My turn Dr. Raymond W. Bryant 'Come walk with us'

This Sunday, the Warwick Valley School District will host the annual Orange County “Out of the Darkness” Walk to help raise awareness and funds to prevent suicide.

Yes, I said it, the suicide word. The word we don’t like to talk about, the word we don’t like to admit or share was the reason a loved one or friend died. Suicide – the thing that happens to other people, the tragedy about which we more often ask how it happened then why it happened.

And yet, this is the one cause of death out of the top 10 killers in our country that we as a society have almost complete control of.

So we walk to raise awareness that more than 100 people, young, middle aged and elderly die from suicide each day.

This is a number equivalent to a 737 jet airliner crashing every three days.

If such crashes happened with that regularity we would not be holding a walk once a year, we’d be walking every single day. We would want to know why. We would demand efforts to prevent such crashes, and we would not rest until there was a fix.

We walk once a month, yet every 13.7 minutes in our country someone will die as the result of suicide.

No complete count
The following information is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC collects data about mortality in the U.S., including deaths by suicide. In 2010 (the most recent year for which data are available), 38,364 suicides were reported, making suicide the 10th leading cause of death for Americans

In 2010, the highest suicide rate (18.6) was among people 45 to 64 years old. The second highest rate (17.6) occurred in those 85 years and older. Younger groups have had consistently lower suicide rates than middle-aged and older adults. In 2010, adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 24 had a suicide rate of 10.5

No complete count is kept of suicide attempts in the U.S.; however, the CDC gathers data each year from hospitals on non-fatal injuries resulting from self-harm behavior.

In 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, 464,995 people visited a hospital for injuries due to self-harm behavior, suggesting that approximately 12 people harm themselves (not necessarily intending to take their lives) for every reported death by suicide.

Together, those harming themselves made an estimated total of more than 650,000 hospital visits related to injuries sustained in one or more separate incidents of self-harm behavior.

Many suicide attempts go unreported or untreated, and surveys suggest that at least one million people in the U.S. each year engage in intentionally inflicted self-harm.

As with suicide deaths, rates of attempted suicide vary considerably among demographic groups. While males are four times more likely than females to die by suicide, females attempt suicide three times as often. The ratio of suicide attempts to suicide death in youth is estimated to be about 25:1, compared to about 4:1 in the elderly.

And so we walk.
Will you walk with us on Sunday?

Do you know the warning signs and how to help prevent suicide?

Do you know what to do and say when someone you know, love or care about says directly: “I’m going to kill myself.”

Or more commonly, they may say something more indirectly: “I just want the pain to end,” or “I can’t see any way out.”

The event begins at 6 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 29, for the Sunrise Walk with registration at 7:30 a.m. for the full walk, which begins at 8:30 a.m. at the Warwick Valley High School football field.

Come Sunday and learn the answers, learn how to get connected, learn how to help save a life and learn how to make our communities places that will not accept suicide as solution for any problem.

Come walk with us.

Dr. Raymond Bryant is superintendent of schools for the Warwick Valley School District.