Suicide Rates Rise in the U.S.

 I became extremely interested in suicide prevention after two of my young cousins committed suicide within six months of each other.

I began to study the current state of suicide prevention in 2008 and began to envision what I refer to as a future state in about 2009. I wrote a very quick paper summarizing my research because two of my dear friends were deeply engaged in suicide prevention, one as chair of a prevention task force and the other as a teacher, coach and mentor.

I gave three presentations in 2011 about what I believed was a proper approach using an identification of ACEs approach. I refined that until I wrote up a “Restoration to Health Strategy” that addressed both behavioral and health issues. My approach is systemic and starts as soon as we can identify the infliction of ACEs and related behaviors, positive, neutral and negative. Healing is a five-step approach addressing assessment and knowledge, nutrition, trauma release, self help and professional help. It is my hope to start a dialogue around a holistic approach to health, and not just one centered in healthcare, behavioral health, child protection systems and other current entry portals. In that discussion, we should be able to identify the symptoms of ACEs and how it progresses into actual suicide ideation and attempts. 

Thanks to a post on ACEsConnection, I was introduced to the Frameworks Institute [LINK HERE] and its work on how to identify frames used by people to discuss issues with the purpose of reframing topics for discussion in a manner that does not trigger original frames and trigger defensiveness. It’s a brilliant theory with incredible potential for reframing many of the discussions around ACEs. 

A recent New York Times article, for example [LINK HERE], makes no mention of ACEs, but points to many of its symptoms as causation. I believe that unresolved childhood trauma is a significant contributor to suicide, and that the same trauma is responsible in part for many of the symptoms. Think about the relationship between ACEs and high school dropouts. If you are a dropout, your economic security will be challenging, and you are very likely to be poor in your later years. Being poor in later years can contribute to additional stress that might take your ACE condition and propel it into other symptoms that eventually lead to suicide. This chain of causation can be difficult to follow, but I am hopeful that researchers will start looking down that causation chain from ACEs to suicide.

In Alaska, our suicide rate is increasing as well. It’s already high among Alaska Natives, and that is predictable. Pat Sidmore, a state of Alaska researcher on ACEs, summarized the results of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data from 2013 as identifying Alaska Native with almost double the risk of having 4 ACEs than the general population has. [LINK HERE]

I did a search for any analyses using the Frameworks Institute model, and asked my colleagues on the American Indian/Alaska Native Task Force on Suicide Prevention whether any of the were aware of a Reframing Analysis. No one had heard of the theory nor any work to use it. I would like to ask you if you are aware of any use of Reframing within the Suicide Prevention community. And do you have ideas about how we might reframe the discussion about ACEs to become more systemic? After all, the original study started out studying health and identified a host of other behavioral issues -- it was a systemic result.