CHARTS, GRAPHS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE BOOK
FIGURE 1:
It is remarkable to note that the area where the smallest circle overlaps the larger circle represents the suicides that show us the most, like Jamie. These adults, 263,000 souls, had no previous plan to commit suicide yet still attempted to take their own life.
(MOAN, p. 153)
"It is really hard to comprehend that as a young white male, Jamie was far more likely to die by his own hand than the hand of another...
The data confirms he was at great risk of successfully killing himself with no previous warning to friends and family."
(MOAN, p. 154)
"A Gallup poll conducted in 2023 (see Figures 3a and 3b below), reveals that only 74% of the U.S. population actually believes there is a God. This number is down dramatically from a similar poll conducted just 20 years earlier in which 90% of Americans reportedly believed in God. This shift away from God began around 2007, and accelerated rapidly in subsequent years.
The same poll finds that less than 60% of millennials believe in God, and even fewer believe in an actual Devil or Hell. In fact, those who comprise Millennials, ages 18 to 34 years old, reported that they believe in Angels more than they believe in God." (MOAN, pp. 161-162)
"For illustrative purposes only, I created charts depicting suicide risk for Jamie, Kayla, Darren, and Morgan based on what we knew about each during the last year of their life. This is not a scientific instrument; rather, a way for me to express how we should think differently about the way the process of life places someone at risk.
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Figure 5 (below) illustrates the differences in each story, but also the compounding effect of genetics, life experiences, and situational stressors for each individual. It helps me see that when we as spectators to suicide only focus on the situational factors we can observe, we are likely to miss the underlying foundation upon which decisions to commit self-harm happen. No one person saw the whole picture as it emerged; mostly only saw one or two colors of each individual's chart. We can only start to understand what a person is actually experiencing when we build relationships and ask uncomfortable-to-us questions - especially with teens and young adults." (MOAN, p. 181)
