About 800,000 people take their lives every year worldwide

[clips]

Haha...Jumpy I feel your pain bro. When i was in between jobs in took a job in an IT help desk call center. S**t was the worst. Dealing with people of all types and ranks...especially VP corporate folks who expect you to fix their crappy email account/corrupted accounts?

And management would kiss their ass even if they was talking rudely to us.... ....i mean you do what you gotta do to pay the bills, but i stayed there for 4 months and that was it...hopefully you can find something that you like doing.

Jumpy. sorry to hear your plight. Forgive my untimeliness I'm sure you understand given the pace here.

From my perspective, you're contemplating the equivalent of hitting the reset button. The difference being you'll lose all you've learned from this time through. Hang in there! You should know damn well booze will only make things worse and is not near quick enough. Try pot for the pain relief. At least then, once you finally snap out of it, your body and mind won't be as physically wrecked afterward.

Check in if you can. I'll keep an eye out here for a while

Take care man

800,000 children go missing every year in the US alone. Millions worldwide.

Am I wrong in thinking these are much more worrisome numbers?

[Paul2]

are you sure is that high that 800,000 children go missing every year in the US alone?  that is really high.

[Titan]

That seems a kinda high to me too. I definitely think this is in the thousands for sure but there are 200 million people in the US, 74 million children aged 0-17 as of 2016 (according to childstats.gov). That would mean one in 100 kids goes poof. 1% of children eventually goes missing still seems high to me. You have a source Heretic of how it's broken down? Does it take into account teen runaways vs. abductions? I mean, if it's just missing persons reports, then I guess that number could be correct. But most missing persons reports a lot of times tend to come back as runaways, like a teen girl running away to see her boyfriend or whatever or a teen sneaking out to see friends.

[Titan]

Heretic was correct on the number. However, this article breaks it down. It's also from 2007 but the numbers are probably still consistent 10 years later.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2007/01/800000_missing_kids_really.html

wo boys abducted in Missouri were found in a St. Louis suburb last Friday, in the home of a pizza shop employee. One had been missing for less than a week, the other for more than four years. News reports cited a statistic that 800,000 children disappear every year—or about 2,000 a day. Seriously? How reliable are these numbers?

Reliable enough, but easily misinterpeted. Like most crime statistics, abduction numbers are fungible since they depend so much on whether the crime gets reported and how you define abduction. Saying a child is "missing" can mean any number of things; a child who has run away from home counts the same as a kidnapped murder victim. For officials, the total number includes those who fall into several different categories: family abduction, nonfamily abduction, runaways, throwaways (abandoned children), or lost and "otherwise missing" children. Local police departments register missing children with the federal National Criminal Information Center database, specifying what type of abduction it is.

When the categories get conflated, the statistics can become confusing. Take the number 800,000: It's true that 797,500 people under 18 were reported missing in a one-year period, according to a 2002 study. But of those cases, 203,900 were family abductions, 58,200 were nonfamily abductions, and only 115 were "stereotypical kidnappings," defined in one study as "a nonfamily abduction perpetrated by a slight acquaintance or stranger in which a child is detained overnight, transported at least 50 miles, held for ransom or abducted with the intent to keep the child permanently, or killed." Even these categories can be misleading: Overstaying a visit with a noncustodial parent, for example, could qualify as a family abduction. Some individuals get entered into the database multiple times after disappearing on different occasions, resulting in potentially misleading numbers.[/i]

But in other ways, the NCIC may understate the figures. Many missing persons aren't reported at all—a 1997 study estimated that only 5 percent of nonfamily abductions (in which a nonfamily member detains a child using force for more than an hour) get reported to police. Some police departments may not even bother filing a report when a kid runs away from home for a few days. It's also easy to lose track of abduction cases, since some of them get filed away under associated crimes, like homicide or sexual assault.

Until the early '80s, investigating cases of missing children was left entirely up to local officials, who didn't have an alert system in place or a central database to keep records. But after a series of high-profile abductions in the late 1970s and early '80s, like those of 6-year-olds Etan Patz and Adam Walsh (son of America's Most Wanted host John Walsh), Congress passed legislation creating the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an organization that monitors the FBI's database of missing children and collaborates with local law enforcement to get the word out. In recent years, states implemented "Amber laws," named after 9-year-old murder victim Amber Hagerman, setting up an alert system for missing children.

If the number doesn't reflect those found and accounted for it does seem to be very misleading if not outright bogus. Curious the number dates back to a 2002 report and so far as I can tell no hard numbers have been released of a toll of those still missing for any year since. I'll look around some more and update if I find anything more conclusive.

Didn't mean to hijack the thread. The 800,000 suicide number jumped out at me as I had run across the same number in reference to missing kids a couple of times recently. Be prepared to hear a lot of news about human trafficking in the coming months.
 
On topic. I suffered from a fairly severe case of insomnia for about a year (prescription drug side affect) and during that time felt I gained a  sense of understanding how people get to the point where they'd be willing to take their own life.  Never considered doing so, as I attempted to convey to Jumpman not an option in my view, though I longed desperately for relief.  I've had an extremely blessed life so that sleepless phase was a real eye opener for me, no pun intended.

[Paul2]

that suck that there were time in your life where you felt suicidal.  glad that you can sleep normally again and no longer felt suicidal.

back at you man. I know you haven't had it easy for much of your life and you have held up well in spite of it all

70's flashback; keep on truckin'!

[Paul2]

thanks a lot for the very kind words.  very appreciate it.