Suicide is Painless:The Crisis of Black Male Suicide

You had to be shocked or else feel a sense of revulsion after hearing the news of the Abraham K. Biggs, Jr. suicide, reported Sunday, November 23,2008. If not, then I suggest you immediately detoxify from your Play Station and Xbox and stop playing Grand Theft Auto; because like the others who watched Biggs kill himself, you have a major problem.
If you didn’t hear about the story, these are the facts: Biggs took an overdose of pills while broadcasting streaming live on the website Justin.tv. This tragedy gets uglier, as hundreds, watching by webcam, urged him to take more drugs, while others debated whether he had taken enough.
The Biggs self-immolation generated 1,379 related articles on the Internet. Protests ensued, as many felt the caldron call to push for Internet censorship. Even comparisons were being made between Biggs and Kitty Genovese, a woman who was also a victim of a violent ending, stabbed to death in Queens,New York, 44 years ago while onlookers did nothing to stop the brutal attack. Psychologists have named this effect: the Kitty Genovese syndrome.

I think psychologists, social scientists, and other mental health professionals might be on to something in making a case between the webcam viewers who egged on an obviously troubled Biggs, and the neighborhood that heard Ms. Genovese’s incessant screams for help and did nothing.

As it relates to the crisis of black male suicide, our society is no better than the rapacious cyberspace peeping toms who watched a human being kill himself. As a matter of fact, we might be judged worse. Statistics provided by the Florida A&M University’s counseling services tell us that suicide is the third leading cause of death among black youth, after homicides and accidents.

According to Florida A&M, a firearm is the primary weapon used in 65 percent of all black male suicides between the ages of 15 and 25.

What is lost in this disturbing story is how a major mental health crisis is growing in the black community and nobody seems to care. In the last 20 years, suicide rates among young black men between the ages of 15 and 19 increased a whopping 114 percent. You wonder if this problem existed among young white males, someone would be calling for a major congressional hearing to urge Congress to pass legislation to fund suicide prevention programs for this “important ethnic group.”

However, the ignorance of this crisis is not just the sole responsibility of white America. The black community needs to step up to plate and take responsibility for this crisis. Like the AIDS pandemic, suicide is slaying “the young, gifted and black,” while we deny in spirit the critical need to address this issue.

Mental disorder and depression are viewed as signs of weakness in the black community. Counseling is eschewed like annual physicals. Furthermore, it doesn’t help that a mere 2.3 percent of all psychiatrists in the United States are African American.

So what can be done to intelligently combat this growing nihilism among our youth? Dr. Alvin Poussaint suggests the first thing to do is to become acquainted with the signs leading to potential suicide:
• Irritability
• Changes in appetite and sleep habits
• Chronic fatigue
• Social withdrawal
• Lingering sadness

If these signs exist for a noticeable period of time, ask a mental health professional to diagnose the problem. It’s better to be safe than sorry. This is a crisis that is too critical to ignore.
If you need further information contact suicide prevention, you could be saving the future of a community that is on the verge of destruction.