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Loading ...Killing ourselves: Part 2
Part 1 of Killing ourselves ran last week.
The call came a few hours after the body was discovered. Brenda Manning* had been found by her nephew in her Philadelphia condominium, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. She had been dead for several days.Randy Berg* and Brenda Manning had been partners for 20 years before their break-up nine years earlier.
In the years since the break up, Manning had been unable to get her life back on track. Although she had many friends, unlike Berg, Manning had found it impossible to establish a new romantic relationship.
Several months before her 50th birthday, Manning began writing about suicide in her journal. At Christmas, she began organizing her estate, labeling all her possessions to be given to various family and friends. The weekend before Valentine’s Day, she took the gun she had bought and shot herself in the head.
Manning’s suicide was, like most adult suicides, both tragic and preventable. But unlike many adult suicides, Manning was not physically isolated and alone; she had a large network of friends and was close to many members of her extended family, like the nephew who found her body.
Yet Manning had been thinking about and planning her suicide for months. She lived in a big city with many avenues for help for someone with suicidal thoughts. She was well-educated and thus knew how to access help. But in the period that she was considering suicide, she never was able to reach out to family, friends or anyone in the health care system to help her with her suicidal thoughts.
Next Page: LGBT adults commit suicide, too.
To Robert Mosley
Your rant borders on the insane. What business is it for you to condemn people’s preferred form of sexual expression?
It is not anal sex that kills, it’s a virus that kills – and fortunately much less frequently than in the past. A virus that can indeed be transmitted anally, but also vaginally, through any open sore, through needles and countless other ways.
Perhaps you have a problem with anal sex, but that’s your problem. It’s up to each person to determine what form of sexual expression they need or desire. It’s, for sure, not up to you.
In response to this article about killing ourselves,I want to point out the greatest killer of us all: anal sex.With a prevalence rate of 25% and at a cost of 500.000 lives of innocent gay men almost nothing is mentioned about this form of destructive sexual behavior. Condoms and antiviral medications have led many to abdicate their personal responsibility and to become complacent allowing the scourge of anal sex to continue. How many more lives are going to be jepordized before people realize that anal sex is the greatest killer of us all.
Tremendous review of the hows and whys of depression, in general. I don’t know if this is printed anywhere other than here, but it would be great if this could get some extrememly wide read.