Suicide - Nothing Good Can Come of This

Today's big comment story was about a teenage boy who killed himself following a psychotic episode brought on, apparently, by abusing bath salts as drugs.

This is a very sad tale:

Dickie Sanders snorted a packet of Cloud 9 bath salts expecting a euphoric high. Instead, his final days were filled with a terror that will forever haunt his family.
Rocked by waves of paranoia and imagining that the police were closing in on him, the 21-year-old grabbed a knife and, in front of his horrified father and sister, swept the blade across his throat.
"We were right here at the kitchen sink,'' his father, Richard Sanders, said one recent afternoon at the family's home in the Waldheim area. "He was looking out the window and he said, 'Dad, look, there's 25 police cars out there.' I said, 'Dickie, there's no one out there. The police aren't out there. If they were I'd invite them in.'
"Then he grabbed this butcher knife right here and cut from ear to ear, just cuts his throat right in front of me and my daughter.''
Richard Sanders, a well-known St. Tammany Parish family physician, recalls grabbing his son's shirt and applying pressure to the cut on his neck. The blade missed major arteries and the wound would later be stitched up.
"I remember thinking, 'It's not as bad as I thought. Thank God,' '' Sanders said.
But the night of Nov. 11 would get progressively worse. Dickie, battled a psychosis his family says was brought on by snorting Cloud 9 bath salts, a synthetic drug which has since been temporarily outlawed by the state after an alarming number of emergencies attributed to its use were reported by the medical community. As the chemicals in the drug coursed through Dickie's system, he became more despondent, more nervous, more erratic.
"I just want this stuff out of me,'' he told his father over and over.
The bad trip raged on through the next day and night, son seeing things that weren't there and father trying to calm him. At one point, the father lay in bed next to his son, an arm wrapped around him until sleep finally came.
When Richard Sanders awoke at daylight and found Dickie lying on the floor in another room, he figured his son had wandered away from him but that sleep had mercifully overtaken the boy.
No one had heard the pop. No one immediately realized that Dickie, just a couple of weeks shy of his 22nd birthday, had found a long-forgotten .22-caliber youth rifle won so many years ago in a marksmanship contest, put it in his mouth and squeezed the trigger.

But, as ever, it immediately descended into a nasty, free-for-all at NOLA.com, notwithstanding apparent moderation by NOLA.com that had led to the deletion of numerous offensive comments before I looked at the story online.

A number of the comments focus blame on the boy's father, a physician who will no doubt see these comments and who must be grieving and blaming himself, as most parents and many friends do following a child's suicide. This exchange is fairly representative:

CorruptionWeary January 16, 2011 at 8:45AM

How about a better law called parental responsibility - Laws are no good that are unenforceable.
Maybe its about time to start making every parent take year classes on how to raise a child.
Maybe its about time that a parent is taught personal responsibility -
Quit spoiling your children - you are not their friends!
Maybe its time to teach a parent that you have to discipline your child.
The list goes on -

fideauxdawg January 16, 2011 at 8:50AM

blaming a father for trying to help his son who made a bad choice is in extremely poor taste. Shame on you.

CorruptionWeary January 16, 2011 at 9:31AM

The bad Choice and the Failure rest solely with the Father- Plain and simple - he is a Physician and knew the kid was suicidal -
If the parent/doctor is not bright enough to take his child to a mental facility and have him put on suicide watch and the person kills themselves then who is to blame.

I pretty much side with a comment made by Heather on this story:

heather January 16, 2011 at 9:58AM

Oh please, let the family grief at this time. Dr. Sanders is a very well known doctor and I'm sure a very good parent......like the saying goes.....if you live in that glass house, don't throw stones and if you have nothing nice to say at this time of grief then shut the ___________ up !!

But I would suggest that the extraordinarily high likelihood of offensive comments on a story like this, involving the tragic suicide of a young man, creates a responsibility with NOLA.com to disable the comments, like they do with Society stories.