Parking a link: a suicide report on CNN

Last updated on: February 24, 2015 at 11:26 pm by Jane the Actuary

Parking a link: a suicide report on CNN 2015-02-24T23:26:45-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Here’s a report from CNN today: “A transgender teen’s suicide, a mother’s anguish.” The story: a 17-year-old teenager commits suicide, and posts a suicide note blaming his parents for lack of support.

Now, the first thing you’ll notice is that CNN has wholly adopted the approach that, if you announce you’re transgender, and provide a new name, their stylebook dictates that this becomes, for reporting purposes, your new name, as they use this new name in their reporting and even call out the parents for failing to do so.

But here’s what the teen’s note said: it was not about being miserable. The boy was upset that he wouldn’t be able to seek out surgery until age 18 (that is, concerned that the changes of puberty would mean that he wouldn’t really look like a woman anyway), but didn’t really seem to be in the pit of despair so much as lamenting the prospect of a life that wasn’t “good enough,” and, besides, was just angry. And — here’s the key paragraph: “My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say ‘that’s fucked up’ and fix it. Fix society. Please.”

A while ago, with respect to the Brittany Maynard case, I wrote that (based in part on a book I’d read, Man’s Search for Meaning) it is having a purpose or meaning for your life that gives one a motivation for living, particularly those in grim circumstances or facing a serious, even terminal illness, and that the irony of her case was that “she did indeed find a new purpose after being diagnosed with brain cancer, but this very purpose, that of promoting assisted suicide, compelled her to kill herself in order to fulfill this purpose, which could only be achieved that way.”

Could this not be a part of the issue with suicide in a great many more cases?

Was this child so full of despair about his future that life was unbearable? Was he depressed, suffering from mental illness, not able to see his way to a brighter future?

Or had he, in fact, found a purpose to his life — but one that could only be fulfilled by killing himself? The purpose being: sending a message of acceptance for transgender teens (“my death needs to mean something”) and punishing his parents for their lack of acceptance (both through their anticipated suffering by losing a child, and a hope that they will face criticism from others).

Now, look, I’m no expert — and when Robin Williams killed himself, we heard repeatedly that suicide is caused by depression/mental illness, and it isn’t the “fault” of the individual himself. And my brief looking around didn’t produce any significant facts or figures on this, but I wonder how often the individual does think that committing suicide is somehow a positive action they can take that will achieve some goal, however mistaken that goal is.

Sunny thoughts for New Year’s Eve, eh? But now I’m off to make some cookies and play a game with the kids.

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