Understanding deat and dying

THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
Department of Social Work and Social Administration &
Department of Sociology

CCHU9024
THE LAST DANCE: UNDERSTANDING DEATH AND DYING

GROUP PROJECT REPORT TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 3
LITERATURE REVIEW 4
Suicide 4
Identification of deliberate self-harm and steps of suicide 4
Categorization of suicide 7
Statistics on suicide cases and DSH in Hong Kong 7
Factors that affect the probability of committing suicide 8
Effect of suicide on surrounding people 8
Acceptance of Death 9
5-Stages of loss and grief 9
Different types of acceptance towards death 10
Fears of death 10
Factors that facilitate acceptance towards death 11
METHODS 11
DISCUSSIONS 15
Differences between suicide and acceptance of death 15
Adolescent suicide 17
Effect of suicide on surrounding people 19
Fear of death 20
Suicide Situation in Hong Kong 21
Personal reflection 24
CONCLUSION 26
REFERENCES 27

INTRODUCTION
Suicide has become a severe problem in Hong Kong. It is estimated that there are 1008 suicide deaths with a rate of 13.6 per 100000 in 2012 in Hong Kong (Coroner’s Court, 2011). This is higher than that of the most developed countries. For instance, the suicide rate of the US is 11.1 per 100000, while Australia and the UK have a suicide rate of 10.55 and 6.45 per 100000 respectively (WHO, 2012). The situation is even worse when attempted suicides are also taken into consideration. The number of people who try to commit a suicide is even higher (10 to 20 times approximately). According to HKJC Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention of HKU (2010), the overall attempted suicide rate in 2003 is about 40 per 100000. Based on these facts, a consensus has been reached that more attention shall be paid to this issue and further research shall be needed. Our project tries to analyze the causes of committing suicide, compare it with the acceptance of death and giving some suggestion on further study and social work that aims at preventing suicide. Through the multi-media production, it also tries to convey the message that committing suicide is not accepting death but a way to escape from the reality instead. We hope that this project can help the suicidal people think more about the meaning of suicide and death and eventually prevent them from doing so.
This report aims at showing all aspects of our project, and the following parts of this report will be literature review, methodology used in the video production, further discussion of this topic and conclusion. LITERATURE REVIEW
Suicide
Identification of deliberate self-harm and steps of suicide
Both deliberate self-harm (DSH) and suicide mean that one hurt himself deliberately. But the action and purposes behind are actually different for the two. Therefore, it is crucial to distinguish these two behaviors in order to look into suicide more deeply and correctly (Consoli, et al., 2013).

Deliberate self-harm (DSH) refers to the behavior that one hurt themselves purposely without the idea of ending their own lives. It was suggested that DSH is a way for to release the negative emotions suppressed in the heart (Sadia, et al., 2007). It is just a way for the one to feel a sense of relax through this action, instead of a way to terminate life.

Suicide is actually another case. Suicidal behavior means the act that one try to kill oneself intentionally. The behavior can be further divided into 4 parts - suicide ideation, suicide planning, suicide attempt (non-suicidal behavior) and suicide (termination of life) (Kessler, et al., 1999; Shek & Yu, 2012). The probability of transition between stages was investigated by Kessler, et al, in 1999. Transition from ideation to plan, from planning to suicide attempt and from ideation to unplanned suicide attempt were found to be 34%, 72% and 26% respectively. Graphic respestation is shown below. The findings reveal the relationship between the stages and the high probability of suicide attempt for those having ideation (34% x 0.72 + 26% = 50.48%)

There are also findings showing the positive relationship between level of depression and rish in commiting suicide (Lee, 2009). People with continuous depression over 2 weeks are the groups of high risk in suicidal behavior.

Combining these research findings, we have developed a model showing one of a sequence from the development of negative emotion to suicide, for developing the story of the clip.

It starts with the development of aversive thought due to the adversity in reality. These people may suppress the feelings to alleviate their worry (one of the mental control strategies). People may try to release the stress through hurting themselves physically (DSH) and obtain a temporary sense of control if they are overwhelmed by such depression. It the situation continues to deteriorate, the people feel no hope to solve the adversity (sense of hopeless) and DSH is no longer help in relaxing them. As a result, they may start suicide ideation and have a probability of committing suicide to escape the reality.

Categorization of suicide
According to the sociologist Emile Durkheim, the founder of the theory, suicides can be divided into three categories. The first is egoistic suicides which are committed by people who can’t be integrated into society. The second is altruistic suicides which are committed by people who sacrifice themselves for a better society. The last is anomic suicides which appear when the society is not stable enough to provide individuals a sense of belonging (Comer, 1998).

Statistics on suicide cases and DSH in Hong Kong
As medical technologies and economy advance, diseases and starvation are no longer main cause of adolescent mortality. Instead, suicide has become the reason. Such phenomenon is especially prevalent in the rich regions such as America, Japan and also Hong Kong. There was a research focusing on the statistics on suicide and DSH among Hong Kong adolescents (Shek and Yu, 2012). The statistics are shown in the following table.

Behavior in the past one year Percentage of respondents Number of respondents
(Total respondents = 3291)
DSH last year 32.7% 1087
Suicide ideation 13.7 446
Suicide planning 4.9% 158
Suicide attempt 4.7% 152

Factors that affect the probability of committing suicide
To investigate the causes of suicide and develop a function of suicidal behavior, several researches have been done worldwide. Below shows the summary of factors related to suicide and the corresponding researches.
Factors leading to high risk in suicide Remarks Corresponding researches
Feeling of depression Lee, 2009

Gender - Female Consoli, et al., 2013
Shek and Yu, 2012

Poor family functioning family conflicts, family separation/ loss, parents remarried) Consoli, et al., 2013
Shek and Yu, 2012

Poor academic performance Consoli, et al., 2013

Poor life style drug abuse, binge drinking, early sexual experience Lee, 2009
Consoli, et al., 2013

Effect of suicide on surrounding people Referring to Shneidman (1969), each suicide probably results in at least six bereaved survivors (Chan and Chow, 2006) affecting them in different aspects including psychologically and livelihood. This can predict that suicide will not only affect the one who commit it, but more than estimated and bring about a chain effect and step into a vicious circle.

Acceptance of Death
5-Stages of loss and grief
The theory proposed by Kubler-Ross is to generalize the reactions of one who is informed of his coming death suddenly, from the announcement to final death. The five steps are shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance (Kubler-Ross, 1972). The description and typical response for each stage are summarized in the following table.

Stage Typical Response Remarks
Denial "No! Not me!" It takes different times for different people, can take from seconds to months.
(Kubler-Ross, 1972)

Anger "Why me?" The patients is in emotionally unstable, keeping on criticizing everything
Bargaining "If I can live for some more days, I promise I will donate all my money." The bargaining will never be terminated because of the accomplishment of the previous wish.
Depression Crying and then being quiet
Acceptance "I think I 'm ready for that now" It is further discussed in the following parts.

Different types of acceptance towards death
Acceptance of death is a psychological state of being ready to the termination of life.
There are 3 types of acceptance - approach acceptance, neutral acceptance and escape acceptance (Honold, 2002, p.28-29).
Neutral acceptance was also described by Kubler-Ross before (Kubler-Ross, 1972). It was suggested that the acceptance does not mean feeling positive towards death. Death is still unwanted. It only means the person now accept that the coming death is true and inevitable.

Both approach and escape acceptance are positive towards the end of life. In both cases, the afterlife world is a place better for living. The difference between the two is the reality part. For escape acceptance, the afterlife world is favored mostly because of poor real life and death is treated as a way to escape. But approach acceptance is rooted in religious beliefs on the life after death such as the heaven for Christian. It is not closely related to the real life (Honold, 2002).

Fears of death
According to Florian Victor and Mario Mikulincer(1997), fears of death can be categorized into three parts including intrapersonal, interpersonal and transpersonal components. This first one is about the expected impact on mind and body such as the fears of failing accomplishing goals and wishes and fear of destruction of the body. The second one concerns for the attachment relationships like being forgotten after death) and the welfare of family members and friends. The third one arises from the uncertainty of death. It includes fear of the unknown nature of death and fear of punishment in the afterworld.

Factors that facilitate acceptance towards death
Factors that are able to affect the acceptance state were investigated by many researchers before, such as high level of psychological health, life satisfaction, autonomy and social networking. These factors related give the idea on how death acceptance is more easily to achieve. Transition from shock and depression to acceptance is not only dependent on the time, but can be accelerated by the personal factors (mental health, life fulfillment and autonomy) and social factors (social networking). These all helps in establishing a clearer concept on reaching death acceptance and developing the character (the man accepting coming death) in this group project.

METHODS
The reference we were looking for are mostly academic research papers and published books to ensure the accuracy of the collected information. Some ideas were also grasped from the website of some well-known organization.

The video clip was originally to simply make a contrast between acceptance to death and suicide, as so to present the thought of not committing suicide. After coming up with this idea, we started to research on how people accepting death and suicidal people actually think and the difference between the two psychological states. Both of them are actually going to the end of their life. The suicidal people are even pursuing death. Does it mean that death is indeed a favor to the suicide? Does the suicidal one really enjoy the death? Is suicide indeed a kind of death acceptance? Should suicide be discouraged if the person concerned really like it? These questions seem to be strange. But they came to our mind and puzzled us at the beginning.

We attempted to find the answers through research and through discussion. "Rest in Peace", the words always appears on the gravestone, gave us the answer. Even both the two kind of people die at the end, but their endings are not the same. The suicide cases being reported on the newspapers were compared to what people accepting death do before their pass-away.

It was noticed that suicidal people usually encounter hardship in their life before suicide. But instead of trying to fix it, they choose suicide as a way to escape from these troubles. We defined that suicide is a way for these people to escape from reality. They in fact do not know or care about what death really is. They just put the focus on the failure in the real life and do not favor death indeed. Their ending is undoubtedly not a happy ending.

But for the ones having death acceptance, before their death, they try hard to squeeze every moment to do the things they want, staying beside their beloved ones and prepare for their pass-away arrangement (Chan, 2011). Their emphasis is not at the bitterness (the coming death), but making the remaining life more meaningful. Their vision and their mind are much boarder than those of the suicidal people.

We tried to link up the 5-stages of loss and grief by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance) with the project (Kubler-Ross, 1972). We hypothesized that the psychological state of the suicidal people remains at the depression state, instead of acceptance. Suicide and acceptance to death were completely different concepts. To support our thought, our team started to search for research papers about the relationship between depression and suicide and found that there is positive relationship between the two. If one keeps on feeling depressed and hopeless at least 2 weeks, then the one would more probably to commit suicide than the control group (those not feeling hopeless/ feeling hopeless not often) (Lee, 2009).

Therefore, a depressed suicidal character without a smile all the time and a person accepting death after passing through all the 5 stages were designed. (Only 3 stages are finally presented due to limited length - Angry, Depression, Acceptance.) The design of afterlife world and "Rest in Peace" on the gravestone was also adopted in order to show a strong contrast between suicide and acceptance.

Later, it came to another milestone of our project. The man commits suicide just because of failure in love in the original script. We doubted, is the reason as simple like this? It could be yes if the one is easily driven by impulse. But there could also be other reasons. At this point, there has been a vigorous discussion on balance between the suicide part and acceptance part. Should they be put equal importance in the video? Or should one of them take the main part?

We have discussed on this point quite a long time and finally came to consensus that they would be equally emphasized if the suicide part could be reinforced by new elements reasonably. Therefore, the direction of our researches was divided into two parts - the reason behind suicide and how to present the acceptance state more properly.

Afterwards, it was found that there are actually some groups of people having higher risk in suicide attempt, such as females, adolescents from non-intact family and those people involved in violence (both victims and villains) (Consoli, et al., 2013; Lee, 2009; Shek and Yu, 2012). Based on the findings, the suicidal character becomes an adolescent who lost his father when he was young. Pressure keeps on accumulating in his heart as he cannot accept his father 's death. The stress bursts out and overwhelms the person when he encounters failure in love. It is hoped that the story can bring up the idea of acceptance of death of our beloved ones. It is hoped to bring up the message through this video that people have to learn not only acceptance towards our own death, but also acceptance towards other 's death.

As to Death, the narrator of the story, was decided to be depicted as an indifferent and selfish character. He cares nothing about humans but only his workload and holiday. He was depicted this way since many people have a feeling that death is something bad. If death is a character, it would be considered as a villain without sentiment. In the video, its lines and behaviors showed that it is self-centered and kind of cold-blooded as imagined by most of the people.

Ironically, this character is created to persuade people not to commit suicide, but in a different way. Despite its indifference to people’s death, it cares about suicide which would result in doing a detailed report to his boss. Its lines especially the last one emphasized the importance of the holiday and the desire of lower workload indeed implies that it did not want any suicide and hope humans can treasure their lives.

DISCUSSIONS
Differences between suicide and acceptance of death
1. In terms of the sense of belonging
As spoken of in the literature review, there are three kinds of suicide. However, the first two kinds of suicides are not common compared to the third category. So our video as well as the whole project aims at discussing the third kind of suicides, anomic suicides.

As Durkheim described, anomic suicides are committed by individuals whose social environment fails to provide stable structures to support and give meaning to life (Comer, 1998).

In our video, the man commits suicide because of being lovelorn and losing father in his childhood. These changes can actually be interpreted as the signs of a society, or family in this specific case, becoming unstable. As a consequence, this man loses his sense of belonging because of the unsatisfactory societal state, so he decides to escape from the society by terminating his life. He does not have 5-stages of Loss and Grief as buffer providing them time to rethink the meaning of the remaining moment. He tries to “find” death deliberately which does not indicate his fully understanding of death.

On the other hand, we argue that the man who accepts his death is different because he doesn’t lose his sense of belonging as he knows his family and friends will support him and accompany him in his remaining days. He experiences the 5-stages of Loss and Grief suggested by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (1972). During those five stages, they would think about death repeatedly and then try to plan for the time left properly start from the acceptance stage before their death in order to end with brightening life with no regrets. He regards making good use of everyday in his remaining life as his meaning of life. In this sense, he accepts the death as a termination of his life while the man who commits suicide only views death as a shelter of his meaningless life.

2. In terms of the attitude revealed from posthumous letters
Apart from the view above, we can also illustrate the differences between committing suicide and acceptance of death by the posthumous letters of the deceased. When people accept death peacefully, they would not indulge in the negative atmosphere all the time but focus on the positive deed since the fear of death would not occupy their minds as much and as frequent as usual. Therefore, the things they are talking about before death would be neutral, if not optimistic. For example, Tang Siu Lam, who is a cancer patient as well as a cancer fighter, had a famous saying about her death. The meaning of the saying is translated as the following. ‘You can miss me and be sad about my death, but do not indulge in the sadness for more than a week since I would rather like you to spend times on the people who are still alive than on my death.’ She also encouraged people to have a non-regrettable life through her posthumous letter.

However, as to those who commit suicide, they always reveal their regrets and depressions through the posthumous letters like the reasons for doing so and the apologies to their parents. Some of them even show their angers to those who ‘force’ them to take this step in the posthumous letters. A popular example would be the Korean star, Jang Ja Yeon. She committed suicide for exposing the darkness of the show business and threatening and taking revenge to her agency company (McCurry, 2009).

3. In terms of the moment before death
Other than the posthumous letters, the moment before death can also be considered as another difference between the two behaviors and mindsets.

Most of those who accept death would have their friends and families to stay with them for showing support or seeing their last moments before they die. However, to those who commit suicide would rarely experience the same. The reason for the suicide usually being alone before they do it is that he or she knows others must try to stop him or her if they know what he or she is going to do. Also, the suicide attempters would create negative atmosphere for themselves to stay for showing themselves as the poor ones before they are desperate enough to attempt it. To achieve so, being alone is the easiest way.

Adolescent suicide Adolescent suicide is usually depicted as innocent practice driven by impulse. That is also what the multi-media presents ordinarily to the public. This kind of news is usually worth reporting as it can attract readers’ eyes with simplified reasons (WHO, 2000). According to the document issued by the World Health Organization in 2000, there is correlation between suicidal report and suicidal cases. Focusing too much on suicidal news, which is a public health issue, can easily affect the people with similar encounter (WHO, 2000). Thus, the suicidal rate will probably rise. In fact, how much do the multi-media really know about those who commit suicide? It is surely not much with just simplistic causes of committing suicide.

The reason leading adolescences committing suicide is usually written as depression, which is regarded simply as emotional change. But in what extent this reason in explaining adolescent suicide is available. Though depression is the common and major reason causing suicidal ideation and even adolescent suicide (Lee, 2009; Consoli, et al., 2013), it is led by various factors including social and family (Fig. 3) (Consoli, et al., 2013; Shek and Yu, 2012; Sun, 2005).

Social life and family are influential to adolescents. They are the sources of hope, support and protection in life. Normal social life includes support from both teachers and peers (Sun, 2005) in order to gain approval and own value while family provides care and love to them. Failure in social life can affect adolescents’ daily life seriously. Family dysfunction including ineffective communication and consensus resulting conflict in the family leads to extremely stressful life (Shek and Yu, 2012).

Initially, such factors may only cause adolescents to have low self-esteem and further, depression. Pressure accumulates and hopes in life gradually lose. When they furthermore spark by other factors, similar to the character committing suicide shown in the video, pressure will be exerted in order to express their negative emotion. Higher risk of deliberate self-harm and suicidal behaviours can be resulted to show their avoidance of feeling desperate (Shek and Yu, 2012).

Deliberate self-harm and suicidal behaviours are deemed as ways to escape from stress in life (Shek and Yu, 2012). Since adolescents think that troubles from family and social life are unavoidable and they are unable to deal with them, they choose deliberate self-harm or suicidal behaviours to gain physical pain. They would then try to control pain instead of family or social problems (Shek and Yu, 2012).

Notes. +ve: a positive causal linkage; -ve: a negative causal linkage

Effect of suicide on surrounding people
People choosing committing suicide as a way to terminate their hard lives seems to be a personal matter while committing suicide is regarded as a selfish attitude. Indeed, committing suicide is not just a matter affecting his or her own but also those bereaved persons or even more than expected according to Dr. Chow, an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration (Chan and Chow, 2006). The ratio of suicide person and bereaved survivors is 1:6 according to Shneidman (1969). This ratio is even said to be underestimated the actual number (Chan and Chow, 2006) meaning that more people are affected with one suicide case. With suicidal bereavement, survivors have higher potential of committing suicide than other types of bereavement (Chan and Chow, 2006).

The above evidence shows that not only depression, but also suicidal behaviours can be transmitted. If a person decides to eradicate and escape from obstacles by ending life with committing suicide, a group of people will experience bereavement as well as higher rate of suicide. When they are depressed by other matters in addition to this risk, they may have a greater possibility of committing suicide. More people will then be affected. Suicidal behaviours will continue and turn into a vicious circle. Suicide, therefore, is a chain effect and a selfish action. This can also explain suicide as a public health issue.

Fear of death
Convincing public to accept death can definitely help them to have a good death, however, is one of the most difficult things to do in the world. Only if people have the experience of death or getting prepared for death can they have the possibility of accepting death.

The former one is difficult since it is hard to create such a situation for people. Therefore, the latter one would be more practical. To lead them to accept death, we have to know their fear of death. Referring to the part of literature review, it is known that the fears of death are divided into three parts.

To deal with the intrapersonal component of the fear, we need to understand this is about one’s enjoyments and accomplishments. If one can try to do as much meaningful things as he or she can every day, the regret he or she would have would be less. The fear due to the divorce with the reality world would then be diminished.

The interpersonal component is related to attachment to the beloved. To tackle with this fear, living memoirs can be adopted. Creating a video tape or writing letters for the beloved after death can be used to arouse the memory about oneself from one’s family and friends and help them to move on by encouragement and consolation.

Regarding the transpersonal component, the uncertainty indeed is kind of related to the previous component. As to the punishment after death, doing good and meaningful deeds can soothe this worry because there is a belief that what goes around comes around (Chinese saying: Shan you shan bao, e you e bao: 善有善報，惡有惡報). If one does good deeds in one’s life, he deserves good return.

The premise for letting public reducing their fears of death by doing so is daring discuss it with others especially the beloved and start getting prepared for death. It would definitely make things easier if they are willing to talk about and prepare for death without avoidance.

Suicide Situation in Hong Kong
Nowadays, suicide has become a severer and severer issue in Hong Kong. We can easily find a hand of news reports about suicide in newspaper and TV news programs. Due to the economic depression, unfavorable working environment, heavy study workloads, the uncompleted elderly-care policy and the increasing sense of loneness, many white collars, laborers, students and senior citizens in modern cities such as Hong Kong and Shanghai, Beijing in mainland China choose to finish their treasure life by the shameful death -- suicide. Many suicide events drew public’s attention back to the suicide issue and the society problems behind the death.

Suicide has been the seventh leading cause of deaths behind maliagnant neoplasms, diseases of heart, cerebrovascular diseases, pneumonia, chronic lower respiratory diseases, nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and neophrosis in Hong Kong. (HKJC Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention, HKU, 2004) According to the statics data in lecture 3, the global suicide rate is over 1,000,000 per year in 2012, which means there would one death happen in every 40seconds. In Hong Kong, it’s estimated to have approximately 1,000 suicide deaths in 2009 (i.e. 13.8 per 100,000). Compared with the drastic number -- 18.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2003, it’s pleased for us to found a 23.3% reduction. In the latest research in 2012, approximately 1,008 suicide deaths (i.e. 13.6 per 100,000) were recorded. The suicide rate remained stable in recent 3 years. (World Health Organization, 2009)

In Hong Kong, the gender and age of suicide people is also worth being studied. Based on the statics data we collected from WHO, we listed tabulations about suicide rates and numbers of suicides by age group and gender in Hong Kong in 2009. We can easily calculate that the number of male suicides is approximately 1.57 times than female suicides. Males shoulder more responsibility in such a male-directed society especially the middle-aged males who have married with kids. They are regarded the backbone of their families particularly in economic income aspect, which brings them big pressure. Apart from the pressure from family, they also suffer immense working stress. What’s more, some scientists claimed that males’ ability to cope with stress is much weaker than females. Many factors combine together to lead to males’ higher suicide numbers and suicide rates from different age groups. Besides the gender difference in suicide, the age group could show some issues. In Hong Kong, there is not a specific high-rated suicide age group. Besides the severe problem about youth suicide, suicide in the age groups from 25 years old to those above 75 years old are all occurred frequently. It could be attributed to the stressful life in Hong Kong. However, what surprised and shocked us deeply is that the suicides occurred among the senior citizens aged above 64 years old. The elderly-care policy and pension system are not perfectly completed in Hong Kong and the life cost in Hong Kong is very high as well. So if they cannot save enough money during their working period, or some accidents happened and then they used up their savings, it is hard for them to lead a good life and may even not be able to survive. It could be one of the main reasons why there is such a high suicide rate among senior citizens.

All in all, suicide is a very tough issue but also worthwhile for us to think about. Many people are sucking with it and many families are in big grief due to the suicidal death of their family member. If what we did in the project can help, even a little, to solve the problem, we achieved our goal.

Table 4: Numbers of suicides by age group and gender, Hong Kong
(World Health Organization, 2009)
Ages (years) 5-14 15-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65-74 75+ All
Males 0 49 99 90 121 104 77 85 626
Females 4 26 56 76 83 39 40 74 398
Total 4 75 155 166 204 143 117 159 1024

Table 5: Suicide rates (per 100,000) by age group and gender, Hong Kong
(World Health Organization, 2009)
Ages (years) 5-14 15-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65-74 75+
Males 0.0 11.0 21.7 17.8 19.5 25.6 33.2 46.6
Females 1.3 5.8 9.0 11.3 12.5 9.7 17.9 28.9
Total 0.6 8.4 14.4 14.1 15.9 17.7 25.7 36.3

Personal reflection
Since we have a very strong stand of opposing suicide, completing this project can only strengthen our attitude against it. If we do not treasure the beautiful scenes in this short journey of life but only indulge ourselves in the pain we suffer, we would just miss so much memorable moments that we should have experienced. Life has no take two. It means we can never go back to see the scenes again if we quit the journey. It would result in a great regret which is a feeling we generally hate most.

After completing this project, we acknowledge that there are a number of factors that can lead to suicide, and there are also lots of theories trying to explain it. This problem is of great complexity and needs much more effort to solve. As we have mentioned in the previous parts, the psychological and biological view of suicide need further research. Since the sociocultural perspective has attained some success, we believe that further study from the other two views may also bring a breakthrough to this field.

As for the essence of suicide, we thought that suicide was also a kind of acceptance of death. It seemed that those who committed suicide actually chose death as destination. However, after doing research and taking the video, we find that there are essential differences between them. As above-mentioned, suicide is a consequence of losing meaning of life and the sense of belonging whereas the acceptance of death is based on people’s acknowledgement of what life means and where they belong to.

In fact, we think that this difference can be applied to suicide prevention and treatment for suicide attempters. We can help them find out what makes the suicidal people and the suicide attempters feel lost and not belonging to somewhere and what they can do to regain the sense of belonging. We may also arrange appointments for these suicidal people with those in their last days but have already accepted death. This may also help the suicidal people realize the meaning of death and life.

When talking about suicide prevention, it seems that the existing suicide prevention programs are not so effective as some people may have expected. Those who ask for help from these programs only take up a small portion of all suicidal people. Many people don’t know where they can go for help. So first of all, these programs should make themselves acknowledged by more people. Advertising can be a good solution to this problem (Comer, 1998). Secondly, these programs should pay attention to those who have family members or friends dying of suicide because these people are more likely to commit suicide compared with ones who don’t have such experience. Thirdly, these programs can try to not only offer help when individuals want to commit suicide, but also teach people the harm of suicide and what they can do when faced with obstacles in life except suicide before they want to do so.
CONCLUSION
In terms of the sense of belonging and the attitude towards life and death, suicide is just a way to escape from the reality but not a kind of acceptance of death. People do so usually due to the feeling of depression caused by poor functioning of families and poor academic performance, high pressure of life as well as poor life style.

To help preventing these from happening, arranging potential suicide attempters to meet those who are in their last days and accept death with peace may achieve this aim. Aside of it, helping them to regain their sense of belonging to the society is also important. Last but not least, offering concerns and cares to those who lose their beloved due to suicide can also lower the risk of suicide of the bereaved survivors.

Despite of the same destination as accepting death, committing suicide can never bring you the experience of the journey with peace and hope. Only by treasuring our every moment to do good and meaningful deeds, can we overcome the fear of death and thus finally accept it with no regret. REFERENCES
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