Causes of Suicide*No works cited Suicide can best be described as the destructive act of voluntarily taking one's own life. Suicide often presents a real and often tragic conundrum that must be resolved by friends, family and any other professionals who have been involved with someone who has committed suicide. Being able to definitively answer the question of why an individual commits such a deadly act appears to be a very complex task. The victim himself is perhaps the least aware of the response to this ninth cause of death. Scientists have found that the cause of this fatal behavior can be found both inside and outside the individual. Whether biological, sociological, or psychological, the question remains as to what explanation will be provided for suicidal behavior. Or perhaps the answer could be that all these factors are somehow related. Whatever the case, the statistics are frighteningly real. Every year in the United States there are more deaths from suicide than homicides. Shockingly, suicide is in fact the ninth leading cause of death in the United States. For young people up to the age of fifteen, it is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Rounded to the nearest second, on average, every seventeen seconds a person will complete this self-destructive act resulting in death. Men account for eighty percent of all suicides in the United States and are more likely than women to succeed in killing themselves. There are, rounded to the nearest person, one completed female suicide for every four male suicides. Suicides committed with firearms represent over sixty percent of the population who committed... middle of paper ......what is it about Romeo and Juliet being together? There is only one alternative to suicide that I can think of. Individuals seem to commit suicide when they feel pressured by society. Suicidal people have problems and feel that there are no alternatives, their best solution would be to die. The individual fails to understand the fact that perhaps he can solve his own problems. Indisputable suicide is not the answer to anyone's problems. If society worked together to help struggling suicidal people know that there is a solution, then perhaps we would have fewer suicides. Bottom line, the alternative to suicide is that there is no problem big enough to constitute suicide. No matter what solutions are devised, there will always be suicide. However, by understanding suicide and the many factors that cause it, we could begin to try to reduce the statistics.