Love and Suffering: Adolescent Socialization and Suicide in Micronesia

Donald H Rubinstein

OCTOBER 6, 1990

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.

M oments after penning this short and bittersweet note,¹ 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-

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