Every year in the United States, more teenagers and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, and asthma combined. Despite decades of research into brain chemistry and many more decades of probing into behavioral models, there remains a limited base of knowledge as to why people commit suicide. Often what families believe is very different from the beliefs of professionals. How families try to help their suicidal loved ones also is often quite different from the approach taken by experts. It is the masked nature of the suffering of parents and victims that experts may understand the least