SUICIDE AND MEANING

Suicide has become epidemic in the States:

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released startling new statistics on the rise of deaths by suicide in the United States, which are up 25 percent since 1999 across most ethnic and age groups. These numbers clearly point to a crisis — but of what kind? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/opinion/sunday/suicide-rate-existential-crisis.html

The author, Clay Routledge, dismantles the common assertion that we to improve and to make psychotherapy more available. However, Routledge correctly observes that, at this time of the greatest availability of therapy, suicide continues on its deadly march.

He then identifies a key factor in understanding the phenomenon of suicide:

• As a behavioral scientist who studies basic psychological needs, including the need for meaning, I am convinced that our nation’s suicide crisis is in part a crisis of meaninglessness.

We express our quest for meaning in many different ways - “Finding myself,” “Finding my inner truth,” or “What fulfills me.” Routledge reasons that this quest is a demanding and persistent human need:

• Empirical studies bear this out. A felt lack of meaning in one’s life has been linked to alcohol and drug abuse, depression, anxiety and — yes — suicide. And when people experience loss, stress or trauma, it is those who believe that their lives have a purpose who are best able to cope with and recover from distress.

Where does such a belief come from? Some insist that we can simply create such a belief. Really? Perhaps as easily as creating the belief that we are experiencing an incredibly beautiful relationship, when we know that we are not. In other words, meaning depends upon the existence of a real meaning, not something that we create in our imagination.

Only when we are convinced that our meaning is real will changes take place. M. Scot Peck, the late psychiatrist and author of the “Road Less Traveled,” had consistently observed that those patients who believed that God was taking care of them would improve. These observations finally led him to find his own meaning and purpose as a follower of Jesus.