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In Reply to: Wait up! Jim LaMattery messed this one up for you! posted by Family friend on June 21, 2006 at 13:41:42:
Glad to know it may not have been a suicide, but the death of another SGA is still lamentable. I purposely used the term "suicide" to talk about something that is really a complex phenomenon.
Premature and accidental death are closely related to the phenomenon of suicide among young adults. If I'm a 19-year-old who dies of a drug overdose, is that suicide? Technically, no it it's not. Is it a premature and accidential death? Yes.
A wierd factoid about children of alcoholics (COAs) is that they are more accident-prone than children raised by sober parents. We don't know all the underlying mechanisms for the elevated accident rate in COAs, but we can safely conclude there are things about growing up in an alcohlic family that make children more accident-prone. It's not that big of a reach to argue that people raised in TFI, the grandchildren of David, are esstentially children of alcoholics. Much of the insanity that characterized Family life during Berg's reign is typical of alcohlic homes.
Another wierd factoid is that urban minority children are 8 times more likely to be stuck and killed by an automobile than suburban white children. What is it about the urban minority environment that makes these kids more vulnerable? Researchers haven't figured out all the risk factors, but we can safely conclude that there are factors in the environment that put certain kids at higher risk for certain types of fatal injury and premature death.
By parallel, we can also speculate that there are certain factors in the TFI environment that make SGAs more vulnerable to certain types of premature death. Such as: 1) You're raised by people who don't routinely take you to a medical professionals when you get sick, so you don't automatically think about going to see a doctor when you're a young adult experiencing symptoms. 2) You developed a very serious medical condition during your childhood in TFI that was never treated adequately, and you enter adulthood with impaired health and a weakened physical constitution. 3) You're out of TFI and living in the US, where you don't have medical insurance through your employment, so you autonomically limit your access to medical care for financial reasons.
Under these conditions, it is logical that you will ignore symptoms of a serious illness until it is too late to mount an effective medical intervention. The premature death rate among people where these conditions are present will be much higher than the premature death rate among people who have a medical home and health insurance.
