This is going to be the first part of my blog entry, but I just wanted to get it started.

My topic is going to be based around some aspect of suicide. It is kind of obvious to take a stance that it is wrong…but that is exactly how I feel. I have lost 7 friends to suicide within the past 4 years of my life. Ever since these events our High School and those affected have never been the same. It is still a day by day struggle for me to go through since none of them were expected, none of them left notes and one happened while we were all at school. So much confusion, frustration, anguish, and any other emotion you can describe, I have gone through. Suicide prevention and acknowledgment is something that I am very passionate about. The biggest flaw my High School had was that we weren’t allowed to talk about it. If we cried the say that someone died, if we said their name or even acted a little sad we were sent to the principles office to be shut in a small room to talk about our “feelings” with the stupid counselors they brought in. The notes that they sent out to students to notify them that a student had died were all the same, except for the boys name, we weren’t allowed to mourn, we weren’t allowed to feel. We were basically all put on suicide watch, but were taken away every form of happiness or freedom away from the school that we could have had. I think that that is is the one thing that i wish that my school did differently. I took part in a city wide walk this summer called “Out of the Darkness”. It is a walk to raise awareness about suicide and that it actually DOES happen. I think that the focus of my essay that I want to use will have something to do with the medical abuse of anti-depressants and how they just try to hide the problem instead of addressing it. I am not really sure where I can go with this, but I am going to use the research database and use Suicide as my keyword and see what I can find. Thats all I have for right now.

Part 2:

So, with talking to my mom I think that I am going to focus a lot on common risk factors and correlation with depression and self mutilation after suicide/suicide attempts. There is a lot of research out there about common factors, targeted genders, age groups and so on. I want to make my focus more towards teenagers or high school aged children because that is what I have been around the most. I think I want my question to be “As a friend are you missing the signs?” or “Would you want this to happen to your friends? If not speak up!” I want my paper to be written advocate for suicide awareness and prevention. I feel like it is my time to help and make a difference and also my chance to get out emotions that I have yet to deal with.

A lot of the articles I have found have actually gone right along with my topic sentence. One of the articles I found has to deal with how schools should deal with a suicide, the emotions students will go through, what to do and how to help. Like I said, my High School thought if they mentioned the word of suicide that they would be glamorizing it. But their plan backfired on them. Instead of creating a sort of acceptance with the issue we had almost a “domino effect” of suicides, self mutilation, poor school performance and depression.

I want another one of points to deal with ways to address a friend or family member. It is a common misconception that people only think about suicide. By showing people how to talk to others about their fears for their friends or even their own bought with it, I think that it will shed the light on prevention.

Obviously, the main part of my essay that I want to address is going to be warning signs. We didn’t see any in our case but I feel it was because we were un-prepared and oblivious to the idea that it would actually happen in our small town.

I don’t know much about how I would correlate this idea, but I want to talk about the use of therapy and medicine as almost a form of cover-up or a “fix-all”. Or I could even talk about the benefits of the suicide help line and in-school counselors. Right there could be my counter and rebuttle.

So, I have 4 paragraphs and have 5 sources already to use from. I am going to continue to find more and contact our local center for suicide awareness which my mom is involved in. After I contact them I will hopefully be able to get a better understanding of what I want to write on and will have more information as well.