The issue is that while the media wants to hog-tie teen suicide and teen bullying together, there is no quantitative support for such a position. I believe it goes without saying that bullying is bad and even one suicide, of any age, is bad. That’s not the point. The point is how our emotions are being twisted by the media spin.
NIMH is very clear about the risk factors of suicide and bullying/harassment etc is not on the list.
The issue is the spin.
Michelle, I came across this
YouthFACTS.org piece. The writer points to selective compassion by politicians and media as being tied to the sensationalizing of gay teen suicides allegedly after bullying. He refers to a CDC report that is consistent with what you are saying as to risk factors at play when teens end their life.
Interestingly, the writer stated that he is in favor of gay marriage. Regardless, the spin is hard to miss and its use to weaken opposition to SSM is not far fetched in my view. I have another link which I will post separately that is along the lines of your OP.
October 31, 2011
REACTION TO GAY TEEN SUICIDES SHOWS LIMITED AMERICAN COMPASSION TOWARD YOUTH
UPDATED 22 OCT. 2010
The widespread outrage and sadness, now extending to President Obama, over the suicides of four gay teenagers, allegedly after bullying for being gay, in the last month shows once again that only certain types of tragedies involving young people seem to stir politician and media compassion. Worse, the selective compassion seems tied to sensationalizing a youth tragedy to pursue larger political agendas.
That suicide is indeed terrible, and gay rights in the military and across society are very worthwhile agendas, does not obscure the suspicion that these particular teen suicides received publicity because they were useful to various interests. After all, in an average month, 140 teens and 2,750 adults commit suicide in the United States, all without any public grieving.
What made these four suicides different? First, they can be blamed–superficially, since media and commentator analysis of exactly what caused these suicides has been severely lacking–on other teenagers, a powerless group safe for adults to condemn. Commentators can pretend that bullying is simply something teenagers do and we responsible adults don’t (a “rite of passage,” as the president put it), allowing easy moralizing.
Interest groups and the news media (which function as one entity) can aggrandize their pitches and stories by inventing the notion that bullying and youth suicide represent some vast new “epidemic” that never occurred in our halcyon days of the past.
That these insinuations are clearly false does not seem to matter. The latest Centers for Disease Control figures show suicide by teenagers, along with various types of self-destructive deaths such as self-inflicted firearms injuries or drug overdoses, are at their lowest levels ever reliably recorded, less than half the rates of 40 years ago. They also show teenagers are far less likely to kill themselves than adults are. A 16 year-old is nearly three times more likely to have a parent commit suicide than the other way around, yet we are curiously unable to show compassion for teens who lose a parent. Finally, teen suicide is extremely rare–only 1 in 2,500 teens will take their own lives during the seven-year age 13-19 period (compared to 1 in 900 adults of age to be their parents during the same period), which means that suicidal youth strongly differ from their peers. Consistent research has found teen suicide strongly connected to family abuses–that is, bullying by adults–as well as suicide by parents.
But citing these counterpoints interferes with the needs of politicians, interests, and media reporters to sensationalize, and so the opposite pretense is indulged: that teens, particularly today, are being driven to suicide en masse by bullying peers. It’s a good thing that teenagers don’t seem to pay much attention to adults’ efforts to misrepresent adolescence as a life stage in which suicide is practically normative, or we’d probably see more teen suicides.
Second, the sudden (and certain to be fleeting) concern over teen suicide coincides with vehement political controversies over repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policies imposed on homosexual enlistees, as well as gay marriage and other rights. I’m strongly in favor of repealing DADT, legalizing gay marriage, and gay rights in general.
But there is something disturbing about advocates stating, in effect: “support our political goals or gay teens will kill themselves.” That polls and surveys consistently show young people are far less homophobic than adults, and “bullying” occurs among all age groups and is hardly unique to the present, adds yet more unwanted perspective to what is a very selective adult concern for young people.
[Bolding mine.]
The issue is expressing your opinion with love, as a Christian should – it just often doesn’t come across that way.