Suicide Prevention

This article appeared in the Friday Extra edition dated 2 August 2013 see website www.carersouth.org.au/mental-health-news-updates

Article: Why men kill themselves: The warning signs most people miss
SOME people believe that if a person is going to kill themselves, there’s nothing one can do. If you try to stop them, they’ll just bide their time and do it later. Suicide is a major worldwide epidemic taking the lives of more than one million people a year, according to the World Health Organisation. Estimates suggest that 10 to 20 times more individuals attempt suicide. Self-harm now takes more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined. My father tried to commit suicide when I was five years old. Although he lived, our lives were never the same. I grew up wondering what happened to my father and was terrified that the same thing would happen to me.
A colleague of mine, Dr Thomas Joiner, lost his father to suicide while he was at university. Although his father was depressed, he didn’t seem like a suicide risk.
Dr Joiner, who’s dedicated his life to preventing suicides like his father’s, has proposed a new theory of why people take their own lives, proposing three key motivational aspects which contribute to suicide:
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