By Shari Sanger
The Evening Sun (Hanover, Pennsylvania)
Copyright 2006 MediaNews Group, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Daniel was 19 when he killed himself.
He had finished his first semester at Tri-State University in Angola, Ind., where he attended on an academic scholarship and studied mechanical engineering.
He excelled in sports and was a straight-A student.
He had a lot of friends.
But he was an overachiever, said his mother, Beverly Abernethy.
“We had no clue Daniel was suffering,” she said.
On May 4, 2004, he had been home in Lebanon with his parents for exactly a week.
“When I came home from work and opened the door to his bedroom, my life changed immediately, forever,” she said.
Daniel had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
“Losing a child to suicide is like no other loss,” she said. “My husband and I have lost our future.”
Abernethy is the coordinator of the Lebanon County Chapter of The Yellow Ribbon Program for suicide prevention.
She was part of a panel discussion at a suicide forum held at the Adams County EMS Training Center on Thursday afternoon.
The workshop was organized by the Youth Suicide Prevention subcommittee, an offshoot of Healthy Adams County.
“Our goal is prevention,” said Joanna Myers, chairwoman of the subcommittee.
In Adams County in the past six years, 67 people have died by suicide. Seven of those were teens.
Experts say suicide is the third leading cause of death for youth between the ages of 15 and 24.
And it’s an issue in all realms of the community, especially in schools, said guest speaker Marlene Corcoran, a state trainer for Olweus, a bullying-prevention program.
She should know.
Corcoran is a retired at-risk-student program coordinator from the Red Lion School District, York County, where a murder-suicide occurred in 2003.
In the cafeteria of Red Lion Junior High School, Principal Eugene Segro was fatally shot by a student. The student, James R. Sheets, then turned the gun on himself.
“This is a serious problem and one we should be addressing in groups like this,” Corcoran said.
Corcoran spoke of the need for schools to enact plans to provide grief support and respond to other situations, she said.
“Threats of suicide must be taken seriously. Students often are desperately seeking help and need support,” she said.
Often going hand-in-hand with suicide is bullying, she said.
She referenced a study that showed Australian children who were bullied at least once a week were twice as likely as their peers to “wish they were dead.”
“Bullying is a one-way street. Someone has the power and someone is vulnerable,” she said.
Across the country each year, 30,000 people complete suicide, said Dr. Frank Daly with Pennsylvania Counseling Services, who has degrees in internal medicine and psychiatry.
Daly said suicide should be approached as a disease. Suicide and suicide attempts rarely occur outside a context of a psychiatric disorder, he said.
He said people who abuse substances, have mood disorders like depression and bipolar disorder, or personality disorders are among those more likely to attempt suicide.
For every one female who successfully completes suicide, three males die by suicide, he said.
“Females attempt suicide more frequently, but males are using more lethal means,” he said.
Also increasing the risk for suicide is having a gun in the home, he said. People who own guns are 32 times more likely to commit suicide.
That, he said, is because “suicide is often impulsive.”
Beverly Abernethy said her son was loved very much. Daniel was an only child and an only grandchild. He had everything he could have wanted.
Maybe that was part of the problem, she said.
“There’s nothing I can do for Daniel anymore, but I can try to prevent other children from taking their lives. They’re much too precious,” she said.
Abernethy wears a bracelet on her wrist that says, “It’s okay to ask for help.”
And that’s a message she hopes will be embraced by youth.
“If you’re lucky, you find out before it’s too late,” she said.