We can't talk about it

An article entitled Our Young People Kill Themselves And We Can’t Say It Out Loud turned up recently on a NZ blog site called Military Models. The author's name isn't obvious from the site, and I suspect this blog post is a bit of an unusual one for them. 

The writer's main point is that the current Government policy doesn't allow suicides to be written about or reported at the time they happen, and while there is a move to change this policy it's not happening fast enough for many.  I note on Twitter that there's been a good deal of discussion about this recently, initiated to a great extent by SPINZ (Suicide Prevention Information New Zealand).

One of the comments relating to the article says:
What hits me most about this is not the hypocrit [sic] way of the officials, it is the fact that so many kids apparently cannot stand their life and go to this extreme. What is wrong in your country?
Apparently we have a very wrong concept of New Zealand here in Europe where for many it is a very desirable place to be. Maybe that is Peter Jackson´s fault…
There is a lot of pressure on kids everywhere in the western world today, but this sounds alarming.
Start by calling things by their name,but then go and find the root of this disease.

We know some of the issues - a lack of a spiritual base is one of them - but there is a good deal of work to be done to reduce the horrendous toll suicide takes on the lives of young people.