U.S.A.
Everyone Else
Health
Science
Business
Technology
Sports
Video Games
Entertainment
Future
NEWS > U.S.A. > TRAIN SUICIDES ALL THE RAGE IN CALIFORNIA
TRAIN SUICIDES ALL THE RAGE IN CALIFORNIA
November 3 2009
Palo Alto, CA – Suicide, the deliberate termination of one’s own life, has long been a mystery to medicine and psychiatry. Human beings are, after all, the only species on the planet aware of their mortality and it is that awareness that helps to define our
lives. Like every other animal we eat, sleep, breathe, and have sex all in an effort to 
extend our own lives and the life of the species. That makes it all the more confusing and distressing, then, when a loved one decides to commit suicide.
Religion also strongly forbids the act of suicide and in the Christian tradition damns the inner to eternal life in purgatory. For many families too the act of suicide can tear apart happiness, destroying everything that has been built. Despite all those social and physical obstacles to the act, though, suicide continues to occur across the United States and throughout the world. With everything ranging from slit wrists to drug overdoses to shotgun blasts, people across the United States have found innumerable ways to end their mortal existence. Now a new trend in California has begun to form with more and more young suicides being committed via train, a trend that is only showing signs of growing.
“There is no single answer. There is not necessarily a cumulative set of answers either. A lot of the time, the problem is no one really knows the exact reason why someone would step on the tracks. People keep on searching for answers, but sometimes you won't ever really know because the person is not here anymore,” said Greg Hermann, a spokesperson for the city of Palo Alto, the apparent epicentre of the trend. “Honestly, this is not what we expected to become the known for. We have a nice little community, right on the water and the last thing we expected to be recognized for was certain type of suicide. Sometimes though the momentum is something you can’t stop and we just have to deal with things the way they are.”
In the last six months at least six young people have committed suicide by train, the majority of which attended Henry M. Gunn high school. It’s not clear if the motivation for suicide is a result of the school, or if the environment provided there simply prompted a spontaneous eruption of the events.
“We have started to these types of incidents have recently started to spread throughout the Bay area. That’s really unusual because the majority of trends occur in the southern part of the state, in and around Los Angeles, but we can see how things are starting to expand here,” said San Francisco trend critic Mary Hawk. “Once it starts to spread into places like San Jose it will likely explode from there. I mean it may cross the bay and hit Oakland but it’s really just a new wrinkle for them. I’d want to kill myself if I lived in Oakland too. What we are talking about here are people who wouldn’t ordinarily kill themselves throwing themselves down on the train tracks and getting smucked. That is where the real revelation is.”
Hanging and drugs are still the most common form of suicide across the state. Some critics are sceptical about the rise of rain related deaths due to the proximity of many residents to unprotected tracks.
“The real test is when this hits big cities like L.A. There are so man y people there and the majority of them live far from the tracks, which is going to make it very difficult to have this take off in the mainstream,” continued Hawk. “Of course L.A. has a way of taking existing trends and making them their own. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them reinvigorate this type of suicide, an innovation that would likely help it to spread across the country and become one of if not the most popular ways to do oneself in.”
For many years train based suicide has been the most common form in Europe, though it’s not clear if the current trend in California is directly related.
Mike Michaels, American Correspondent
NEWS > U.S.A. > TRAIN SUICIDES ALL THE RAGE IN CALIFORNIA
SHARE THIS STORY!
LINK IT! http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/usa/pages-3/Train-suicides-all-the-rage-in-California-Scrape-TV-The-World-on-your-side.html |
TWEET IT! http://bit.ly/3HGNtw |
BOOKMARK IT!  
|
|---|