About Suicide
Underlying mental illness is the number one cause of suicide. Depression and depressive illnesses occur when chemicals in the brain, such as serotonin, become unbalanced or disrupted. A person who has depression does not think like a healthy person. The illness can prevent her/him from understanding the options available to help relieve her/his suffering.

Depression can happen at any time - even when a person's life seems to be going well. For some people, depression can occur after traumatic or stressful situations such as death of a loved one, loss of a job, divorce, legal trouble, or chronic illness. Suffering from depression is involuntary, just like cancer or diabetes, but it is a treatable illness that can be managed.

Facts and Figures

• Every year, about 30,000 people in the United States of all ages, ethnic and racial groups die by suicide.
• Suicide is the eleventh leading cause of death overall, with white men aged 65 and older having the highest rate. 
• Suicide is the third leading cause of death among children, teens, and young adults in the United States, second in Minnesota.
• It is estimated each year, depression and related brain illnesses cost the country more than $44 billion in lost work productivity alone.
•  Depression:
  o 20 million people in the U.S. suffer from depression each year. Four in 10 people will suffer from depression at least once in their life.
  o Depression is a serious medical condition that is highly treatable. Yet only 1/3 of those suffering from depression undergo treatment.
  
• Suicide:
  o 90 percent of people who die by suicide have a brain illness like depression at the time of death.
  o Suicide takes the lives of about 30,000 Americans every year.

    o Suicide is now the 11th leading cause of death in Americans.

    o Suicide is the third leading cause of death among children, teens, and young adults, ages 10-25. 
    o Every day 80 Americans take their own lives and more than 1,900 Americans visit emergency departments for self-inflicted injury (National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, total 706,000).
o For every two victims of homicide in the U.S. there are three people who take their own lives. There are now twice as many deaths due to suicide as compared to HIV/AIDS.
o Between 1952 and 1995, the incidence of suicide among adolescents and young adults is up nearly 200%.
o More teenagers and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart illness, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, influenza, and chronic lung illness combined.
o Research shows that in the month prior to their suicide, 75 percent of elderly people had visited a physician.
o More than half of all suicides occur in adult men, aged 25-65. Males are four times more likely to die from suicide than are females, yet females are four times more likely to attempt suicide.

Symptoms
Learn the symptoms of depression:

• Changes in feelings and mood:
  o Feelings of sadness, emptiness or numbness
  o Feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and/or worthlessness
  o Losing interest/pleasure in activities that were once enjoyable
  o Acting irritable or cranky, constantly critical/complaining 
• Changes in physical health:
  o Unusual eating patterns, unusual weight gain or loss
  o Unusual sleep patterns; sleeping too much, waking in the middle of the night
  o Fatigue or loss of energy
  o Physical slowing of speech, movement and thinking, or physical restlessness
  o Aches and pains that don't respond to treatment
  o Use of alcohol and/or drugs to mask feelings 
• A change in thoughts:
  o Low self-esteem and self-confidence; thoughts of pessimism
  o Poor concentration or indecisiveness
  o Thoughts of death or suicide
  o Learn the warning signs of suicide
• A person who is suicidal might:
  o Talk about suicide
  o Talk about feeling worthless, hopeless and helpless
  o Be preoccupied with death
  o Be suddenly happier and calmer
  o Visit or call people one cares about, as if to say goodbye
  o Make arrangements; set his or her affairs in order
  o Give things away
  o Acquire guns or stockpile pills
  o Have made a previous suicide attempt