I have heard just a little too much about suicide among the religious — from patients, from others, now this; to the son of a published pastor who gave an invocation for the Obama folks.
I really do feel for the family, for death of the younger generation before the older one by any means including suicide by his own hand, is a horrible thing that is anti-nature and has a profound wrongness, a too-deep effect on all involved.
I was way back in residency when I attempted to gather some statistics on the association between religion and psychiatry in Kansas, sending a basic questionnaire on feelings about mental illness (and referral patterns to mental health professionals) to a big list of Wichita area “religious professionals.”
First, I had already made the assumption from the French part of my education that not too many people actually went to church, but none of them seemed to much care about mental health professionals.
In Kansas, with the world’s worst statistics (no major support on this from my
Filed under Religion by on May 1st, 2013. Comment. 
Maybe there are people out there who do not know what Down Syndrome is, although at 1 per 691 births it is the most common of chromosomal abnormaities.
I still remember my next door neighbor, little “Stevie,” who was the youngest in a large family (seven children as I recall) so mother may have been a bit advanced in age when she had him. I thought of him then (I was not over six or seven) as a sort of human stuffed animal, as he loved hugging and was profoundly retarded, able to do little on his own. I learned even then that people said what such children lacked in intelligence (and muscle tone and
Read more on Down Syndrome — Human Choice Doesn’t Catch Up With Technology…
Filed under Down Syndrome by on May 27th, 2013. Comment.