Suicide andSuicidal Attempts

Suicide and suicidal attempts are, contrary to popular wisdom, quite frequent in childhood and adolescence. Even in the 1970s, suicidal death was shown to be one of the fastest growing adolescent problems, ranking fourth as the leading cause of death in the fifteento nineteenyear age group (Toolan, 1987, p. 339). This view is echoed in the more current literature in the field, which also emphasizes that 59 to 71 percent of surveyed adolescents believe suicide to be a potential for most within that age group (Domino, et.al., 1988-89, p. 359). Similarly, attitudes toward death within the fabric of American society have significantly changed in post WorldWar II society, primarily because of the pervasive influence of television and the rapid rise in the importance of the media. Prior to the advent of the media age, most Americans lived in smaller, more tightlyknit communities. Both suicide and accidental death were thus experienced at a more personal level members of the community facing the situation locally (Fulton & Owen, 1988).

As television and motion pictures grew in popularity, however, images of violence, death, and suicide formed more of a cognitive pattern within the framework of popular culture. Films such as "Halloween," "The Road Warrior," and "Rambo" depict death in vivid color and often in slow motion. This detailed destruction of humans serves to eclipse the meaning of death and lessen its impact upon the viewer. Conversely, this behavior is impressionabl

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ward suicide in general, they also believe that television newscasts about suicide may, in fact, act as a preventative measure (Pfeffer, 1986). It seems as if there are several issues at stake in this problem. For instance, does television or motion picture violence cause imitative behavior? Is this behavior necessarily suicidal, or is the suicide "accidental?" Do news portrayals of suicide make the adolescent think more about suicide, or fear it? It would be impossible to study all of these in a single research proposal, therefore, it might behoove us to limit the study to the investigation of whether seeing violent behavior in the media does indeed provoke similar violent feelings. Two methods to investigate this problem in a systematic manner are presented. One would include providing a questionnaire to members of a target adolescent group after showing them a particularly violent video. The other would be to get access to medical records of adolescents who attempted suicide and survey their responses to a series of questions. Perhaps the most logical method would be to use a combination of the two in order to extrapolate a series of common occurrences between the control group (adolescents who have not attempted suicide) a

Category: Psychology - S