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By JON KLAVERKAMP
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
Call her Amy.
She was an excellent student, active, well-liked at school and loved (adored) at home. No apparent problem.
That’s not to say everything was perfect. Amy did have a temper, and she was known to lapse into occasional tantrums over trivial matters.
She fought with her mother, not often, but when a fight did break out it was fierce. That doesn’t seem abnormal. The fights were not violent, just loud.
If there was anything unusual about Amy it was the way she seemed slightly detached from the many activities she participated in. She was a dreamer.
There is another thing that separates Amy from most people: for reasons that nobody can fathom, she came home from school one day and killed herself in a violent manner.
Why did she do it? Could it have been prevented, and if so, how?
To help answer these questions the Rappahannock News sought the advice of Lee Nettles, Director of Family Guidance Services of Rappahannock.
Of course, Amy is not the only topic of discussion here. In the past year or so, several attempted and completed suicides have plagued the Rappahannock area.
Does a rash of suicides, whether in the nation as a whole or in Rappahannock County alone, indicate some kind of link between occurrences. Nettles said yes.
“Suicide is a highly contagious problem - one’s success (at suicide) will trigger another’s attempt.” Nettles explained that suicidal thoughts - feelings of hopelessness and helplessness - actually are very common. Such feelings “are experienced by a majority of people at some time in their lives.”
It is an ambivalence about suicide that keeps many people from going through with it. “A person reaches an intense point where there is a struggle between the will to live and the desire to die,” Nettles said. “Part of the ambivalence is ‘what if I’m not successful (with the suicide) - what if I screw that up like I’ve screwed up everything else
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