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Distraught Father's Courthouse Suicide Highlights America's Male Suicide Epidemic
By Glenn Sacks
A distraught father struggling with overdue child support obligations and
adverse family court decisions committed suicide on the steps of the downtown San
Diego courthouse Monday. Angrily waving court documents, 43 year-old Derrick Miller
walked up to court personnel at the entrance, said "You did this to me," and shot
himself in the head.
Miller is one of 300,000 Americans who have taken their own lives over the past
decade--as many Americans as were killed in combat in World War II. America is in the
throes of a largely unrecognized suicide epidemic, as suicide has become the eighth
leading cause of death in the United States today, and the third leading cause of
death among adolescents. All Americans recognize that our country is rife with
violent crime, but few know that 50% more Americans kill themselves than are
murdered.
Who is committing suicide?
For the most part, men. According to the National Institute of Mental Health,
males commit suicide four times as often as females do, and have higher suicide rates
in every age group. There are many risk factors for suicide, including substance
abuse and mental illness, but the two situations in which men are most likely to kill
themselves are after the loss of a job, and after a divorce.
Because our society strongly defines manhood as the ability to work and provide
for one's loved ones, unemployed men often see themselves as failures and as burdens
to their families. Thus it is not surprising that while there is no difference in
the suicide rate of employed and unemployed women, the suicide rate of unemployed men
is twice that of employed men.
It is for this reason that economic crises generally lead to male suicide
epidemics. During the Midwest farm crisis of the 1980s, for example, the suicide
rate of male farmers tripled. A sharp increase in male suicide occurred after the
destruction of Flint, Michigan's 70 year-old auto industry, as documented in the
disturbing 1989 film "Roger and Me." Some suicide experts fear a rise in suicide
related to our current economic downturn.
The other most common suicide victims are divorced and/or estranged fathers
like Derrick Miller. In fact, a divorced father is ten times more likely to commit
suicide than a divorced mother, and three times more likely to commit suicide than a
married father. According to Los Angeles divorce consultant Jayne Major:
"Divorced men are often devastated by the loss of their children. It's a little
known fact that in the United States men initiate only a small number of the divorces
involving children. Most of the men I deal with never saw their divorces coming, and
they are often treated very unfairly by the family courts."
According to Sociology Professor Augustine Kposow of the University of
California at Riverside, "The link between men and their children is often severed
because the woman is usually awarded custody. A man may not get to see his children,
even with visitation rights. As far as the man is concerned, he has lost his marriage
and lost his children and that can lead to depression and suicide."
There have been a rash of father suicides directly related to divorce and
mistreatment by the family courts over the past few years. For example, New York
City Police Officer Martin Romanchick, a Medal of Honor recipient, hung himself after
being denied access to his children and being arrested 15 times on charges brought by
his ex-wife, charges the courts deemed frivolous. Massachusetts father Steven Cook,
prevented from seeing his daughter by a protection order based upon unfounded
allegations, committed suicide after he was jailed for calling his four-year-old
daughter on the wrong day of the week. Darrin White, a Canadian father who was
stripped of the right to see his children and was about to be jailed after failing to
pay a child support award tantamount to twice his take home pay, hung himself. His 14
year-old daughter Ashlee later wrote to her nation's Prime Minister, saying, "this
country's justice system has robbed me of one of the most precious gifts in my life,
my father."
We'll never know exactly why Derrick Miller took his life and if his suicide
could have been prevented. What we do know is that male suicide is one of America's
most serious public health issues, and it is time to address it.
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