Death, Suicide, and Young
Americans
2007 Psyc 456
Dusana Rybarova
Adolescence
 13 to 20+ years
 Expectations and views of adolescents changed
over time and are influenced by social and cultural
factors
– During WW I and WW II adolescents viewed as
competent, hard-working, and responsible (end of
adolescence at age of 16)
– During economically depressed periods (e.g. 1930s)
adolescents viewed as incompetent, lazy, and immature
(end of adolescence at age of 20)
 Many adolescence don’t experience any
significant problems and have good relationships
with their parents
Facts of Teenage Life and Death
 77% of deaths of young Americans are accounted for by
– Accidents
– Murders
– Suicides
 Facts about life and death of adolescents in the USA
– Young Americans among the highest risk groups for contracting
AIDS
– Teenagers’ rates of drug use, eating disorders, and depression are
rising
– Young Americans are facing collapsing public education and
increases in college tuition costs
– More than 12,000 American teenagers yearly admitted to ERs with
self-inflicted bodily injuries
– Young Americans are 15 to 20 times more likely to die from
homicide than their counterparts in other industrialized nations
Facts of Teenage Life and Death
 …’dissolution of American nuclear family,
geographic mobility, the pressures of
consumerism, along with media abstractions
of violence and egocentrism are creating a
youthful world where teen pregnancy, drug
and alcohol abuse, and adolescent suicide
are seen as ways out for children loosing
their childhood.’ (Fox-Genovese, 1996:41)
Adolescence, Death and Dying
 Three phases of adolescence with respect to perception of
death
– Young adolescence
 12-15 years
 Death still seems very remote
– Middle adolescence
 15-17 years
 Death defiance attitude – high risk-taking and belief in our own
invulnerability to harm and death
 Intense emotional reactions, parents sometimes become ‘worst
enemies’, peer approval becomes priority
– Late adolescence
 17 years plus
 More mature understanding of death and more anxiety of death than
the younger adolescent groups
 Adolescents facing their own death view it with frustration and
disappointment about not being able to achieve bring to fruition their
emerging skills
Factors influencing Reactions of
Adolescents to Death and Dying
 The Avoidance of Death in Childhood
– Children that are screened or sheltered from any real
involvement in dying and death often learn to engage in
cognitive denial, emotional repression and behavioral
passivity in dealing with death and dying
– Lack of preparation to cope with death
 Shyness, Uncertainty, and Lack of Confidence
– Feelings of insecurity and shyness may inhibit young
people from asking questions and expressing feelings
and thoughts about death and dying
Factors influencing Reactions of
Adolescents to Death and Dying
 Adolescence + Turmoil and Disruption
– Adolescents are often left on their own to manage
difficult thoughts and feelings as they attempt to come to
terms with their own dying or death of a loved one
– Stereotypes about adolescent behavior further separate
adolescents from adults (generation gap)
 Death = Distance, Violence, and Destruction
– Surveys show that adolescents have the tendency to
overestimate annual incidence of homicide in the USA
probably under the influence of media
– Death viewed as violent and destructive
Music and Death






Coffin songs and casket tunes
Protest songs
Tributes to the dead
Grief and bereavement
Old age, suicide, and death
Heavy metal and self-destruction (in the 90s)
– 74% of young females prefer pop musing and 70% young
males prefer heavy rock/meal music
– Associating between a preference for heavy rock/metal
music and suicidal thoughts, acts of deliberate self-harm,
depression, delinquency, drug taking, and family
dysfunction
Perspectives on Youth Suicide









Violation of the survival instinct
In some religions violation of the God’s law
Social aspect – hara-kirti and kamikadze in Japan
18th century – romantic aspect, suicide as a way to increase
reputation for some intellectuals and artists (Vicent van
Gogh, Virginia Wolf, Ernest Hemingway…)
Adolescent suicide now about 13 per 100,000 per year
Possibility of many suicides being unreported
Easy access to firearms as a factor associated with
increasing numbers of suicides over the last 30 years
Suicide attempts outnumber actual suicidal deaths by a
ration of about 8 to 1
High rates of suicide attempts among lesbian Americans
(35%)
The Sociocultural Perspective
 Emile Durkheim – Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1951)
– Anomic suicide
 Influenced by disturbed equilibrium of a society (crash of the stock
market; years after WWII in Austria)
– Egoistic suicide
 Lack of integration into society (loners, intellectuals, celebrities,…)
– Altruistic suicide
 Honorable suicide from the point of view of society (kamikaze pilots or
hara-kiri)
– Fatalistic suicide
 Result of being in a society that allows little opportunity for individual
fulfillment (slavery, prison, totalitarian state…)
 Family factors
– Suicide associated with poor communication patterns, inadequate
role models, dysfunctional families
– Parents have the tendency to blame themselves for the suicide and
understand it as an act of rejection, abandonment, and punishment
The Neuroscience Perspective
 Suicide as a result of hormonal changes and
neurotransmitter imbalance
 Suicide and depression
– 90% of those who commit suicide have history of depression
– Depression and suicide associated with low levels of serotonin
 Gender and suicide
– Males outnumber women in suicides – attributed to biochemistry of
aggression
 Impulsive suicide
– Focus on stimuli immediately present in the environment, lack of
broader perspective
– Hyperactivity – not considering consequences of action
 Mood swings and drugs
– Drugs as a way to control mood swings associated with hormonal
changes in adolescence
The Cognitive Perspective
 Adolescent thinking
– Egocentric thinking, feelings of uniqueness of experience and not
being understood, adolescent invulnerability
 Cognitive distortion and suicide
– Aaron Beck – characteristics of thinking of depressed and suicidal
people




Rigidity of thought (unable to consider positive alternatives)
Selective abstraction (focusing on the negative)
Overgeneralization (generalizing the negative)
Inexact labeling (negative labeling of themselves)
 Suicide notes
– Express hopelessness and emotional distortions
 Hopelessness
– The factor that most directly predicts the level of lethality of a suicide
attempt
The Psychodynamic Perspective
 Erik Erikson
– The Identity Crisis: Who am I?
– Intimacy vs. Isolation: Can I love and be loved?
 Adolescent/parent separation
 Thanatos (Freud)
– Overwhelming pain of the early loss associated
with the current rejection
– Anniversary suicide