IV Love and Suffering: Adolescent Socialization and Suicide in Micronesia

My life is coming to an end at this time. Now today is a day of sorrow for myself, also a day of suffering for me. But it is a day of celebration for Papa. Today Papa sent me away. Thank you for loving me so little. [signed] Sima Give my farewell to Mama. Mama, you won't have any more frustration or trouble from your boy. Much love from Sima. Moments after penning this short and bittersweet note, l the seven-teen-year-old author walked into his house and hanged himself. His act of suicide replayed a scenario that, over the past two decades, has become a culturally patterned and recurring response of Micronesian adolescents to episodes of anger and shame toward close family members. Sima's succinct and carefully written note-invoking linked themes of his suffer-ing at the rejection by his parent, yet reaffirmation of his own familial love-speaks for a generation of Micronesian youth. Many aspects of Sima's life and the situations that foreshadowed his death fit a pattern that has become an accustomed part of Micronesian adolescence. Since the mid-1970S, suicide rates among Micronesian young men aged fifteen to twenty-four have reached extraordinary levels, perhaps unsurpassed by any recorded rates among this age-sex group in other societies in the world.2 In this article, I explore the cultural constructions of epidemic suicide and Micronesian adolescent socialization as two mutually informing phe