Love and Suffering: Adolescent Socialization and Suicide in Micronesia

Abstract

Youth suicide has reached epidemic proportion in Micronesia over the past two decades. Suicides display remarkable cultural patterning in the typical actors, methods, motivational themes, and precipitating social scenarios. The focus of contemporary high rates is among young men aged fifteen to twenty-four, who hang themselves following incidents of conflict with parents. Predominant themes invoked in adolescent suicide accounts involve anger and suffering at the hands of their parents, and feelings of familial rejection juxtaposed with reaffirmations of filial love. Less frequent are themes involving personal shame over violations of fundamental social rules. In situations of both "anger" and "shame" suicides, the primary locus of conflict is within close family relations. The suicides appear as an extreme form of an accustomed pattern of resolving conflict with senior family members by withdrawing from the scene. In this article I employ one paradigmatic case history to provide a description of the cultural construction and social dynamics of contemporary adolescent suicide in Micronesia. The suicide phenomenon is situated within recent changes in the stage of adolescent male socialization in Micronesian societies. For adolescent males of earlier generations, social involvement at the level of lineage and clan activities provided important support. The recent rapid shift from subsistence exchange to cash economy has severely attenuated lineage and clan structures and, by undermining the process of adolescent socialization, has set the stage for high rates of suicide among young men. Finally, I explore the potential for suicide modeling and contagion among Micronesian youth.