THE EPIDEMIC OF SUICIDE AND SELF-HARM

 

 

We are in the midst of a national epidemic, and it’s not COVID, but the epidemic of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide among our youth:

 

·       Nearly 1 in 10 high school students admitted that they had tried to take their own life in the previous 12 months, according to a survey published by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, and 1 in 5 had seriously considered it. Suicide rates among adolescents had risen 53 percent between 2010 and 2020. (AARP.ORG/BULLETIN; Sept. 2022)

 

Many are identifying the usual “culprits” to explain this explosion. Social media and the lack of mental health services seem to head everyone’s list. However, as mental health services have proliferated, so too has this epidemic. Conspicuously absent from these lists of culprits are the proliferation of LGBTQ experimentation, witchcraft (judging from the massive numbers of youth joining social media witchcraft groups), and the widespread rejection of the Christian faith, especially among the youth.

 

In short, we need to question whether our tormented youth have placed their hope in the wrong things—sexual exploration and spirit guides, neither of which have solid track records. Just consider the big picture of the nations and people groups who have embraced them. Have these groups prospered? John J. Davis has written about the work of British Anthropologist J.D. Unwin:

 

·       After a comprehensive study of both Western and non-Western cultures throughout human history, Unwin concluded that the record of mankind “does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it had been absolutely [heterosexually] monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.” Unwin observed that a society’s adoption and maintenance of heterosexual monogamy as a social standard “has preceded all manifestations of social energy, whether that energy be reflected in conquest, in art and sciences, in extension of the social vision, or in the substitution of monotheism for polytheism.” (Evangelical Ethics, p.116)

 

The same can be said regarding pagan spiritistic, shamanistic cultures, where violence abounds and peace is a rare commodity. In Whence the “Noble Savage,” Patrick Frank, summarizes the research regarding analysis of ancient burial sites of spiritistic cultures. The findings, for instance, demonstrate that the violent death rates of British Columbian Native Americans (27-33%) far exceeded even the violent death rate of 20th century Europe and the US (1%). Frank also adds,

 

·       “The Southwest is dotted with finds of people killed en masse…These indications of war, violent deaths, mutilations and cannibalism are from tribal societies that experienced no European or modern contact, thus contradicting the idea that peoples who were free from European influence lived relatively peaceful lives.” (Skeptic Mag. Vol 9, #1,2001, 54-60)

 

Spiritistic societies build no hospitals or enduring institutions and establish no universities. In The facts on Spirit Guides, John Ankerberg and John Weldon sound the alarm about the strong association between spiritism and mental illness:

 

·       “One discovers many mental patients who are mentally ill precisely because they are demonized. This is born out by the research of German psychiatrist and parapsychologist Hans Bender who coined the term “mediumistic psychosis’; by theologian and psychologist Kurt Koch; and by clinical psychologist and Swedenborgian Wilson Van Dusen, who has examined thousands of patients and noted the parallels to spiritistic experiences and phenomena.” (27)

 

However, the spirits do not gain a foothold by advertising the costs, one of which is suicide. According to Ankerberg and Weldon, there have been:

 

·       innumerable cases where the “loving” spirits have deliberately induced emotional dependence upon their advice and then at a moment of weakness encouraged their contact to commit suicide. And this has been occurring for decades, probably even centuries. In the 1920 text The Menace of Spiritualism, case after case of tragedy is listed.” (37)

 

The authors have compiled their own list of horrors that have stalked mediums:

 

·       Arthur Ford became a morphine addict and alcoholic…Bishop Pike died a tragic death…The biography on [Edgar] Cayce by Joseph Millar reveals the extent of suffering Cayce’s occultic involvement cost him—from psychic attacks to mysterious fires…Many channelers seem to succumb to various vices later in life.” (39)

 

Although they describe the medium M. Lamar Keene as “fraudulent,” from his book, The Psychic Mafia, the authors cite:

 

·       All the mediums I’ve known or known about have had tragic endings. The Fox sisters, who started it all, wound up as alcoholic derelicts. William Slade…died insane in a Michigan sanitarium. Margery, the medium, lay on her deathbed a hopeless drunk….Wherever I looked it was the same: mediums, at the end of their tawdry life, dying a tawdry death.” (39-40)

 

Violence was another price to be paid:

 

·       Spiritist and guru Sri Chinmoy, a spiritual advisor at the United Nations observes, “Many, many black magicians and people who deal with spirits have been strangled or killed. I know because I’ve been near quite a few of these cases.” (40)

 

·       Dr. Kurt Koch observed after 45 years of counseling the occultly oppressed that from his own experience ‘numerous cases of suicide, fatal accidents, strokes and insanity are to be observed among occult practitioners…Anyone who has had to observe for 45 years the effects of spiritism can only warn people with all the strength at his disposal. (40)

 

I had joined numerous social media witchcraft groups where I found that many were complaining about mental and extra-physical afflictions. However, false hopes are only abandoned after the costs can no longer be sustained. For example, one practitioner joyfully reported that he had finally made undeniable contact with the spirit world when one had slugged him across the face. I too had naively given the abusive and foul-mouthed spirits I had encountered through the Ouija Board the benefit-of-the-doubt.

 

We all need hope, but what better hope can we have than the God who loves us and promised to take care of us in every circumstance and proved it by dying for us:

·       What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:31–32)

 

I am deeply grieved that our youth will not give this God any consideration and will even opt to destroy themselves rather than giving Him a chance.