Why Are Young Black Men KILLING THEMSELVES?

Ebony, April, 2001 by Charles Whitaker

Alarming rise suicide among teenage males creates a public health alert

IN what former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher calls a public health crisis of nearly epidemic proportions, young Black men by the hundreds are killing themselves, giving lie to the long-held belief that Black folks don't commit suicide.

In acts that are, at least on the surface, as senseless as they are violent and arbitrary, these Black teenagers are taking adolescent angst and Black male rage to a fatal, final realm, leaving bereaved parents and friends, as well as the social commentators who are beginning to chart this disturbing phenomenon, groping for answers.

The vast majority of these suicide victims shoot themselves, sometimes in grisly gang-inspired rites of passage that are witnessed by others. Some leap from buildings or hang themselves when they feel they just can't cope. And researchers believe that a fraction of the Black youths killed in showdowns with law enforcement officials are also engaged in a form of self-destruction dubbed "suicide by cop."

Observers are uniformly confounded about the trend. "We don't have a lot of information that tells us much about who these young men are," says noted Harvard University psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, who is the co-author of a new book, Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans, that delves into the mysteries of this horrific phenomenon. "We have data telling us that this is a trend on the rise, but we have no data telling us about the socio-economic background or personal histories of these young men that would help us determine why this trend is on the rise."

Yet the information we do have presents a staggering picture.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the suicide rate for Blacks between the ages of 10 and 19 has more than doubled in the past 20 years, rising from 2.1 per 100,000 in 1980 to 4.5 per 100,000 in 1998, the last year for which figures are available. Teenage males account for a huge portion of that increase, with the suicide rate for Black males between the ages of 15 and 19 rising an astronomical 146 percent, eight times higher than the rate for their White counterparts.

These young Black suicide victims run the gamut from middle-class boys struggling with the fears and frustrations of teenagedom to urban youths weighted down by a poverty of means and support systems.

While mental health experts draw no concrete profile of the young men driving the suicide trend, most agree that the overall rise of violence in the culture has had a deadly effect on teenagers, Black males in particular. "We know that 90 percent of the increase in suicides in general, and by Black males in particular, is associated with firearms," says Satcher, who has assembled a blue-ribbon panel of experts to examine a variety of mental health issues related to minority communities, including the rising rate of suicide among Black teenage males.

"The easy access to guns in our society, combined with the violence in our media and on our streets, certainly is having an effect [on the suicide rate]," says Dr. Felton Earls, professor of child psychiatry and human behavior and development at Harvard who is conducting a large-scale research project in Chicago examining how multiple societal influences affect behavior. "In our research, we find that more than 25 percent of the 15-year-olds we've interviewed have witnessed a knifing or a shooting. When you add those kinds of influences to the typically impulsive behavior of teenagers, you have a volatile mix."

Others say that death has become glorified in the popular culture--particularly movies, television shows and video games--and thus in the minds of adolescents. "There's this almost subliminal message that kids are getting out there about life and death," says Les Franklin, founder and chairman of the Shaka Franklin Foundation, a Denver-based organization named for Franklin's son, who committed suicide in 1990 at age 15. "Our kids think that suicide is a viable option if they've got a problem. Most people don't pick up on this, but I tune in to it because I've been touched by it."

Doubly touched in fact. In August, 10 years after his youngest son took his life, Franklin's oldest son, 31-year-old Jamon, killed himself by inhaling carbon monoxide fumes in the family's garage. Apparently, he had never gotten over the loss of his brother and mother, who died of cancer one year after Shaka Franklin's suicide. But like many Black males, Jamon suffered his grief in silence.

What no one seems quite able to understand is why Black teenage males are more likely than Black girls to internalize those influences and commit suicide. Black women, in fact, have one of the lowest suicide rates of any demographic group, second only to White women.

"The data suggest that women attempt suicide more often, but are less successful," says Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. "Men, as a group, tend to succeed in killing themselves, but that still doesn't account for the disproportionate number of Black teenage males who take their own lives.