With this week being the American Foundation for the Prevention of Suicide's Week to End Suicide campaign AND it also coinciding with the observed uptick in suicides here in Niagara Falls each fall, i thought i would include here 3 or 4 of the best @afspnational tweets of the week.
In America there are 2 suicides for every 1 homicide. In Canada in 2011 there are 598 homicides and 3,500 suicides... 5 times as many people take their own life in Canada as have it taken from them.
32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
Original Post - July 9th 2013
A while back a truly horrific article was published in the Niagara Falls Review. Its 2nd sentence contains the assertion that "something is amiss" in Niagara.It went on to detail that 11% of Niagarians over the age of 20 ATTEMPT suicide every year. That is nearly double the 5.9% of Ontarians that try to end their lives every year.
In April CNN and Foxnews carried live coverage of the NRPS and the OPP talking a man back off the ledge at Table Rock just above the Horseshoe Falls.
Today a man tried to run his car into the Niagara Gorge right by the Niagara AeroCar Tourist Attraction.
Bodies are regularly found in the river, most of them never reported. In fact the team at Niagara Helicopters supposedly makes a run every morning before they begin taking up tourists to check the whirlpool and lower Niagara River for bodies and body parts.
Another body was pulled from the river while i was away with my family on vacation.
Furthermore two seniors got into a fistfight at a golf tournament... we can't even golf without getting at each other.
Some maintain it is about 30 a year. I spoke with a community member in our community garden who is a dispatcher with the Niagara Parks Commission. They confirmed that this year it particular - 2013 - it is much, MUCH higher than that.
What is the "something [that] is amiss"?
Proverbs 16:25 notes "There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death."
At the risk of GREAT OVER SIMPLIFICATION suicidal people feel - note the verb i am using - they feel some combination of:
a) they have no other options
b) they have no one to turn to
c) that everyone else would be better off without them
The "something [that] is amiss" is not that people mess their lives up with gambling, addictions, affairs, debts, etc, etc or that the weight of a dire medical diagnosis becomes too much to bare or the impending legal and publicity woes of a criminal conviction drive one to the edge.
From above... a) might be entirely true. They may really have no other options. They are going to lose their house. The doctor was right to say that pancreatic cancer will kill them and soon and painfully. Their spouse is going to leave them and take the kids as a result of the horrific things they have been investigated for and charged with.
The "something [that] is amiss" is not that people get into trouble. "There is way that APPEARS to be right..." says Solomon in Proverbs 16:25.
The "something [that] is amiss" is that b) and c) above seem so persuasive in combination with a). That people in Niagara are - for whatever reason - so cut off and isolated from each other and from the support systems of the community out there (churches, social service agencies, counselors, etc,etc) that b) and c) overwhelm them is the real "something [that] is amiss".
In other words the "something [that] is amiss" is not amiss with the people that are attempting suicide.
It is "amiss" with us... those around them... that we appear so unable or perhaps unwilling or perhaps uninterested in offering them the love and support they need at what is most obviously their darkest moment.
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