By Bill Cunningham, the Great American, of course. So I had a talker gone last week about young American's nineteen
year old trying to commit suicide. It was an incredible story in which this nineteen year old was extremely depressed, seemingly on drugs, and he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, hit the water at about seventy five miles an hour, fell about two hundred and twenty five feet about twenty two story building hit the water, and because of the intervention of a sea lion, confirmed by the coast Guard, the sea lion picked up his
body and kept it afloat till they arrived. The unbelievable story, but it brought up the fact that April twenty ninth, in the month of April is Fentanyl Awareness Month is declared by the FEDS. And a person that deals with the falloff from all this is our fine Hamlety County Coroner, Doctor Lastmi Somarco and doctor Samarco. Welcome again to the
Bill Cunningham Show. So, first of all, you have available to tell you facts and statistics about suicide, not just in Hamilton County, but because you do autopsies you're pick from around the other counties. Tell the American people the facts about so many Americans committing suicide.
Yeah, you know, this is a really touching, difficult topic to discuss, whether you're talking to parents or school groups or anybody. But I think that, you know, the more information we have, the more we can help these kids. And we noticed March we had an unusual number of suicides come to our office. Most of them were from Hamilton County, but we did have a couple from our adjacent counties. And what's really disturbing about it is is I think we average about eight suicides a month overall.
I mean, we're usually in the range of about one hundred a year, but this was seventeen, and that's double our normal number. And the age spread was a lot younger than we normally see. Yeah, we had a twelve year old and a fourteen year old and we're looking at a thirteen year old as we're not sure if that's a suicide or not, but it was gunshot related and most of I think we had one person in the fifties and one person in their forties, but everybody
else was younger than that. And that's alarming because that's that's not what we usually see. And you know, we talk about mental health issues, and I would just love to get rid of the whole stigma around mental health, because you know, your brain is an organ just like any other organ in your body, and it can develop chemical imbalances or electrical imbalances, and you know, how is that going to manifest. Maybe it'll manifest like a seizure,
or maybe it'll managas like mental health issues. So we had to just start calling it brain health. And I heard this. I didn't coin this, believe me. I heard this at a pediatric lecturer I went to once, and
I really really resonated with me. And you know, my dad practiced psychiatry in this area for fifty years, and you know, we've we've talked about this, and I've talked to him about the suicides and the depression and clinical depression and what we're seeing and and he said, you know, kids nowadays have a lot different but a lot more triggers, and and he just shakes his head sometimes and you know, I think, you know ects. We've talked about treatments for
clinical depression. Most psychiatrists that I have talked to have said nothing works as well as ECTS in those intractable clinical depressed people that they've treated for years pharmacologically but haven't been able to make a breakthrough. But this all goes back to, you know, what are the triggers for suicide? And for so many people, they're so different, you know, and the different age groups. I mean, we talked about social pressures and social media and things that have really
caused some distress for young people. We've talked about job related things, We've talked you know, we looked at COVID. COVID to you know, four years ago, five years ago was an incredibly isolating period of time for this country and for the people of this country. And you know, those people that were that were already sort of on the edge and needing the extra help and then being
isolated made it very difficult for them. And you know, we've had so many kids in their twenties this month and twenties and thirties, and you look back you think, well, you know, how old were they five years ago, And were they seniors and juniors in high school? Were they freshmen and sophomores in college? And you know, my son was a senior in high school and he had no graduation,
and he had no senior prom. He started as a freshman in a college in a dorm where six people were supposed to be in the suite and there were only two of them. And the dining halls had one share per table. You couldn't even sit with anybody to have a meal. There were no clubs, there were no intermural sports. There was nothing. And you had to wear a mask even when you were outdoors.
Yeah, that's ridiculous, now, is there? When you think about America today, I hear about cyber bullying, I hear about revenge porn. I hear about young teenagers, twenty somethings isolated. I was watching I went out to dinner the other night at a downtown restaurant.
I looked to my right.
There was three couples sitting there, seemingly late teens made they might have been sixteen years old. And I watched them for a few minutes, and they were all on their phones in front of them and weren't communicating. I guess they were on a date. It looked like a dressed the girls are wearing. They might have been seventeen years old, and there's little communication sitting at a table
looking at each other. And the way to communicate today is not about picking up the phone and talking where one can understand the nuances of a conversation, accepting, not accepting, whatever it might be. And now young people are told by the culture that there's good and bad, right and wrong. However it's taught through social media. What role does social media play and the idea that you're isolated, you're stupid,
you're fat, you're ugly, whatever term might be used. And the person, especially maybe girls who are going through lots of things in their life anyway in their teenage years, that they can start to believe that my life's worthless. It'd be better if I wasn't alive anymore. That wasn't the case ten twenty thirty years ago.
Correct, No, absolutely not. I think I think everybody that's talking about it is really hitting it on the head, which is social media is isolating because a lot of these people are looking for validation on the number of likes they get or you know, the number of people that have viewed their posts, and that somehow validates them and what they're doing. Instead of hanging out with their friends and having conversations and you know, I found that out in my own house when when my daughter was
younger and they were in high school. I remember the over friends came over. They were sitting on the couch, the three of them, and they were all three of their phones.
And I was like, will you do it?
You get your friends over, You're supposed to be hanging out talking to each other. What are you doing all your phones?
Right?
And I took the phones away. So it was not a very popular mom, but I took all three posts away from them and I said, enjoy your time together, because this is what you get. But honestly, it's it is a huge problem across the world. I just came back from India and you know, everybody has a cell
phone there there. Work show drivers have a cell phone there, and they have massive networks, and they're all on their phones and they're looking at their social media and they're on their Internet and they're getting their tidbits of information here and there, right or wrong, from the inner and from social media. And it's just scary because it's not just our country, it's across the world and we have just radically changed how we all communicate or don't communicate.
You know, and I think it's unchangeable.
I can't maybe every now and then, you were there for those three girls saying, take away your phones.
Talk to each other. They don't know what to say. That's not going to change.
In fact, it's accelerating when I see moms and dads buying nine, ten to eleven year old's devices where they communicate through the device and they don't communicate with human beings, which causes an array of socially debaucherous condition including the fact that dating doesn't take place. Boys live in a world of porn and online gambling, and girls resist getting a relationship because they're hurt and there's no dating going on.
Girls get married at the age of thirty and boys get married at the age of thirty two, which used to be you know that that was old.
Now it's young.
And so doctor Somarco County Corner, Is there a way to correct this or is it simply arming people with the information? May God grant me the patience to accept the things I can't change, the strength to change the things that could be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference. And so if we can't change the culture and change society, that's not gonna I would like to think we could change it.
I don't think we can.
What can you equip parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters with to stop the suicides from happening? When a person feels so low and their life is meaningless, what do.
You do in it? Well, first of all, there's no going back. I mean that horse has long left the gate, and I wish I could go back to flip phones, I mean, just foot phones. You can still make your phone calls and do some crude texting, but you can't get on social media and one another. That's not gonna happen anymore. But so we have to figure out how to deal with this, and we have to do it quickly because there are more and more and more apps being offered. There are more and more, you know, I mean,
we have dating apps. And we were dating, you know, when we were going out with people, and now people meet their partners on dating apps. And I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong or worse than meeting somebody at a bar or something, but you know, if you meet somebody at the gym, or if you meet somebody at a social event, you're you've got face to face time with them. You can read body language, you can you know, feel
the inflection of their voice when they're talking. I mean there's a lot more parameters, a lot more variables that you can decide if somebody's right for you or if you want to see them again, versus just swiping left or swiping right. And I think we as parents are afraid to set rules anymore. And I and I've put myself in that too. I mean, there are times when I want to say something and but you know, thinking, well, you know they are adults. Now do I say something?
Do I not say something? And I think you have to go with your instincts as as a parent and say is this going to benefit your child? Is this going to help them think it through? And have to decide. And you know, having grandparents in your life, I think
is really important. Having other family members that can show that they care about you and stay connected with you, even at a periperal level, just to know that you've got a network of people that you can go to, if not just your coaches and you know, your religious leaders in your community, or you know that that person that's in your music class or your dance class or something I think that having kids more involved with and I know there's soccer, there's hockey, there's all these other
sports too, but I think some of the arts are are important just for a balance and for kids to be exposed to people with different interests and different temperaments. And I don't have a solution. I just know that we've become we've become more isolated, and it's showing. And
these are young people. These are young you know, people that have the capability of being really productive members of our society and you know, possibly even the next president, but we won't know if we can't get them to the finish line.
So the answer is, the answer is communication. And the idea of a twelve year old or a fifteen year old or eighteen year old or nineteen year old killing themselves decades ago that simply didn't happen except if you were profoundly mentally ill suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with effective components. But today it is you're sounding the alarm this afternoon because you're saying, is it is a problem that's accelerating in southwest Ohio, that it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Well, unfortunately, it looks that way right now, and I hope that this is just a weird month and we're not going to have any more months like this. But we already have two suicides in the month of April,
and you know, it's only been a few days. So I'm raising the alarm because I think that bringing awareness to people looking around at other people, those who you work with, those you go to school with, those you live with, I think, just take an extra look, just you know, put yourself in their shoes, see if there's something you can do to lighten the load for some people, or you know, just talk. Just be there so that they can communicate with you if they communicate. That's the
other thing. You stop looking at your phone. Yeah, a lot of friends and people around you that you can look up. Don't look down, look up, look up and around you. I mean, you know, look at the flooding out there today. Talk to people that are being affected. I mean, volunteer. There's a lot going on in your community.
Get out there, volunteer.
I could not imagine when I was eight seventeen or eighteen years old on a date with little Penny Asbroc that I'd be on I'd be looking down and not communicating with her, and girls want communication. I think girls have a lot more problems in life than boys. I think it's much harder to be a girl or a woman than a man or a boy. That's my that's my sexist opinion. It's hard to be a woman and a girl compared to a boy or a man.
But I don't know. I think we're sounding an alarm.
That suicides are way up and that it's a big problem, and parents have got to look to the left, look to the right, pick up cues from their child and from the loved one that something's amiss, something's not right.
And the message you know, to you you were talking about the social media and these kids, and you know how some of these kids have committed suicide because of what's posted about them and whatnot. You know that also comes from a sense of self worth And what's happened to that? Have we not armed our children with a sense of value and instead they're looking for social media for this validation. Do they not have a sense of their own worth? And where along the way has we
missed that ball? And how do we go about fixing it so that we're arming our kids with confidence and the sense of I am a good person who's going to do great things in this life. I just need a chance.
Yeah.
And of course fentanyl is another thing. It's terrible fentyls and drugs that that the little pill may say xan x, but it may not be xanax unless you get it from Adrian pharmacy, and that the fentanyls in marijuana powder, cocaine.
That's another issue.
Well, that's another thing though, is that people reach for these escapes, you know, when when they don't when they can't find it on their own and in their in their own little environment, and they're looking for a way to escape some horrible situation or feeling. And you know, drugs are drugs are an easy way to escape. Alcohol is an easy way to escape. And you know, of
course those things just make depression worse. I mean, alcohol is a depressant, So I mean that doesn't it's it's not a you know, it's not a it's not a long term fix. And you know, we always say suicide is is a very impulsive most of the time, it's not even a solution, but it's an act that you
can't come back from. You can't fix it. You know, whatever might be the problem, you never get a chance to fix, so solution for a long term problem, and I think that I think I just wanted to make sure people were aware that, Hey, you know, we're kind of seeing this out there in the community. And you know, if you look at some of the statistics about high school kids, you know, one in twelve either has attempted or considered suicide. I mean, that's an alarming number. And
that's an old number. I don't know what it is even now. That was from five years ago, and you know, and that in itself ought to be alarming to everybody. But you know, I think it's I think it's even a smaller number now unfortunately, or a bigger number however you want to look at it at the ratio. But here it is. We've got young adults in our region who are taking their own lives and are desperate enough and find this world a horrible place to live in that they don't want to be here anymore.
Doctor Samarca, you're the best of what you do. Thanks for being there, and once again, thanks for coming on the Bill Cunningham Show. Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
Willie God bless it.
Let's continue with more. If you have a classroom with twenty five, for example, there's two or three kids on average in that classroom who thought about killing themselves. Let's continue. Bill Cunningham, News Radio seven hundred WLW