My Social Issue: Teen Suicide and Depression

In my point of view, this issue is an important issue because according to media.www.theloquitur.com, each year, approximately 5,000 college students die by suicide according to the National Mental Health Association. This means if this among of students die each year, it means that our future is dying with them. Also, according to www.news-releases.uiowa.edu, nearly 13.6 percent of those suicides were committed by people under the age of 25. Moreover, suicide accounted for 13 percent of all deaths for people between the ages of 15 and 24. This is a huge percentage, and how could we bring that down. One of the strong reason to keep more mental health services for students is that more than half of 26,000 students across 70 colleges and universities who completed a survey on suicidal experiences reported having at least one episode of suicidal thinking at some point in their lives, according to psychcentral.com.

This is a story I found on www.sprc.org website, " Marty was a student at a very large East Coast university-the type of place where it was easy for someone to get lost. Attendance was never taken, and no one noticed if a student stopped showing up in a class of 200 or 300 students. The residence assistants in Marty's dorms were graduate students. They cared about their students but had no systematic way of checking up on everyone. Marty started drifting from his friends. He was uncommunicative and withdrawn. He slept late and rarely left his room. When he did appear in the cafeteria or on the street, he looked more than a little frightened and unkempt. Everyone found it easier to avoid him than to confront him. Late one night, Marty tried to kill himself." This kind of situation happen every single day life. Sometimes we avoid people because we think that they're bizarre and we keep away from them. We have to be careful about how we act with everyone. Show a little compassion and avoid that situation. When I read this story is hurt me so deep and abstrusely because sometimes we could make someone ends his or her life without knowing what we're doing.

We're hurting people feelings without knowing instead to approach this person and ask this person if he or she is fine. Thus, we need more mental health services for teenage to avoid this situation. Maybe that this would never happen if Marty's mental health services did a good job in his college. They have to improve their services in schools.