Dennis Prager's right about one thing: the answers generated by reading statistics from a pre-programmed left-wing perspective are the wrong answers.
Let's chew on these thoughts for a while:
1. Suicide is often chosen for rational, not emotional, reasons. While we have plenty of "mental health professionals," and if we didn't we could always encourage some of the ones who've become motivational speakers or computer techs or certified public accountants to go back into mental health counselling, neither the study nor the practice of psychology really qualifies people to address the rational reasons why people consider suicide. At best a psychologist might know more creative ways to argue against suicide than the average person knows--though people who read philosophy, religion, literature, "the humanities," would know more of those ways than the average person, too. A psychiatrist who gets some sort of corporate encouragements to hand out antidepressants would be likely to cause more adverse reactions, including more suicides. And homicide-suicides.
2. Suicides who have access to firearms don't always use firearms. Suicides who lack access to firearms don't need firearms. Dragging firearms into the argument is a politically motivated argument, not shown to be relevant to the question.
If a quick step to the right, repeal of an existing gun ban, isn't enough to stop the People of the Stubborn Jackass from braying "gun bans" when their foreign overlords jerk their reins, perhaps Congress should consider cash penalties: "Certain subjects having been brought up by certain interests, and shot down by the majority of the people, so many times that there is no reasonable room for belief that they are worth debating any longer, anyone proposing a gun ban, any federal law having to do with abortion, any new applications of nuclear technology, or any federal budget that does not reduce by the same proportion that price inflation has occurred during the past year, shall pay a $500 fine and spend the rest of the legislative session sitting in a corner, facing the wall." And they can consider themselves jolly lucky if their rich White selves are not dragged out to talk to the grandparents of the young men who died during the D.C. gun ban, too.
Of course, Prager's insights are politically motivated too, or at best they reflect his insight into the suicidal ideation of people he knows. For people I know, i.e. women, involvement with men creates drama and stress, though loss of their men creates even more of those things. Women tend to outlive men, even if we didn't also tend to marry men who are older than we are. Our only hope of happiness in old age seems to me to be knowing that, however much we miss our individual Partners for Life, we were designed to live happily without men.
But loneliness does not motivate people to commit suicide, at least not consciously; it motivates them to join singles clubs and go to bars. When adults who have been competent for fifty years commit suicide, they're likely not to have talked about that specific solution. (Who wants to be told to talk to "mental health professionals" whose only question is which pill to shove at you? Certainly nobody who has a reality problem; many people do try to alter their moods when they can't solve their reality problems, and alcohol is cheaper than pills, and drinking with buddies obviously offers more immediate relief from loneliness than popping pills alone at home.) They are likely to have talked about reality problems, most of which involve pain, disability, and/or money. They are likely to have, or believe they have, chronic long-term diseases that will become more painful over time.
When rational reasons not to want to live exist, antidepressants can actually help people to feel cheerful and businesslike about suicide, if not about homicide-suicide. Other prescription medications are also associated with suicide in various ways. Tegretol is known to cause obsessive thoughts about suicide, which can, for people who believe suicide is morally wrong, take the form of academic or "spiritual" interest in the subject of suicide. Flomax is known to cause errors in judgment that can easily be fatal for patients or others, especially when driving.
The incidence of suicide in my generation is increasing, I believe, primarily because the incidence of painful, disabling, embarrassing chronic diseases is increasing. We're growing old. Previous generations didn't have to live with so many chronic diseases for so long, nor did they go into old age believing that their own feelings were all they had to live for...and neither did they live in an overcrowded world, as most of humankind now do, where the attitude of many other people toward our impending demise is transparently "The sooner the better."
Faced with the problem of having guaranteed lifelong retirement pensions to people who want to retire at 62 and live to the age of 102, many people committed to socialism have seriously proposed that more older people ought to do the public-spirited thing and die sooner. As a generation mine has not gone in for public spirit in anything like the way our parents' generation did...but once in a while we do want to make the public-spirited choice.
Those who really want to reduce the incidence of suicide among adults might try listening to individual adults, by ones, and not ignoring their concerns about reality problems, but actually doing things to solve the reality problems. Mentioning "mental health" is not likely to solve reality problems, and should be avoided. Reversing inflation, banning glyphosate, and being more cautious about immigration are things that would relieve the pain of many people's reality problems.
If Robert Kennedy has seriously promised to end chronic diseases if elected, he was either raving drunkenly or talking about some plan he's not discussed with his e-friends. More likely he's been misquoted to that effect by campaign opponents. Chronic diseases existed before glyphosate and will still exist after a total glyphosate ban. Nevertheless, what Glyphosate Awareness has found is that most if not all chronic diseases are dramatically aggravated by glyphosate reactions--that almost all individual "Spoonies" lose half of their "spoons" of energy after exposure, whatever their chronic diseases are. The question to be asked is whether there are people living with chronic diseases who will not notice a big improvement as soon as a total glyphosate ban has had time to eliminate glyphosate from their food. You can't prove a negative but I will be surprised if there are such people. Glyphosate does not cause rheumatoid arthritis but it causes the flares of pain. Glyphosate does not directly cause people with sickle cell anemia to collapse, but it's among the factors that shorten the time sicklers have to enjoy relatively normal health in between collapses. Glyphosate does not cause Lyme Disease but it triggers the neuromuscular condition, seen in chronic Lyme Disease, that is usually identified as Bell's Palsy and easily confused with "mild" strokes. And so on.
I only spent fifteen years monitoring and documenting the reactions of one of the toughest old ladies who ever lived and one of the strongest combat veterans, and many other people, myself included. I only had to look a neighbor in the eye while he said he'd "shot down" Glyphosate Awareness as not having anything to offer his son (with sickle cell anemia)--and I can say now that, although it can't offer a cure, yes, Sir, a ban on glyphosate can help your son too. I can be a bit emotional about these facts but they are solid scientific facts. Corporate gaslighting about the flaws in this or that study and the fact that other studies haven't been done is just that--gaslighting. The longer the corporate spox babble and quibble, the more they should be made to pay!
Some otherwise nice older people go into pathological, hysterical depression at the idea of blocking immigration, because they plan to depend on a Social Security system fed by a cohort of second-class citizens to whom the relatively lower wages and higher taxes they will be offered in North America may still be an improvement over their conditions at home. I think that's immoral as well as unsustainable, but as their party is so fond of observing, these people did grow up with so many benefits from the legacy of segregation that they are unconsciously racist...Mean, but true. You want that Cuban dishwasher, that Venezuelan baby-sitter? You should jollywell pay them the same as you'd pay a North American, and before anybody starts to whine that they've not had comparable educations, you should jollywell give them educations. Just as a guess I'd expect that any impartial listener would agree that their English is better than your Spanish.
Then other older people, also otherwise nice, go into pathological panics at the idea of admitting all the immigrants who want to come here, because they've heard all the stories about what the criminal gangs who are here illegally, for criminal purposes, get up to and they imagine that other immigrants have the same intentions. At the very least, these people wail, the immigrants will all vote for Democrats! To which two things need to be said: (1) It's still possible for the D Party to get back to its roots, get in touch with its base, listen to its clearer thinkers again, such that the possibility of people's voting for Democrats will no longer be the disaster it currently appears to be; it's still possible that at some future time even you may want to vote for Democrats, again, as you probably have done in the past; and (2) Given the known opposition of traditional Catholics and serious Muslims to anything resembling "godless (Marxist) communism," why agonize when you can strategize? These people are certainly "cultural conservatives." If "conservative" voters reached out to them while they were preparing to qualify to vote, many immigrants would vote for Republicans. Stop wailing and hire an immigrant to improve your Spanish by talking politics with you.
Immigration is not my main issue, but the amount of passionate e-mail I get on the subject, from both sides, suggests that an honest, frank, benevolent national discussion of the issue could yield much relief from the anxiety many adults feel about the future. We have had more discussion of this issue than I personally wanted--but most of it has been neither frank nor benevolent. Both sides could start by owning their hidden agendas. For those who think we should fling wide the gates to immigrants and also encourage our own young people to have more than one baby, a serious consideration of why their towns are not overpopulated, as towns with viable economies all are, may also help.
People who feel optimistic about growing old tend to be people who take full responsibility for their own health care, with plans that may or may not include seeing a doctor every five or ten years. It is not possible for all of us to employ the best doctors. It may be possible for all of us to demonstrate enough responsibility for our own health, enough reluctance to employ a pill-shill who merely writes prscriptions instead of talking about our health care, to restore a level of quality to the medical care system where people believe that the merely-average doctors we are likely to find can still do us more good than harm.
Last week a book about Althea Gibson, the early twentieth century tennis star, hit the stores. Books about athletes usually have little to offer the rest of us; Sally Jacobs' Althea does. It presents a model of what Jacobs might have hoped was becoming less common, but is actually becoming more common, as people grow older. People who did something well and ought to have become rich, somehow or other, just didn't. Biographical studies after these people are dead may be able to document precisely how their not becoming rich was not their fault; e.g. Gibson's income, throughout her tennis career, was capped at barely enough to keep her in tennis shoes. While living people are unlikely to be willing, even if they are able, to document that information. Gibson was blessed with richer friends who joined together to stabilize her old age, financially. The unsustainability of Social Security, and the low incomes from which many people made whatever payments they made into it, mean that more of us are going to need to do this for people we know. An income sufficient to keep them in their homes and guarantee adequate climate control and groceries in the same months will keep many adults from considering suicide.
The ridiculous housing situation produced by mindless capitalism is another motive for suicide in adults, about which we can all do something. We need to make it easier for retirees to keep their homes (some older people do choose to live in apartments, but most don't and we should stop lying to ourselves about this). We need to make it easier for young parents to bring up children in decent homes, which should be defined, probably by law, as houses with at least one bedroom per child and one acre of garden per person. We need to make it harder for banks to hold onto houses--perhaps with a law requiring any real estate acquired by a bank to be sold to the highest bidder after thirty days, and if the highest bidder offers fifty cents, then that's the value of the property. When anyone blathers about "property values" we need to affirm that property rights and human rights are viable values, and the resale value of real estate is a luxury we have rated too highly for too long. We could also profit from more awareness of the benefits of houses and land being handed down to natural heirs rather than being sold. Keeping extended families together relieves many of the reality problems that cause adults to consider suicide.
Every despairing adult is a different individual with different specific concerns. I've considered a few things that can help a lot of people, but the last thing despairing adults need is large-scale "programs" that lump them together and propose one solution for all (which usually fits none). Just as walking barefoot is healthier than walking in shoes that don't fit your individual feet, no effort on the part of the federal government to "create programs" is likely to benefit more people than another "program." The things that make suicide seem like a rational choice are best addressed by individuals who know each other's specific individual situations.
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