When Suicide Strikes: How One Teen Wages War Against Depression

My transition from childhood innocence to the harsh reality of the world began July 20, 2004. The date changed my life in a way I could never have imagined. My Aunt Julie died that day. She committed suicide. I was only 8 years-old. An 8-year-old can hardly comprehend death, let alone suicide. I was confused. I felt pain and hurt. Everything seemed out of control. My family had always felt safe, now it felt chaotic, random, uncontrolled. Looking back now, I see how that dark July day, a day so final, marked my beginning.
For the next several years, memories of my aunt periodically came up in solemn conversations among family members. As the fifth anniversary of her death passed, I began to ponder how my life would be different if she had lived. The more I thought, the more sorrow I felt. I began to slip into a state of renewed grief. Was I slipping into depression? Fortunately, I realized grief was not going to make my situation better. It was in that moment a passion began to stir within me, and I became determined to make a difference.
One year ago, the beginning of my junior year, I realized my calling was to educate my community about depression, the same illness that took my aunt's life. Leading a group of my peers, I managed the planning of a convocation to be conducted at three Knox County high schools, including my own. I had never been involved in or organized such a large social justice project. Surprisingly, however, I didn't have one worry. Throughout the entire project, I knew my Aunt Julie's love from above would be supporting me. I was impassioned and committed to taking depression down. I couldn't bear the thought of someone suffering the way my family had.
The resulting project was named Down with Depression. It encompassed 50 hours of planning and required fundraising in excess of $2,000. My passion to lead and educate, the stirring I had felt, became a force. I knew Down with Depression would be a successful and worthwhile endeavor.
On March 9, 2013, that force guided me onto the stage and into the spotlight of my county's 1,800 students. I first addressed the ways in which students and family members could detect depression and perhaps prevent a loved one's suicide. Afterwards, I told the story of my Aunt Julie. A hush fell over the crowd. The reaction triggered feelings in me I'd forgotten I had. That old grief began creeping into my throat. Although emotion tried to overtake me, I continued speaking. I continued as if my life depended on it. I had to get the message out. According to statistics, I knew one or more of my audience members might be struggling with depression or know someone who was. I had to make them understand. I had to persuade at least one person attending that suicide was not the answer. If at least one person heard my message, I had done my job.
At each auditorium, as I finished speaking, the crowd would erupt into applause. I knew I had done the right thing and that I had made my Aunt Julie proud. But more importantly, during the final convocation, I searched the crowd for two familiar faces. The most defining moment was spotting my mother and father in the back standing and applauding, tears streaming down their cheeks. In that moment, I knew I had become the young man I'd always dreamt of being. My journey was predestined, the one that began the day my aunt died. Finally, I knew I could look to the heavens and say, "Aunt Julie, I'm sorry I was too late for you, but with your love I will continue to fight. I will make sure depression is taken down!"
Source:- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tanner-snider/teens-and-depression_b_4163298.html

Five-year-olds treated for depression and anxiety

Children as young as five are being referred for treatment for depression and anxiety, the BBC has found.

Figures showed mental health teams in Sussex are working with more than 1,000 under-18s while in the Solent 324 young people were referred for therapy.
Prescriptions for Fluoxetine, more commonly known as Prozac, have risen 26% in Oxfordshire and 13% in Berkshire from April to September last year.
MPs recently announced an extra £22m to tackle child mental health treatment.
Experts said children are coming under increasing stress because of unemployment, financial problems and substance abuse among their parents.
In February, the NHS Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) in Sussex estimated it was working with about 330 under-11s and about 830 12 to 18-year-olds with anxiety and/or depression.
While in Dorset, 212 young people were diagnosed with depression and/or anxiety disorder with 118 of them being under 16 at the date of referral.
Plastic animals With the approval of health professionals and his family, the BBC was given access to a therapy room in Sussex, where eight-year-old "Jack" was receiving treatment for anxiety.
Having developed a deep-seated fear of leaving his mother he has been seeing child behaviour experts since he was 18 months old.
"The anxieties, I think started probably very soon after he was born," said child psychologist Jo Russell.
"There were other difficulties in the family, some stresses around employment and finances, and then his parents separated when he was just a toddler."

During his therapy "Jack" dangles his toys from a window, 30ft from the ground

During his therapy, the BBC observed "Jack" wind up a large ball of sticky tape around his hand and tie up his toy plastic animals with string before dangling them out of the window, 30ft above the ground.
"In his mind he's putting that little creature in a position of insecurity," Ms Russell said.
"Will that little creature manage to get to the ground or not? Through that play, this little boy and I have been able to think and talk about how people cope with feeling very insecure."
Jack's mother "Joy" said she knew her son, who has thrown things at her and put holes through doors, was "different" from other children at a young age.
"He gets very like a spring, he gets wound up and explodes," she said.
"He can be very loving and caring and when it's like that it's absolutely amazing but you have the other side which goes along."
After several years of therapy, his mother said "Jack" had improved, but could still be "up and down."
NHS Solent, which covers Southampton and Portsmouth, saw 324 young people with a problem of depression referred to it between September 2010 and August 2011, the youngest of whom was five years old.
It also revealed 378 patients, aged 16 and under, were referred for a range of mental health therapies not just for depression, including cognitive behaviour therapy, anxiety management and art and play therapy.
'Entrenched problems' Its youngest patient, a two-year-old, was referred for specialist child psychotherapy.
Barbara Inkson, child clinical psychology at Solent NHS Trust, said it was seeing an annual rise of about 10% in referrals.
However, its database can only record a reason for referral and not subsequent diagnosis.
"What is clear is that levels of emotional disorders, including depression as well as anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorders, are rising in line with other referrals to CAMHS here in the city," she said.

Child psychologist Jo Russell said difficulties within the family can cause stress in children

The charity, Young Minds, said it wants more treatments based in school and the community rather than in mental health units, which it says can be intimidating for children.
The government recently announced an extra £22m funding to tackle child mental health over three years, to expand state-of-the art psychological therapies and extend training for community workers.
Nationally, one in 10 children aged between five and 16 years old has a clinically diagnosable mental health problem and of adults with long-term mental health problems, half will have experienced their first symptoms before the age of 14.
Sarah Brennan, chief executive of Young Minds, said: "Intervening early when a child or young person starts struggling to cope is proven to reduce the likelihood of that young person developing much more severe and entrenched mental health problems.
"It is vital that we invest in children and young people's mental health in order to prevent a generation of children suffering entrenched mental health problems as adults."
Source:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-18251582

Men shouldn’t suffer in silence with depression and anxiety

‘Things always change, as long as you give them the chance to.’ Photograph: Alamy

I was 24 when my dad, Peter Manderson, took his own life. We had a troubled relationship and hadn’t spoken to each other for about six years; for no real reason we just stopped. Then one day I got in touch to try and repair some of the damage. It was Boxing Day and we argued over the phone about where to meet. I got angry, and my dad, who was a gentle man, stammered and stuttered. The last words I said to him were: “If I ever see you again I’m going to knock you out.” It all seems so desperately trivial now.
The tragic last hours of Robin Williams’ life have been raked over in minute detail over the past week. Susan Schneider, his wife, has said he was battling depression and anxiety, as well as the early stages of Parkinson’s.
I still don’t know what was going through my dad’s mind when he killed himself in a park not far from where he lived in Brentwood, Essex, in April 2008. I’ll never know. The last time I saw him alive was my 18th birthday. He had been in and out of my life for years. I was brought up by my gran in Hackney, east London, because neither of my parents were capable of looking after me. I just wish that he could have reached out to someone, anyone.
The moment I found out my dad had killed himself is as clear today as it was when it happened. That morning I woke up with a sense of dread knowing that something was very wrong. My gran came into my room with tears in her eyes and said: “Stephen, your dad’s dead. He’s hanged himself.”
His death was a complete shock and it’s still a struggle to articulate how I felt. I went through so many emotions that day. At first I was angry with him for doing what he did. I kept thinking, how could he take himself away from me? Williams’ daughter Zelda said something similar about her dad: “I’ll never understand how he could be so loved and not find it in his heart to stay.”
I thought my dad was selfish for taking the easy way out. But then I quickly realised that I was the one who was being selfish for thinking he was selfish. For someone to be able to do that, I don’t think it is cowardice; it’s the only solution they think they have. The last thing I said to him kept replaying in my head – you have no idea how much I regret that the final words he heard from me were anger and hate. I would give anything to change that. I never got a chance to say a proper goodbye or tell him that I loved him.
Last year in Britain, almost 6,000 people killed themselves, leaving behind families struggling for answers. Men aged between 30 and 44 are most at risk. My dad was 43. I later found out that one of his brothers had killed himself two years before and that another brother, whom I am named after, is believed to have died after allowing himself to fall into a diabetic coma.
Communication is a big problem with us men. We don’t like to talk about our problems; we think it makes us look weak. There have been times when I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression. I even had cognitive behavioural therapy and although that didn’t work for me, I did find that talking about things to someone helped the problem seem smaller than it was in my head. It’s important to let things out and not bottle them up.
Society likes to tell you that you have to be happy all the time, and it’s easy to think that if you’re not happy then there’s something wrong with you. But happiness isn’t permanent, it’s not something you can feel all the time – and neither is sadness.
What happened to my dad and uncles makes me want to deal with things. As much as I love my dad, I don’t want to be the father to my child that he was to me. I wrote the song Lullaby about my experience of depression and how it has affected my life. The most important lyrics are the final two lines: “Things always change, as long as you give them the chance to.”
Know that is true. I just wish my dad did.

Source:-  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/20/men-suffer-depression-anxiety

Anxiety and amen: Prayer doesn't ease symptoms of anxiety-related disorders for everyone

Whether the problem is health, enemies, poverty or difficulty with aging, "Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there," suggested the late gospel musician Charles A. Tindley. But when it comes to easing symptoms of anxiety-related disorders, prayer doesn't have the same effect for everybody, according to a Baylor University researcher.

What seems to matter more is the type of attachment a praying individual feels toward God. According to a Baylor study, those who prayed to a loving and supportive God whom they thought would be there to comfort and protect them in times of need were less likely to show symptoms of anxiety-related disorders -- symptoms such as irrational worry, fear, self-consciousness, dread in social situations and obsessive-compulsive behavior -- than those who prayed but did not expect God to comfort or protect them.
An article about the research -- "Prayer, Attachment to God, and Symptoms of Anxiety-Related Disorders among U.S. Adults" -- is published in the journal Sociology of Religion and was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
While previous research has shown that people who have a secure attachment to God are more satisfied with life and less depressed and lonely, little attention has been paid to psychiatric symptoms, said researcher Matt Bradshaw, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences.
"For many individuals, God is a major source of comfort and strength that makes the world seem less threatening and dangerous. Through prayer, individuals seek to develop an intimate relationship with God," Bradshaw said. "Those who achieve this goal, and believe that God will be there to protect and support them during times of need, develop a secure attachment to God. In this context, prayer appears to confer emotional comfort, which results in fewer symptoms of anxiety-related disorders.
"Other people, however, form avoidant or insecure attachments to God -- meaning that they do not necessarily believe God will be there when they need Him," he said. "For these individuals, prayer may feel like an unsuccessful attempt to cultivate and maintain an intimate relationship with God. Rejected, unanswered or otherwise unsuccessful experiences of prayer may be disturbing and debilitating -- and may therefore lead to more frequent and severe symptoms of anxiety-related disorders."
Researchers analyzed data from 1,714 of the individuals who participated in the most recent wave of the Baylor Religion Survey, completed in November 2010 by the Gallup Organization and analyzed by sociologist researchers at Baylor. The study focused on general anxiety, social anxiety, obsession and compulsion.
Teachings of Christianity and some other faiths use the parent-child imagery to depict the relationship between God and an individual, with one researcher describing God as "the ultimate attachment figure." The Baylor study findings are consistent with a growing body of research indicating that a person's perceived relationship with God can play an important role in shaping mental health.
In theory, people who pray regularly may be inclined to live out their religion more faithfully, which may lead to less stress, such as marriage and family conflicts, researchers wrote. People who pray often may have more of a sense of purpose in life or have more supportive personal relations. And many people use prayer as a coping strategy.
When it comes to personal prayer outside of religious organizations, however, findings by previous researchers have been inconsistent -- and puzzling. Some studies indicate frequent praying has positive effects on mental health; others report no effect -- or even that people who pray more often have poorer mental health than those who pray less frequently. "At the present, we don't know exactly why the findings have been so inconsistent," Bradshaw said. "Prayer is complex."
Some possible explanations for varying findings:
• Individual expectations. Some scholars suggest that "if you expect prayer to matter, it just might," Bradshaw said. In several studies of older adults, people who believe that only God knows when and how to respond to prayer fare well when it comes to mental health; those who think their prayers are not being answered do not.
• Style of prayer. In general, meditative and colloquial prayers have been linked with desirable outcomes, including emotional well-being, while ritualistic prayer actually has been associated with poor mental health outcomes. Meditative prayer is concerned with closeness and intimacy during reflection and communication with a loving, supportive God; colloquial prayer takes that a step further by also asking for help, such as guidance in decision-making, blessings for the world or less widespread suffering. "These requests tend to be broad, however, and are aimed at making the world a better place instead of personal enrichment," Bradshaw said. Ritualistic prayer, in contrast, is less intimate and usually involves reciting common prayers or lines from sacred texts.
• Perceived characteristics of God -- such as loving, remote or judgmental -- affect the relationship between prayer and mental health. "Our previous work has found that prayer is associated with desirable mental health outcomes among individuals who believe that they are praying to a God who is close as opposed to remote, and the results from the current study are largely consistent with this finding," Bradshaw said.
"These are all important considerations, but a comprehensive understanding of the connection between prayer and mental health remains elusive," he said. "We still have a lot of work to do in this area."
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140812121404.htm

Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself

One of the more fascinating psychotic conditions in the medical literature is known as Cotard’s syndrome, a rare disorder, usually recoverable, in which the primary symptom is a “delusion of negation.” According to researchers David Cohen and Angèle Consoli of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, many patients with Cotard’s syndrome are absolutely convinced, without even the slimmest of doubts, that they are already dead.
Some recent evidence suggests that Cotard’s may occur as a neuropsychiatric side effect in patients taking the drugs aciclovir or valaciclovir for herpes and who also have kidney failure.* But its origins go back much further than these modern drugs. First described by the French neurologist Jules Cotard in the 1880s, it is usually accompanied by some other debilitating problem, such as major depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy or general paralysis—not to mention disturbing visages in the mirror. Consider the case of one young woman described by Cohen and Consoli: “The delusion consisted of the patient’s absolute conviction she was already dead and waiting to be buried, that she had no teeth or hair, and that her uterus was malformed.” Poor thing—that image couldn’t have been very good for her self-esteem.
Still, call me strange, but I happen to find a certain appeal in the conviction that one is, though otherwise lucid, nevertheless already dead. Provided there were no uncomfortable symptoms of rigor mortis cramping up my hands, nor delusory devils biting at my feet, how liberating it would be to be able to write like a dead man and without that hobbling, hesitating fear of being unblinkingly honest. Knowing that upon publication I would be tucked safely away in my tomb, I could finally say what’s on my mind. Of course, living one’s life as though it were a suicide note incarnate (yet remember this is precisely what life is, really, and I would advise any thinking person to stroll by a cemetery each day, gaze unto those fields of crumbling headstones filled with chirping crickets, and ponder, illogically so, what these people wish they might have said to the world when it was still humanly possible for them to have done so ) is an altogether different thing from the crushing, unbearable weight of an actual suicidal mind dangerously tempted by the promise of permanent quiescence.
In considering people’s motivations for killing themselves, it is essential to recognize that most suicides are driven by a flash flood of strong emotions, not rational, philosophical thoughts in which the pros and cons are evaluated critically. And, as I mentioned in last week’s column on the evolutionary biology of suicide, from a psychological science perspective, I don’t think any scholar ever captured the suicidal mind better than Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister in his 1990 Psychological Review article , “Suicide as Escape from the Self.” To reiterate, I see Baumeister’s cognitive rubric as the engine of emotions driving deCatanzaro’s biologically adaptive suicidal decision-making. There are certainly more recent theoretical models of suicide than Baumeister’s, but none in my opinion are an improvement. The author gives us a uniquely detailed glimpse into the intolerable and relentlessly egocentric tunnel vision that is experienced by a genuinely suicidal person.
According to Baumeister, there are six primary steps in the escape theory, culminating in a probable suicide when all criteria are met. I do hope that having knowledge about the what-it-feels-like phenomenology of ‘being’ suicidal helps people to recognize their own possible symptoms of suicidal ideation and—if indeed this is what’s happening—enables them to somehow derail themselves before it’s too late. Note that it is not at all apparent that those at risk of suicide are always aware that they are in fact suicidal, at least in the earliest cognitive manifestations of suicidal ideation. And if such thinking proceeds unimpeded, then keeping a suicidal person from completing the act may be as futile as encouraging someone at the very peak of sexual excitement to please kindly refrain from having an orgasm, which is itself sometimes referred to as la petite mort (“the little death”).
So let’s take a journey inside the suicidal mind, at least as it’s seen by Roy Baumeister. You might even come to discover that you’ve actually stepped foot in this dark psychological space before, perhaps without knowing it at the time.
Step 1: Falling Short of Standards
Most people who kill themselves actually lived better-than-average lives. Suicide rates are higher in nations with higher standards of living than in less prosperous nations; higher in US states with a better quality of life; higher in societies that endorse individual freedoms; higher in areas with better weather; in areas with seasonal change, they are higher during the warmer seasons; and they’re higher among college students that have better grades and parents with higher expectations.
Baumeister argues that such idealistic conditions actually heighten suicide risk because they often create unreasonable standards for personal happiness, thereby rendering people more emotionally fragile in response to unexpected setbacks. So, when things get a bit messy, such people, many of whom appear to have led mostly privileged lives, have a harder time coping with failures. “A large body of evidence,” writes the author, “is consistent with the view that suicide is preceded by events that fall short of high standards and expectations, whether produced by past achievements, chronically favorable circumstances, or external demands.” For example, simply being poor isn’t a risk factor for suicide. But going rather suddenly from relative prosperity to poverty has been strongly linked to suicide. Likewise, being a lifelong single person isn’t a risk factor either, but the transition from marriage to the single state places one at significant risk for suicide. Most suicides that occur in prison and mental hospital settings occur within the first month of confinement, during the initial period of adjustment to loss of freedom. Suicide rates are lowest on Fridays and highest on Mondays; they also drop just before the major holidays and then spike sharply immediately after the holidays. Baumeister interprets these patterns as consistent with the idea that people’s high expectations for holidays and weekends materialize, after the fact, as bitter disappointments.
To summarize this first step in the escape theory, Baumeister tells us that, “it is apparently the size of the discrepancy between standards and perceived reality that is crucial for initiating the suicidal process.” It’s the proverbial law of social gravity: the higher your majesty is to start off with, the more painful it’s going to be when you happen to fall flat on your face.
Step 2: Attributions to Self
It is not just the fall from grace alone that’s going to send you on a suicidal tailspin. It’s also necessary for you to loathe yourself for facing the trouble you find yourself in. Across cultures, “self blame” or “condemnation of the self” has held constant as a common denominator in suicides. Baumeister’s theory accommodates these data, yet his model emphasizes that the biggest risk factor isn’t chronically low self-esteem, per se, but rather a relatively recent demonization of the self in response to the negative turn of events occurring in the previous step. People who have low self-esteem are often misanthropes, he points out, in that while they are indeed self critical, they are usually just as critical of other people. By contrast, suicidal individuals who engage in negative appraisals of the self seem to suffer the erroneous impression that other people are mostly good, while they themselves are bad. Feelings of worthlessness, shame, guilt, inadequacy, or feeling exposed, humiliated and rejected leads suicidal people to dislike themselves in a manner that, essentially, cleaves them off from an idealized humanity. The self is seen as being enduringly undesirable; there is no hope for change and the core self is perceived as being rotten.
This is why adolescents and adults of minority sexual orientations, who grow up gestating in a social womb filled with messages—both implicit and explicit—that they are essentially lesser human beings, are especially vulnerable to suicide. Even though we may consciously reject these personal attributions made by an intolerant society, they have still seeped in. If we extrapolate this to, say, Tyler Clementi as he was driving towards the George Washington Bridge to end his own life in the wake of being cruelly and voyeuristically outed over the Internet, I’d bet my bottom dollar that he felt even the songs on the radio weren’t meant for him, but for “normal people” more relatable to the singer and deserving of the song’s message.
Step 3: High Self-Awareness
“The essence of self-awareness is comparison of self with standards,” writes Baumeister. And, according to his escape theory, it is this ceaseless and unforgiving comparison with a preferred self—perhaps an irrecoverable self from a happier past or a goal self that is now seen as impossible to achieve in light of recent events—fuelling suicidal ideation.
This piquancy of thought in suicidal individuals is actually measurable, at least indirectly by analyzing the language used in suicide notes. One well-known “suicidologist,” Edwin Shneidman, once wrote that, “Our best route to understanding suicide is not through the study of the structure of the brain, nor the study of social statistics, nor the study of mental diseases, but directly through the study of human emotions described in plain English, in the words of the suicidal person.”  Personally, I feel a bit like an existential Peeping Tom in reading strangers’ suicide notes, but it’s a longstanding cottage industry in psychological research. Over the past few decades alone, nearly 300 studies on suicide notes have been published. These cover a broad range of research questions, but because they tend to yield inconsistent findings, they have also painted a confusing picture of the suicidal mind.
This is especially the case when trying to reveal people’s motivations for the act. Some who commit suicide may not even be aware of their own motivations, or at least they have not been completely honest in their farewell letters to the world. A good example comes from University of Manchester sociologist Susanne Langer and her colleagues’ report in a 2008 issue of The Sociological Review . The researchers describe how the suicide note written by one young man was rather nondescript, mentioning feelings of loneliness and emptiness as causing his suicide, while, in fact, “his file contained a memo inquiring about the state of an investigation regarding sexual offences the deceased had been accused of in an adjacent jurisdiction.”
The more compelling studies on suicide notes, in my view, are those that use text analysis programs enabling the investigators to make exact counts of particular kinds of words. Compared to fake suicide notes, real suicide notes are notorious for containing first-person singular pronouns, a reflection of high self-awareness. And unlike letters written by people facing involuntary death, such as those about to be executed, suicide note writers rarely use inclusive language such as plural pronouns, such as “us” and “we.” When they do mention significant others, suicide note writers usually speak of them as being cut off, distant, separate, not understanding, or opposed. Friends and family, even a loving mother at arm’s length, feel endless oceans away.
Step 4: Negative Affect
It may seem to go without saying that suicides tend to be preceded by a period of negative emotions, but, again, in Baumeister’s escape model, negative suicidal emotions are experienced as an acute state rather than a prolonged one. “Concluding simply that depression causes suicide and leaving it at that may be inadequate for several reasons,” he writes. “It is abundantly clear that most depressed people do not attempt suicide and that not all suicide attempters are clinically depressed.”
Anxiety—which can be experienced as guilt, self-blame, threat of social exclusion, ostracism and worry—seems to be a common strand in the majority of suicides. As I mentioned in last week’s post, we may very well be the only species for which negative social-evaluative appraisals can lead to shame-induced suicide. It’s not without controversy, but the most convincing data from studies with nonhuman animals suggest very strongly that we are the only species on the face of the earth able to take another organism’s perspective in judging the self’s attributes. This is owed to an evolutionary innovation known as “theory of mind” (literally, theorizing about what someone else is thinking about, including what they’re thinking about you ; and, perhaps more importantly in this case, even what you’re thinking about you) that has been both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it allows us to experience pride, and a curse because it also engenders what I consider to be the uniquely human, uniquely painful emotion of shame.
Psychodynamic theorists often postulate that suicidal guilt seeks punishment, and thus suicide is a sort of self-execution. But Baumeister’s theory largely rejects this interpretation; rather, in his model, the appeal of suicide is loss of consciousness, and thus the end of psychological pain being experienced. And since cognitive therapy isn’t easily available—or seen as achievable—by most suicidal people, that leaves only three ways to escape this painful self-awareness: drugs, sleep and death. And of these, only death, nature’s great anesthesia, offers a permanent fix.    
Step 5: Cognitive Deconstruction
The fifth step in the escape theory is perhaps the most intriguing, from a psychological perspective, because it illustrates just how distinct and scarily inaccessible the suicidal mind is from that of our everyday cognition. With cognitive deconstruction, a concept originally proposed by social psychologists Robin Vallacher and Daniel Wegner, the outside world becomes a much simpler affair in our heads—but usually not in a good way.
Cognitive deconstruction is pretty much just what it sounds like. Things are cognitively broken down into increasingly low-level and basic elements. For example, the time perspective of suicidal people changes in a way that makes the present moment seem interminably long; this is because, “suicidal people have an aversive or anxious awareness of the recent past (and possibly the future too), from which they seek to escape into a narrow, unemotional focus on the present moment.” In one interesting study, for example, when compared to control groups, suicidal participants significantly overestimated the passage of experimentally controlled intervals of time by a large amount. Baumeister surmises, “Thus suicidal people resemble acutely bored people: The present seems endless and vaguely unpleasant, and whenever one checks the clock, one is surprised at how little time has actually elapsed.”
Evidence also suggests that suicidal individuals have a difficult time thinking about the future—which for those who’d use the threat of hell as a deterrent, shows just why this strategy isn’t likely to be very effective. This temporal narrowing, Baumeister believes, is actually a defensive mechanism helping the person to cognitively withdraw from thinking about past failures and the anxiety of an intolerable, hopeless future.
Another central aspect of the suicidal person’s cognitive deconstruction, says Baumeister, is a dramatic increase in concrete thought. Like the intrusively high self-awareness discussed earlier, this concreteness is often conveyed in suicide notes. Several review articles have noted the relative paucity of “thinking words” in suicide notes, which are abstract, meaningful, high-level terms. Instead, they more often include banal and specific instructions, such as, “Don’t forget to feed the cat,” or “Remember to take care of the electric bill.” Real suicide notes are usually suspiciously void of contemplative or metaphysical thoughts, whereas fake suicide notes, written by study participants, tend to include more abstract or high-level terms (“Someday you’ll understand how much I loved you” or “Always be happy”). One old study even found that genuine suicide notes contained more references to concrete objects in the environment—physical things—than did simulated suicide notes.
What this cognitive shift to concrete thinking reflects, suggests Baumeister, is the brain’s attempt to slip into idle mental labor, thereby avoiding the suffocating feelings that we’ve been describing. Many suicidal college students, for example, exhibit a behavioral pattern of burying themselves in dull, routine academic busywork in the weeks beforehand, presumably to enter a sort of “emotional deadness” which is “an end in itself.” When I was a suicidal adolescent, I remember reading voraciously during this time; it didn’t matter what it was that I read—mostly junk novels, in fact—since it was only to replace my own thoughts with those of the writer’s. For the suicidal, other people’s words can be pulled over one’s exhausting ruminations like a seamless glove being stretched over a distractingly scarred hand.
Even the grim, tedious details of organizing one’s own suicide can offer a welcome reprieve:

When preparing for suicide, one can finally cease to worry about the future, for one has effectively decided that there will be no future. The past, too, has ceased to matter, for it is nearly ended and will no longer cause grief, worry, or anxiety. And the imminence of death may help focus the mind on the immediate present

Step 6: Disinhibition
We’ve now set the mental stage, but it is of course the final act that separates suicidal ideation from an actual suicide. Baumeister speculates that behavioral disinhibition, which is required to overcome the intrinsic fear of causing oneself pain through death, not to mention the anticipated suffering of loved ones left behind to grieve, is another consequence of cognitive deconstruction. This is because it disallows the high-level abstractions (reflecting on the inherent “wrongness” of suicide, how others will feel, even concerns about self-preservation) that, under normal conditions, keep us alive.
A recent theoretical analysis by University of Rochester psychiatrist Kimberly Van Orden and her colleagues sheds some additional light on this component of behavioral disinhibition. These authors point out that while there is a considerable number of people who want to kill themselves, suicide itself remains relatively rare. This is largely because, in addition to suicidal desire, the individual needs the “acquired capability for suicide,” which involves both a lowered fear of death and increased physical pain tolerance. Suicide hurts, literally. One acquires this capability, according to these authors’ model, by being exposed to related conditions that systematically habituate the individual to physical pain. For example, one of the best predictors of suicide is a nonlethal prior suicide attempt.
But a history of other fear-inducing, physically painful experiences also places one at risk. Physical or sexual abuse as a child, combat exposure, and domestic abuse can also “prep” the individual for the physical pain associated with suicidal behavior. In addition, heritable variants of impulsivity, fearlessness and greater physical pain tolerance may help to explain why suicidality often runs in families. Van Orden and her coauthors also cite some intriguing evidence that habituation to pain is not so much generalized to just any old suicide method, but often specific to the particular method used to end one’s own life. For example, a study on suicides in the U.S. military branches found that guns were most frequently associated with Army personnel suicides, hanging and knots for those in the Navy, and falling and heights were more common for those in the Air Force.
So there you have it. It’s really not a pretty picture. But, again, I do hope that if you ever are unfortunate enough to experience these cognitive dynamics in your own mind—and I, for one, very much have—or if you suspect you’re seeing behaviors in others that indicate these thought patterns may be occurring, that this information helps you to meta-cognitively puncture suicidal ideation. If there is one thing that I’ve learned since those very dark days of my suicidal years, it’s that scientific knowledge changes perspective. And perspective changes everything. Everything.
And, as I mentioned at the start, always remember: You’re going to die soon enough anyway; even if it’s a hundred years from now, that’s still the blink of a cosmic eye. In the meantime, live like a scientist—even a controversial one with only an ally or two in all the world—and treat life as a grand experiment, blood, sweat, tears and all. Bear in mind that there’s no such thing as a failed experiment—only data.

Source: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/10/20/being-suicidal-what-it-feels-like-to-want-to-kill-yourself/

Non-tenure track faculty prone to stress due to job insecurity

Non-tenure-track academics experience stress, anxiety, and depression due to their insecure job situation, according to the first survey of its kind published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology.
There were 1.4 million contingent faculty workers in the USA, according to a report by the American Association of University Professors¹. These faculty members, such as research adjunct faculty, lecturers and instructors, are off the so-called "tenure track". They work under short-term contracts with limited health and retirement benefits, often part-time and at different institutes simultaneously. Among them, women, African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are overrepresented.
Gretchen Reevy from California State University and Grace Deason from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA, used extensive self-report questionnaires to survey almost 200 non-tenure-track academics - mainly from medium-sized universities in the USA, and of whom around two-thirds were women. Questions focused on work-related sources of stress, mental wellbeing, and coping mechanisms, as well as about their background, family situation, and income.
Almost one-third of the participants (31%) replied that the lack of job security was among the most stressful aspects of their work. Other frequently named sources of stress were a high workload; lack of support and recognition; low and unequal pay; and feeling excluded from the infrastructure and governance at their institute .
Non-tenure track faculty who wished for a permanent position, or whose family income was low, were more prone to depression, anxiety, and stress. They were also more likely to suffer from these if they felt personally committed to the institution where they worked. On average, women reported encountering more sources of stress at work than men.
The authors call on universities to attend more to the specific needs of their non-tenure-track faculty to avoid negative outcomes for institutions, students, and faculty. Suggestions include alleviating the sources of stress listed above and considering increasing the rate of hiring into more secure, tenure-track positions. 

Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/280742.php