WASHINGTON – It’s the holiday season. Stores will be packed, expectations will be raised, families will come together — and in some cases grate on one another.
It’s a formula for a seasonal increase in suicides. Or is it?
“That is a myth. As far as we understand, that is a myth,” said Tori Leonard, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
State and national health officials say that suicides actually decline during the time of winter festivities and peak during the spring and fall.
Leonard said she does not know how the myth of more suicides during the holidays began, but “it has been circulating for years.”
Nancy Kline, senior counselor for Grassroots Crisis Intervention, said suicides increase during the spring and fall because depressed people see the changing seasons and happy couples and realize they are still depressed.
Kline said suicide rates actually drop during the holiday season because people are so busy.
Officials with the United Way of Central Maryland’s First Call program, an information and referral service, said their suicide calls fall during the holidays from the average of 14 per month.
Sandra Bond, the program’s director, said First Call got 10 suicide-related calls in November 1997 and 11 calls in December 1997. She said First Call has received only six calls so far in November and December of this year.
Suicide rates in Maryland have been relatively unchanged overall in recent years. The state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recorded 516 suicides in Maryland for all of 1997, just 3 percent higher than the 1996 total of 501 and 1.4 percent higher than the 1995 total of 509 suicides.
The National Institute of Mental Health says that most people who kill themselves have a mental or substance abuse disorder. When those disorders are compounded by personal problems it could lead to suicide, but that is not a normal stress response of most people, according to the NIMH.
Other risk factors reported by the NIMH include prior suicide attempts, keeping a gun in the home, incarceration and exposure to the suicidal behavior of others.
The most common method of committing suicide by men and women of all ages is with a gun. NIMH said guns accounted for 59 percent of all suicides in 1995, when suicide was the ninth-leading cause of death in the country.
NIMH said suicide rates are highest for white men over age 85, who kill themselves at a rate of 68.2 per 100,000 people. The next- highest category is black men between the ages of 20 and 24.
Women have the lowest suicide rates, with black women falling well below white women.