Synthesis Essay - Suicide

Is medical treatment or psychiatric help more successful in preventing suicide?

To treat people who have suicidal thoughts with medication is not going to help as much as psychiatric help, because the medication only lasts up to a certain amount of time, mostly only a few hours, but if you go to a psychiatrist, he may be able to change your way how you see life and to give you a second chance to start living again. The problem with psychiatric help is that you can fall into your old habits very easily, but if you keep taking your medication day for day, the chance to get back to where you came from is very small.

In 2002, suicide accounted for about 30,000 deaths in the US alone and approximately 877,000 deaths worldwide—1.5% of the global burden of disease. It is often difficult to predict due to its complex nature. Some of the biological factors for suicide include hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis dysregulation, 

low blood cholesterol levels and several biological features related to failures in neurotransmitter and neuroendocrine systems, such as the serotonergic, noradrenergic, dopaminergic, and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) systems, have been proposed. Even though these things are more less the reason for suicidal thoughts or problems than mental illness, it should be treated, because everything that makes someone feel so bad that they want to kill themselves is not right. Medical treatment to prevent suicidal thoughts is helpful in that case that it stops some brain functions, but you have to take a couple pills a day to actually get the process started. Many people who forget or who don't want to take their medicine fall back into deep depression and sadness and they have to be helped in another way. (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000271)

On the other hand, psychiatric illness is a major contributing factor to suicide risk, with mood disorders such as major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder being associated with about 60% of suicides. Psychiatric disorders are diagnosed in more than 90% of completed suicides, and more than 80% of these disorders are untreated at the time of death, which is the reason why people have to get psychiatric help, because a mental illness is diagnosed way more often than biological dysfunctions. These people feel the "heavy weight of the world laying on their chest" (Suicide Prevention). Psychiatrists try to turn of the voice inside of the people's head which is saying "why suffer why not just get over with the complexity of your intricate design" (Suicide Prevention". This kind of help actually gets into people's mind, with spoken words they reach more than with medical treatment that just stops parts of your brain of working.

I think that psychiatric help is way more successful in preventing suicide even though 80% of all the people who committed suicide and who were diagnosed with a mental illness actually went and got help. People who know that someone in their family or from their friends are suffering from such a thing should talk to the person, they may don't want to be helped, but at the end they'll see how much more fun it it to be alive than to fall into depression and finally ending their life.

MY GLOGSTER: http://www.glogster.com/frannydog/suicide-poetry-project/g-6koaie2mo0cbfh1qpkbqta0