Another Family Destroyed by Suicide This Week
January 30th, 2009 | by admin |Another family destroyed by suicide this week. Fox news reported “A family of four, including two small children, were found dead in their Ohio home in what police believe was a murder-suicide. … the father left behind a suicide note. …. Police identified the victims as Mark Meeks, 51; his wife, Jennifer Dallas-Meeks, 40; and their children, Abbigail, 8, and Jimmy, 5.”
What can stop the wave of suffering from rising suicide rates? The British Journal of Psychiatry sheds some light on what can stem the tide. The suicide rate in England and Wales fell after the London bombings on 7 July 2005, according to new research published in the January issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.
A second significant reduction also coincided with the second wave of terrorist attacks on 21 July, researchers found. Previous studies have shown that terrorist attacks can have substantial effects on suicide rates. For example, England and Wales saw a reduction in suicide after the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the USA.
This is thought to be because traumatic national events create group integration and greater cohesion within society. The pain of terrorist attacks brought the country made people stop and look outside themselves. Outside of themselves they found something worth living for. Looking away from themselves on the suffering of others puts their own troubles in a different perspective.
The death of innocent people caused some who would be part of suicide statistics to go on living. The greatest cure for suicide is the death of the one man who was so innocent, he did not have one sin lying on his conscience. My father drove a van on Sunday nights in Baltimore City picking people up for church. An elderly lady, who rode the van every week, had been on the verge of suicide years before.
On a Sunday she planed her demise, but before she carried out her plans, she listened to the radio. On the radio she heard the gospel preached by Peter Bisset of Arlington Baptist Church. As she listened she cried out to Jesus Christ, the innocent man who died for her.
From then on she loved Jesus Christ, and had no more thoughts of taking her own life. She had given her life into the hands of the Son of God and he held it safe forever. No life is so wrecked that Jesus Christ cannot salvage it.