Suicide Among Youth Within Residential Group Facilities and Single Family Foster Homes
Suicide Among Youth Within Residential Group Facilities and Single Family Foster Homes
Recent years, researchers admit high rates of suicides among youth within the foster care system. Researchers explain that suicides are caused by social and emotional conditions rather than a mental disease. Furthermore, it is often associated with hundreds of suicides and suicide attempts. “Researchers discovered attention problems and aggressive or delinquent behavior in 40 per cent of children aged five to 17 who were in home-based foster care, up to eight times more than in the general school-age population” (Gough 2007). Though the statistics vary extensively, it is generally believed that some 18 percent of patients with psychological problems finally do kill themselves, and illnesses may be associated with approximately 50 percent of all suicides (Youth Suicide Fact Sheet 2009). The data show, that miserable youth teenagers do not always kill themselves. Symptoms of psychological distress serve as a strong warning signal. They are a good indicator that someone is a potential suicide, especially if he or she has tried suicide before, and it is important to know about psychological distress if researchers are to understand suicidal behavior.
The book Children in Foster Care by J.G., Barber and P. H. Delfabbro provides a wide-ranging description of foster care environment and singles out possible causes of suicides. Researchers know that distressed teenagers, young and old, simply do not feel good about themselves. In foster care homes, they feel helpless, unable to lift themselves out of whatever it is that pull them down, be it the death of a friend, the stress of a work or schoolwork, or opportunities lost. Distressed teenagers may also be plagued with a sense of despair, a feeling that they’ve run out of luck, that no matter what these teens do it will turn out badly. Finally, despair sets in, that dreadful feeling that no decisions whatsoever exist. Fascinated in such a research of futility, and convinced that no one cares or can help, some deeply depressed teenagers understandably, very much, choose the one quick way of putting an end to all the misery, suicide. The researchers who work with teenagers in a community center describe the role that despair plays in a youthful suicide. Just a glance at the suicide notes teenagers often leave, or the poems and diary entries they write before taking their lives, tells us how painful, all-encompassing, and overwhelming despair is in those who kill themselves.
The research study provided by J. Ciffone (2007) Suicide Prevention describes the major causes of suicides among young teenagers in residential group facilities and possible ways of prevention. They are often only precipitating reasons, contributing issues, things that pushed susceptible teenagers over the edge. In examining why teenagers become depressed and why teenagers kill themselves, researchers cannot look for simple research. “The roots of psychological distress lie buried deep, and so, too, do the roots of desperate behavior/” (Ciffone 2007, p. 43). This does not mean that researchers can ignore the outside forces that at times crowd a person beyond his or her ability to cope. Nor can researchers ignore what goes on in our psyches — the mental or psychological structure that makes us what researchers are and forces us to behave in certain ways. hurtful life events, poverty, alienation, lack of a solid tie to guardians, pressure from a guardian on a teenager for that teenager to be more than he or she can or wants to be, and the enormous gaps between what a teenager wants and what he or she actually is or becomes — all of these things may be closely connected with psychological distress and with suicide. Consider an young man — and the elderly are especially prone to suicide who has come down physically but not psychologically. The guardians in single families in foster care tries to find work, but in a society that favors youth and energy — not to mention companies’ delight in being able to pay a younger person less because he or she lacks experience and is eager to learn — he is unable to do so. The man becomes more and more aware of his age and of the limited number of months he has left, and he becomes very depressed.
The research The First Four Months in a New Foster Placement by J.G., Barber and P. H. Delfabbro (2003) describes problems and factors of high suicide rates among youth in residential group facilities. The same pattern can affect a much younger individual who faces a traumatic life change, or whose goals are thwarted. For some teenagers, a decision by guardians to move the entire family far away from the friends because of a new work can trigger a depressive episode. Some psychiatrists see psychological distress of that sort and the kind that affected the older man as situational troubles, or problems in living. Some of the psychological distress may be short-lived and gentle,