Teen Suicide
Suicide among teenagers is one of the great tragedies of our world today. It affects families, schools, and the community (Bostik and Everall, 2007). Interestingly, many teenagers who go through suicidal feelings overcome them, if not with ease, then at last in time. This could be an important factor in devising prevention and intervention strategies, especially for high-risk cases where the teens in question may not overcome their feelings. Currently, not much is known about how adolescents overcome suicidal feelings. Hence, Bostik and Everall (2007) conducted their study around this phenomenon to determine how intervention strategies could be devised around preventing suicide in teenagers by helping them to overcome such feelings.
In general, studies on suicide have focused on identifying risk factors for suicide in teens, with emphasis on variables such as demographics and psychiatry. The authors point out that little evidence exists to suggest that these studies have been helpful in creating a better understanding of suicide in teenagers or even in preventing such a tragedy.
One factor that the authors identify for deeper scrutiny is attachment. When young children reach the adolescent phase, they face many changes, including not only physical and psychological changes, but also changes in their relationships, which the researchers refer to collectively as attachment. Adolescents gradually transfer their attachment from their home and family to...
The health of these attachments, according to existing research, often form a solid basis for overcoming feelings of depression and suicide. Hence, the authors suggest that a focus on how teenagers experience these attachments can offer valuable insight into how their relationships with others can be used as an element in intervention strategies for suicidal teens, since these play a role in adaptive functioning.
The authors also point out suggestions from the research regarding parental involvement. Teenagers with significant and present attachments to both parents and peers, for example, have shown a lower tendency towards suicidal ideas and feelings. Although this is relatively well understood, the research has not paid much attention to the specific mechanism by which relationships work to help teenagers overcome suicidal feelings. For this reason, the authors have chosen a qualitative approach to their study to determine how teenagers experience feelings of suicide, their attachments, and how the two correlate to help them overcome these feelings to ultimately grow into healthy and well-adjusted adults. The qualitative focus has therefore allowed an integrative focus on teenagers' subjective experience and identifying patterns within these experiences and divergent healing processes.
Although divergent, many common factors were found among the responses. These included attachment relationships,…
