I remember where I was when I first read about Carly Henley's death, then not yet confirmed as a suicide. It was my first awareness of Carly Henley at all.
I remember an event to which I went a few days before, and I still have the dated ticket stub, which now only reminds me of Carly Henley's death, and not the event itself.
Over thirteen years it seems that suicide statistics are only getting worse across the board. Although there was an unsurprising bump upward as a function of Covid and its resulting economic crunch on almost every society, the rest of the data continues to head in the wrong direction as well.
Recently this corner saw an interesting read on suicide:
https://www.salon.com/2023/09/24/as-hit-record-highs-what-can-we-do-about-contagion/
Mentioned therein is the new crisis line with the number 988 :
https://www.salon.com/2023/07/10/988-one-year-later-has-the-rollout-of-this-actually-improved-mental-health/
The crisis line seems like a very good idea, with a number that might perhaps become welded onto the American familiarity as "911", "800" and "976" have done over time.
The stigma of suicide and even suicidal thinking remains as prominent as ever with most just wanting to move away from anyone who hints at such ideas.
The article speaks of suicide becoming normalized, and no question that suicide is heading in that general direction.
There is also mention there of a Netflix series called "13 reasons why", which "graphically detailed the suicide of an adolescent girl", and of a 28.9% increase in suicides among 10 to 17-year-olds in the month following the show's release.
Remember how it once was, when almost any and every fight between students at school stayed at school, and how most were long forgotten by the time you were talking at reunions about who used to fight with whom?
These days those fights are often recorded by fellow students, and they will stay on the internet forever. That is the new normal, and you can watch many of them during a random perusal on YouTube.
In much the same way, we're headed for a world in which suicides become that normal. They will become nearer and nearer to our own individual lives just like auto thefts and carjackings are getting nearer and nearer to us.
We have to wonder whether it is possible to help all humans develop a reflexive response to very bad news which will result in them dialing 9-8-8 sooner rather than later. Maybe that is nearer to the answer than anything which North American society has attempted as a means to combat climbing suicide rates.
Long ago there was a similar lifeline for alcoholics called "Dial A Bottle" A-B-O-T-T-L-E would get you some sort of help for alcoholism. In our modern, sped-up society, it is more probable that something like that would get you an alcohol home delivery company.
It is only a guess that A-B-O-T-T-L-E, as a phone number, was best remembered by the sober among us, but it does imply that we might be able to recall something concise like 9-8-8 in a time of dire need.
It is this corner's perception that suicide often impacts those whose quality of life is self-perceived to have fallen, or is about to plummet drastically far to a new level. Obviously there is always someone who has it worse than you do, so it can't be the actual level of your existence that is the core concern. Rather, it is your self-perception that the recent past found you way up there, and the near future projects you to be way down there.
Have to wonder whether society will figure out better ways to be prominent with assistance in those precise scenarios when humans are most likely to perceive a drastic reduction in their quality of life.
Or will society just keep evolving around the troubled while continuing to perceive them as little more than YouTube fodder?
Remember back in fifth grade when Tommy and Jeff fought on the playfield, and to those who witnessed, it was quite the spectacle? Well in 2023 society you don't even have to take a second look when you notice it in person, because the fight will be on YouTube by some point tomorrow.
Somewhere tangent to that YouTube reference is the way that teenage females are especially pressured by the world all around them, with the internet being very prominent in maintaining that pressure.
Sure, it isn't really the internet... much like it isn't really guns...
The internet, as it pertains to school social life, is much like a cement hallway, where anyone or anything which steps into it is merely preserved in the same condition, and knowing the same fate, at the end of the hallway as was the case at its beginning.
If you are bullied or beaten up just before the 3:00pm school bell, the internet will preserve the prevailing environment you endured until tomorrow at 8:00am, when you re-enter that same setting.
You can spend all day watching the dumbest school fights posted on YouTube, and in most cases you're better off never knowing precisely what triggered those fights. Though perhaps YouTube would be an ideal spot for the new 9-8-8 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline to be advertised. Because school social drama exactly the sort of setting which exacerbates suicidality in young people.
We outsiders don't get to know what it was at the core which moved Carly Henley to take her own life 13 years ago on October 6, but we can go on hoping and perceiving that it was the effect of the Zoloft she had recently began taking. Nobody can do anything about it now, but we would feel better if it could be confidently stated that it wasn't social drama tangent to her world which in any way caused her to make her final decision.
