When the shocking news of Mindy McCready’s apparent suicide was announced, her death caused by a gunshot to the head, I immediately flashed on the recent New York Times article linking guns and suicide, with this disturbing statistic: “Nearly two-thirds of the 30,000 gun deaths each year are not the work of deranged mass shooters but the suicides of troubled individuals with easy access to firearms, often in quiet family homes.”
The point of the New York Times story, which everyone should read for the heartbreaking tale of the death of a young man with everything to live for, is that while many gun owners want to keep their guns in their homes to protect themselves, what they may not realize is that if they have someone in their home who suffers from depression or a related mental illness, those guns may pose their biggest threat to their own loved ones. Suicide is the No. 8 cause of death in the U.S. and the No. 3 cause of death for young people between the ages of 15 and 24, according to the National Alliance for Mental Health.
Plus, depression can hit in waves. You’ve got a better chance of the impulse passing if the means for suicide are not readily available. That’s not to say there aren’t other ways, but most other ways take longer (giving time for a change of mind). Unlike pills which can potentially be pumped from the stomach, guns are all too often a fatal way of getting the job done. Dr. Preston Wiles, psychiatrist and medical director of UT Southwestern/Children’s Medical Autism Center Medical Center, one of panelists at our Erasing the Stigma: Mental Illness and the Search for Solutions symposium, wants to make it clear that he supports second amendment rights. But as a physician, he says, he is also clear in his advice to gun owners:
“When I have families with a kid with depression, I say, ‘Take the guns to the gun club and leave them there.’ Even if you lock them up at home with a combination or a key, if a kid is 16 he’s going to know the combination or where the keys are. Parents don’t think they do, but they do.”
Watch Erasing The Stigma: Mental Illness & Search for Solutions on PBS. See more from KERA Specials.