Collapse And The Changing Face of Suicide

August 4th, 2013

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

We have a winner! According to the American Journal of Public Health,
motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death by injury between
2008 and 2009. However, that dubious distinction has been replaced by a
disturbing new cause… Today, the form of death by injury that takes
more American lives than any other is suicide. ~ Gary Stamper, Ph. D.

The indicated change in death by injury
is the culmination of a decade-long trend, and it appears that the
primary reason may be the economic downturn in the U.S. and around the
world.

In the U.S., the rate of death by suicide increased by 15 percent
over the past ten years. In Greece, the suicide rate for men rose by 24
percent between 2007 and 2009, according to The New York Times, and by
another 40 percent in 2012.

Suicides motivated by economic crisis grew
by 52 percent in Italy in 2010, the most recent year for which
statistics were available. What we do know is that researchers say the
trend is intensifying at alarming rates wherever austerity measures have
taken place and as the economic downturn continues to worsen.

According to the Huffington Post,
there are plenty of anecdotal examples of “economic suicide” in the
United States. A Tennessee man lit himself on fire earlier this year
after finding out he wouldn’t be getting financial help from a private
organization.

In May, a California man shot and killed himself in
the midst of a legal battle with Wells Fargo, while he faced the
prospect of foreclosure.

But that’s only part of the story,
especially for the elderly. We’ll get to the new statistics about them a
bit later in this article, but let’s take a look at some other alarming
statistics about suicide.

In my 2012 book, Awakening the New Masculine: The Path of the Integral Warrior,
I point out some other frightening statistics about suicide, especially
in men. According to the National Institute of Mental Health:

“The levels of depression, suicides,
drug abuse, alcoholism, and violence among men are all rising
exponentially to the point of being staggering and frightening.
Ninety-four percent of all inmates are male.

Men live an average of
seven years fewer than women, suffer far more from ulcers and
stress-related disease than women, and are more likely than women to die
from the fifteen leading causes of death.”

“Over 80 percent of all suicides are
committed by men. In the twenty-to-twenty-four age bracket, males commit
suicide six times as much as females, and over the age of eighty-five,
men are fourteen times as likely to commit suicide as women.”

As horrible as these statistics are,
it’s getting worse – especially among baby boomers – and it’s not just
men who are being affected. Even in their youth, boomers have had higher
rates of suicide than earlier generations.

While the elderly have
always had higher suicide rates than the overall population, The
Washington Post reported in June that:

“Numbers released in May by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show a dramatic spike in
suicides among middle-aged people, with the highest increases among men
in their 50s, whose rate went up by nearly 50 percent to 30 per 100,000.

Women in their early 60s, whose suicide rate rose by nearly 60
percent (though it is still relatively low compared with men, at 7 in
100,000). The highest rates were among white and Native American and
Alaskan men.”

We also know that suicides are “vastly
underreported,” said Julie Phillips, an associate professor of sociology
at Rutgers University who has researched this grim trend. “We know
we’re not counting all suicides.”

John Draper, Director of the national Suicide Prevention Hotline recently stated:

In light of about 38,000 suicides a
year, other data showing that more than eight million adults think
seriously about suicide and more than a million attempt suicide in the
United States clearly suggest that most suicides are prevented.

We know
that making it easy to get help is critical, whether through mental
health care, crisis hot lines (the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
is 800-273-8255), clergy or other professional assistance. But hey…
let’s defund those!

We know that reducing access to
firearms, poisons and other lethal methods is vital in saving lives. We
also know that staying connected to family and friends in meaningful
ways can also keep people alive in moments of grave despair. These are
things we can all do to reduce suicide in our homes and in our
communities.

Sometimes it is as simple as picking up a phone and asking
for help, or saying to a loved one, “I care about you, and we are not
alone; let’s go find someone who can help you.”

We’re a nation that has found meaning in
individualism, unrealistic expectations, and financial standing. As
James Carville pointed out, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Certainly, as
the economy continues to unwind in what author Paul Gilding calls “The
Great Disruption,” more and more baby boomers will find a growing number
of stressors, including financial battles, taking care of aging
parents, many with dementia, and providing economic and emotional
support to our adult children, who are also having difficulty launching
their own independent lives.

But it’s not only economical. As we move
around the country, we’ve become more and more separated, more
fractured, and without family or community. A “mobile” nation has found
itself without the “family glue” that our ancestors knew was so
important.

We’re largely a generation of idealists
who are now beginning to realize that our idealism that longed to make
the world a better place has failed. Even in a world of online social
networks, we have become more disconnected, alone, lost, frustrated.

In
U.S. News & World Report, one reader cast things in a slightly
different light.

“Baby Boomers grew up in an America that
had traditional values and decency that today are just buzzwords used
by the advertising industry to part us with our hard earned cash. We
were idealists, we wanted to make the world a better place.

The world we
live in now is monopolized by greed, legal fraud and moral decay. We
spend our lives working long hours only to find no satisfaction, peace
or reward at the end of the day.

“The cost of everything from housing to
medical to food has exploded in the last 20 years, yet our earnings are
stagnant, and that’s the lucky ones who haven’t been hustled into bad
home loans, or lost their jobs, or had a loved one become seriously ill.

We, the working class, find little reason to have hope for a happy calm
retirement. Why do so many give up? It’s pretty obvious…”

Many of us want things to change, and
for healing to begin. “Suicide is a tragedy that is far too common,” CDC
director Dr. Tom Frieden said in a news release.

“This report
highlights the need to expand our knowledge of risk factors so we can
build on prevention programs that prevent suicide.”

Specifically, we
need to identify new risks for boomers and help their loved ones learn
to recognize the warning signs – and equip them with the tools to
support them or intervene if necessary.

In a world of Detroit’s going bankrupt
and becoming the new “steal-the-pensions” model for cities-on-the-brink
of bankruptcy all over the U.S., including NYC, LA, Chicago,
Philadelphia, Houston, Baltimore, and Miami among others.

We can expect to see more and more pensions raided and perhaps millions
with no way to support themselves into their elderhood, knowing that no
Wall Street crooks will go to jail, at least not in a meaningful way,
no CEO’s will have their multi-million dollar paychecks taken from them,
and no high-ranking politicians will have their pensions taken, and so
what if they did?

The perks of being rich are becoming more and more
obvious, and it is only the working man who will foot the bill and pay
whatever taxes are left to be paid after crony capitalism destroys
what’s left.

It’s not just the U.S. where suicides are rising as the economic crisis’ deepen. Suicide rates are skyrocketing in Greece, Greenland (the suicide capitol of the world), China (with more women committing suicide than men at a 3:1 ratio, with working conditions as a primary factor), India,
Italy, Spain, the UK, and others.

The evidence of austerity, massive
job cuts, slashed pensions (think Detroit) and soaring taxes all
contribute overwhelmingly to the deadly side-effects of economic collapse . No wonder people are beginning to feel so hopeless.

Forget about the above, rising
prices, the emerged police state, and energy depletion, all catastrophic
to everyone but the elite (at least that’s what they apparently think
in their sociopathic worldviews)…

The nail in the coffin – probably not the best way to phrase it – in all of this is the environment,
and the growing awareness of the idea that no matter what we do now, we
have very likely passed the point of being able to prevent changes that
will make the planet uninhabitable for humanity.

No matter what we do,
even if we were to completely shut down the entirety of polluting
industrial civilization, more and more scientists are beginning to say
we have passed the point of being able to stop the changes that are
already taking place and that are multiplying exponentially due to
positive feedback loops.

A very brief way of describing this is
that if planetary temperatures were to hit or exceed 4˚C above the
norms, we could not survive. Large scale assessments
of climate change and recent new science indicates we could hit an
increase of 4˚C as soon as 2030, give or take a decade.

However, none of
these assessments take any major self-reinforcing feedback loops into
account.

In his lengthy essay, The irreconcilable acceptance of near-term extinction, Daniel A. Drumright states:

“As of right now, the entire concept of
[Near Term Extinction] NTE is still the most profound abstract concept
the human race has ever been confronted with.

Even though the signs are
everywhere one decides to look, the totality of its cumulative impact is
still enough off in the distance for entrenched self-preservation to
render it an abstraction in our daily lives.

“So again, the following is written from
the viewpoint as to when this is no longer true, when NTE breaks
through abstraction, and detonates in full acceptance of the most
profoundly devastating reality we’ve ever had to both live with and
through.”

He goes on to say:

“What else is NTE other than the final
acceptance of the consequences of our species’ fundamental inability to
live in balance with our environment?”

But rather than get into a discussion
about whether or not we are bound for the 6th Great Extinction, let’s
assume for the sake of this essay on suicide that it is true. You can go
back to whatever belief you hold later.

The purpose of bringing up the
possibility of NTE is to take a look at whether there might be scenarios
where taking one’s life actually is the best choice.

Assuming these non-linear climate
changes – regardless of their cause – actually make the planet
uninhabitable for humanity, the downward spiral of the ensuing collapse
would obviously be catastrophic.

As more and more people come to
awareness of the physical meaning of NTE , the chaos of climate collapse
would likely result in death by one of three possibilities: predation,
starvation, or suicide.

Drumright rightly points out that
choosing the third option, suicide, would no longer carry the “stigma of
cowardice”, or be looked upon as a failure of character.

Rather,
when the time finally arrives, and all physical hope fades, and
any hope of “peaceful tranquility” finally eludes us, deciding when
we’ll depart this realm – and how – our chosen death will altruistically
be the “last ethical act left us.”

Those of us who believe in “something
greater” than ourselves may die more gracefully than those who don’t
carry some sort of metaphysical awareness.

Perhaps more importantly, it
will be easier for us to find meaning in what time we have left largely
because we tend to believe that there is purpose to the universe that is
not only larger than we are, but that we are – even in our dying – part
of that purpose.

The spiritually inclined tend to believe that their
consciousness – separate from their physical selves – will continue,
where atheists and agnostics will likely have a deeper sense of loss.

A moral and ethical act: somehow I don’t think God would object.

Gary Stamper, Ph. D. – August 3, 2013 – posted at WakeUpWorld