Youth suicide in New Zealand

I honestly don't know what to do about this and I think it is horrific. To make it worse roughly half of these suicides were clustered between the ages of 20-24.

Give them hope and something inspirational to live for...

@tane Do you remember the experiment with the rats you posted on iriscafe.nz. We have to bring hope and meaning. Thats what we are here for..... nothing else really can help this

@tane @jobooth

Active meditation, but give people the time and money they need to find purpose in life, and if the jobs that they thought they would find aren't there, supplement their existance with an Unconditional Basic Income.

Osho tells us that as humans with Buddha or Christ potential, suicide is a natural state of conscious unconsciousness, and that we either escape and transcend that through meditation (remaining alive) 'suicide of the mind', or physically, but physically we will only come back to a worser place ;).

1) By nourishing peoples thinking and self worth suicide can be prevented.
I would encourage learning Siu Nim Tao - self defense through meditation. There is an excellent instructor in Christchurch, Master Kevin Earle who established his school in 1972. I started learning, and sharing, the art in 1998, most recently founding the Ving Chun Kuen and Ba Qua Club at Victoria University of Wellington.
Often people get trapped 'in their heads'. Siu Nim Tao is an active, not passive meditation, develops Nim Lik (force of idea) and is not incompatible with other forms of yoga, or Christian based youth group activities, which should also place tremendous value on the individual human potential (God, but not all of God) as a part of the whole...
Robert Downey Jr credits his recovery from Drug and Alcohol Dependence, which he claims would have killed him (physical suicide) to his practise of Wing Chun Kung Fu (the essence of which is Siu Nim Tao).
Personally, I still prefer collecting Kaimoana, which I find tremendously satisfying and meditative.

2) Kapa Haka and traditional cultural groups should exist to nurture the holistic health of the individuals and connect them with themselves, their history, ancestry, and their potential. Again, active meditation takes many forms...

Unconditional Bonus Income again?! UBI is increasingly seen as a means of reducing social cost structures, and giving people more time to do what they need to do to find their bliss. Just found some great UBI links but couldn't find the one I was after...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6025999
http://thestandard.org.nz/ubi-addressing-inequality/

While I am a huge supporter of participation in sport and adventure sport, and we have tremendous opportunities in New Zealand for that here, unless positively inspired, you will still have sportspeople, even top sportspeople, committing physical suicide!

Inner transformation is what is required, just conscious awareness of the value that you have to the greater whole... so looking up quotes via the link below just reinforces what I said above - that what is important is not what is said - but how we focus our intent. Is it to physical suicide, or (remaining alive) 'suicide of the mind', active meditation and transformation, whatever works!

http://spotitup.blogspot.hk/2012/08/osho-quotes-on-suicide.html

@jamesabbott
Aaaaaaaarrrrrrggghhhh!

@fredlook Please tell me you didn't commit suicide of the non-meditative variety :) I hope to have you on the exec!

@fredlook Fred?

@jamesabbott oh sorry i startled you. I suddenly had a horrible vision of another thread drowning in verbiage. I'm ok now.

@tane @fredlook @jobooth

"The number of children and young people who die in New Zealand each year has more than halved since 1980, a new report shows."

Thats good news.

"The Commission is currently trialling a Suicide Mortality Review Committee, with Maori youth one of its focuses as it seeks to identify contributing factors and patterns of suicidal behaviour and key intervention points for suicide prevention."

Sounds ridiculous. Any intervention prior to the act of physical suicide is key. How do they know it is a key intervention point if people still commit suicide? I guess there are statistical trends, but really, I experienced the loss of several to suicide in 1996 in Nelson. It was awful. A selfish act, and so final... it will be difficult to isolate a cause. That said, I do believe smoking Pot saps peoples motivation and if unmotivated enough, they become inactive, life changes can cause them to become depressed, and consider physical suicide more often. So the key is to restrict Pot to over 21's, and smoke in moderation... right?
Similarly, most of those synthetic cannibinoids were absolute garbage and should never have been legal. Perhaps this has influenced the statistics, but where are suicide levels compared by region, now versus 1996? Suicide has abnormal levels of variation, to my understanding...?

So the key is to restrict Pot to over 21’s

@jamesabbott - we'd need to treat cannabis as a health problem first, before we could link it to youth suicide - but yes, anything that saps that motivation to make something worthwhile out of your life should be discouraged, in community.