that he was struggling with depression.
A classmate said that Tyler “was loved by a lot of kids.”
Tyler was just thirteen years old. He was too young to legally possess a handgun, but he didn’t need to look far to find the gun he would use to kill himself. Like most children who die by gun suicide, he found the gun at home; it was in his father’s bed stand, unlocked and loaded.
Tyler’s story is staggeringly common. Every day, at least one child takes their own life with a gun: almost 500 American children die by gun suicide every year. Federal law prohibits gun dealers from selling firearms to people under 18 years old, but American children are obtaining them nonetheless; guns are used in 40% of child suicides. It doesn’t have to be this way: children in other high-income countries are more than 90% less likely to die by gun suicide.
And the problem is growing: over the last decade, the child firearm suicide rate in the United States has been on the rise....
The academic research is in and it is not pretty. From the New England Journal of Medicine. The violence culture in the USA has to stop. I never entertained the imagination of such programs as "The Walking Dead." It is a gross misrepresentation of reality and it is disgusting.
I could not tell you the name of any character, episode or outcome of any such movie, television show or internet video. I strongly believe when a human body is so distorted on a regular basis it brings mental illness with it, that includes other body disorders such as bulimia and anorexia. When human minds are told over and over this is the way society has valued them, the outcomes are inevitable.
Children are far too impressionable to look the other way and believe they are okay. They are not and the adults that allow such danger and violence in the USA are directly responsible.
September 4, 2008
By Matthew Miller, M.D., ScD. and David Hemenway, Ph.D.
...In 2005, (click here) the most recent year for which mortality data are available, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among Americans 40 years of age or younger. Among Americans of all ages, more than half of all suicides are gun suicides. In 2005, an average of 46 Americans per day committed suicide with a firearm, accounting for 53% of all completed suicides. Gun suicide during this period accounted for 40% more deaths than gun homicide.
Why might the availability of firearms increase the risk of suicide in the United States? First, many suicidal acts — one third to four fifths of all suicide attempts, according to studies — are impulsive. Among people who made near-lethal suicide attempts, for example, 24% took less than 5 minutes between the decision to kill themselves and the actual attempt, and 70% took less than 1 hour.
Second, many suicidal crises are self-limiting. Such crises are often caused by an immediate stressor, such as the breakup of a romantic relationship, the loss of a job, or a run-in with police. As the acute phase of the crisis passes, so does the urge to attempt suicide. The temporary nature and fleeting sway of many suicidal crises is evident in the fact that more than 90% of people who survive a suicide attempt, including attempts that were expected to be lethal (such as shooting oneself in the head or jumping in front of a train), do not go on to die by suicide. Indeed, recognizing the self-limiting nature of suicidal crises, penal and psychiatric institutions restrict access to lethal means for persons identified as potentially suicidal.
Third, guns are common in the United States (more than one third of U.S. households contain a firearm) and are lethal. A suicide attempt with a firearm rarely affords a second chance. Attempts involving drugs or cutting, which account for more than 90% of all suicidal acts, prove fatal far less often....
As opposed to QUALITY journalism.
