people avoid suicidal tendencies in themselves and detect them in others.

Are homosexuals lonelier than other people? It is a common belief. Certainly society as presently structured alienates homosexuals when it can identify them. And the reaction of individual homosexuals to society sometimes appears to accelerate and intensify that alienation. The attempt by some homosexuals to fit into conventional behavior patterns fails. And when they are then either indisposed to, or unable to find a framework of homosexual relationships within which to live, they are naturally lonely.

And lonely people are predisposed to suicide.

Many homosexuals have difficulty finding a life partner. In those who are determined to do so, the drive would seem no different from that of most heterosexuals toward marriage. But the fact that homosexual relationships must succeed without the recognition of the community, where they do not experience its outright condemnation, makes them difficult to establish and maintain. And "loss of a loved one" through death or separation is another "symptom" Dr. Schneidman and his associates look for when questioning friends and relatives of a suicide victim. Homosexuals are sometimes thought of as more sensitive and emotionally unstable as well as more dependent than other people. If this is true, reaction to the shock of separation from a loved one, notably where a love relationship is not easy in the first place to establish, might tend to make suicide a likelier possibility with possibility with homosexuals.

It is often said that the person who constantly threatens suicide will never kill himself. Reference is made to the barking dog that never bites. But the studies of the Suicide Prevention Center contradict this folksay flatly. The best index his family, friends and co-workers have to a man's

suicide potential is his talk of suicide. Such talk has been termed by Drs. Schneidman and Norman L. Farbarow "the cry for help."

It is a cry to listen for.

There are other symptoms, some of them subtle. When a man repeatedly says, "I give up," or "I don't care,' or "it doesn't matter," he may be in the psychological downward spiral that can end in his taking his own life. When a person abruptly begins to give away possessions for no discoverable reason, this can be another danger signal. Loss of a job, loss of family or community respect, sickness and imagined sickness, enforced retirement, the isolation from others that sometimes accompanies old ageall of these can contribute to a desire to "end it all."

The slowing down of a man's or woman's physical actions, the dragging step, can be a mute cry for help. Where a person has been normally talkative and no longer appears to want to make the effort to talk, this can be a warning. Not that any of these signs invariably points to suicide. But they are strong indices should not be ignored.

and

They should especially not be ignored as age increases. "We have rarely encountered a nonlethally intended suicidal action in a man over 50 years of age," writes Robert E. Litman, M.D., in his paper, "Emergency Response to Potential Suicide." He means that faking a suicide attempt is not a likely act for an older man. "By contrast, the group of young women, aged 15 to 35, provides the . . . least number of completed suicides." Suicide threats or actions from this group are usually a means of emotional blackmail.

But if noticable changes in behavior take place in an individual and among these are suicide attempts, no matter how ineffectual, they are cries for help. And, especially with men, they are fairly certain indications that