The World Happiness Report (WHR) was released on September 9 2013, the day before World Suicide Prevention Day.
Suicide is tragic regardless of the race, sex, or age of the victim. The tragedy, and this burden of guilt must be carried by our entire culture, is that some among us feel so hopeless about their future that they feel their only option is to die. Suicide affects everyone close to the victim, often destroying the lives of the survivors.
If suicide is to be addressed effectively, it needs to be understood. That means openly talking about victim demographics; who they are and why they commit suicide, for starters. And yet even on World Suicide Prevention Day, the media chose to be evasive about the truth.
The CTV news piece about World Suicide Prevention Day mentioned the many suicide cohorts, the complexities of suicide, that individuals have differing motives, that differences occur within each age group. In fact they went to considerable trouble to touch on these complexities.
But the CTV commentators avoided the single biggest and most significant statistic surrounding suicide:
