The week of 9/9-9/15 was suicide prevention week. We owe a great deal to the Flathead Suicide Prevention Coalition and other individuals and groups for their efforts to promote this cause. Hopefully, there will be a large turnout to support their march Saturday 9/29 called “Out of the Darkness.”

      The coalition’s goal of “training to transform attitudes and behaviors with the goal of extinguishing suicidal behaviors” must include study of the causes of this nation’s dramatic rise in the incidence of suicide. The reasons for the rise are no doubt complex. Functional imaging studies of the brains of suicide survivors reveal an increased incidence of left temporal lobe abnormalities. The risk of suicide is higher with disorders such as depression, illegal substance abuse, bipolar disorder, dementia, borderline personality disorder. However, these realities do not adequately explain why suicide occurs because most people with these diagnoses don’t kill themselves. They cannot explain why the incidence of suicide is increasing, especially among teenagers. I believe the answer lies in our culture’s denigration of the meaning and value of human life.

      There have been carefully orchestrated successful efforts to “remove” God from all public aspects of our society. Remove God, and you remove absolute morality. Remove God, and you remove meaning and the intrinsic value of the individual. Remove God and you remove hope, and humans will inevitably scramble for something to fill that void, that vacuum. Morality is replaced by pragmatism so that what is right and what is wrong is whatever is practical, whatever feels good, whatever serves the individual in power, whatever is thought to serve the greater good or the greatest number of people. The meaning that is intended for us and that our innermost being screams for, as beloved sons and daughters of God, is replaced by the drive for power, material possessions, and/or pleasure at all costs. And these replacements are logical consequences of our culture in which ethics is a relative and private matter rather than an absolute and public matter.

      Evolutionists degrade humanity by claiming we are no more than a bunch of chemicals evolved from a primordial organic soup. The pantheists and extreme environmentalists demean human life by claiming it is on equal par or of lesser value than other living things. The hedonists and power-mongers debase the human body by using it as a means to an end. The legalization of abortion on demand carries the denigrating message that our value is dependent on our being wanted by our parents, on having certain potential, on catering to someone’s convenience or inconvenience. Widespread acceptance of abortion means widespread acceptance of the belief that human beings are expendable. These culturally-contrived notions have replaced the true value of the individual that is intrinsic—built-in and independent of what any other human thinks or values. In our society, this immeasurable intrinsic worth is replaced by that which is based on achievements, talents, material possessions, power, physical appearance, peer acceptance—all things that are transitory, in flux, chosen by others as valuable, and ultimately unsatisfying because they lack the stability and ultimate fulfillment of enjoying our rightful place as co-heirs of God’s kingdom.

      According to the Bible, each of us is brought into being by a wondrous process. Psalm 139 proclaims that God designed our inmost being, as a wonderful work He knit together in our mother’s womb. That process carries great significance and purpose for every one of us, and its spectacular complexity and exactitude are proclaimed by the most sophisticated scientific research.

      Christianity gives the human body the marvel it is due and provides the human species its utmost exaltation. The only begotten Son of God, Jesus, Himself appeared in human form, then lived and died for our salvation. In His Word, each one of us is given the supreme compliment that our human body is the sacred temple of the living God (I Corinthians 3:16), the Creator of the universe. This glorious tribute applies equally to rich and poor, young and old, popular and socially rejected, the highly gifted/accomplished and those most obscure. Placing God at the center of society where He belongs, and thereby restoring our concept of humanity to its God-given dignity, is the ultimate in suicide prevention.

Annie Bukacek MD