Forty-six years after “The Bell Jar” author Sylvia Plath committed suicide by gassing herself while he slept in another room, her son, Nicholas Hughes has also chosen to take his own life.
On Sunday, his sister Frieda told The Times that Hughes had hanged himself on March 16 at his Alaskan home after a long battle with depression.
Hughes was 47, unmarried and had no children. He was a professor of fisheries
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If someone you love has clinical depression, there is a strong risk that they will at some point think about suicide. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, about 30% of all people with clinical depression will attempt suicide, and about 15% will ultimately succeed in taking their own life. Although a more recent estimate places the risk of completed suicide significantly lower, at 3.5%, the risk of suicide should still
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A study published in the January issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders suggests that vets with depression are at higher risk of commiting suicide during two critical periods: after discharge from a psychiatric hospital and after beginning treatment with an antidepressant.
Dr. Marcia Valenstein, a clinical psychiatrist at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, and her team collected data from 887,859 VA hospital patients
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Conventional wisdom is that there are more suicides during the holidays than at other times.
I’d like to explore two questions. First, is this true? Second, as I am sure that the average person is not studying Medline for articles on suicide, why do most people think it true?
In answer to the first question, it is not true. There is a well known reduction in the suicide rate on major public holidays (including non-religious).
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Sexual abuse in childhood increases the risk of suicide in men by up to ten times, say researchers from the University of Bath. A recent study of Australian men has found that those who were sexually abused as children are more likely than women to contemplate taking their own lives.
Whilst gender and mental health problems are the most important risk factors for contemplating suicide, it is increasingly acknowledged that traumatic
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According to a recent study, it was found that youth in their late teens are four times more likely to commit suicide than those who live in better neighborhoods. It was also found that these kids from poor neighborhoods were twice as likely to report suicidal thoughts.
The study showed
that late teens from disadvantaged neighborhoods had higher levels of depressive symptoms along with lower levels of social support.
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Are genes destiny? Alternatively, are we simply the products of our environment? There is a growing sense that neither of these two possibilities fully captures the essence of the risk for psychiatric disorders.
There are an increasing variety of epigenetic mechanisms that have been described, including the regulation of gene function via the methylation or demethylation of DNA. The study by Drs. Michael Poulter
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According to the the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP), suicide is the third leading cause of suicide among youth aged 10 to 19 years old. These tragic deaths are often preventable, however, if parents, teachers and friends are aware of the risk factors and warning signs.
The following increase the risk of children committing suicide:
Mental illnessDrug or alcohol abuseA stressful or dysfunctional home lifeThe
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In Wyoming, suicide is the second-leading cause of death for youths aged 15-19. That is why the department of health is beginning a new program with public and private partners to help address the role of schools in youth suicide prevention.
“Because we are a community here in Wyoming it hurts us all when our youth lose faith in their future and c
onsider suicide as their only option,” says Keith Hotle, suicide prevention
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Teen suicide rates, which had been declining over the past decade, experienced a sharp rise in 2004 over the previous year, according to a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Although rates fell slightly in 2005, the most recent year for which data was available, the rate was still higher than expected.
Some, such as the National Mental Health Association, believe the “black box”
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