Suicide Cleanup 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day.
Suicide Cleanup Narrative
Decontamination - Sterilization - Training and Experience - Prices
Suicide cleanup in begins after the coroner leaves the suicide scene. The coroner or county administrator pastes a seal on the door. Only a responsible party, not the suicide cleaner, has the authority to break this seal. When the responsible party communicates to the suicide cleaner their understanding, and when the suicide cleaner responds with his or her understanding, the suicide cleanup begins.
Our cleaning first removes biohazard material, contains and decontaminates these materials (or seals them), and then begins cleaning. Cleaning after a suicide includes scrubbing with abrasive materials, rinsing, and then cleaning again. Areas soiled by biohazard materials are sealed. At times we seal entire rooms. Our cleaning process reduces or removes the death odors.
Ozone gas and chemical fogs help to decontaminate and remove germs and odors. Both tools help to cover wide areas contaminated by flies and other insects. Decontamination requires removing the source material. Sealing the once blood soiled area ensures decontamination by encapsulating biohazard material. Decontamination is not the same as sterilization. Sterilization occurs in very few place in our Universe.
Clean rooms created for scientific research sometimes claim to have a "sterile environment," but even here the possibility for contamination remains high. Many hours of hard labor, thousands of dollars for filters, and millions of dollars for filtration equipment help to sterilize environments. Some authors point to boiling water and steam generated by boiling water as "sterile," which seems logical enough.
Using boiling water and steam to "sterilize" surgical equipment remains a common method of blood cleanup and recycling tools for surgery and scientific research. Otherwise, the use of boiling water has its limits. Boiling water exists under the earth's oceans as it mixes with cool sea water. Shifting continental plates create pressure under the surface and volcanic action releases the boiling water, which becomes habitat for life forms in some cases. This proves that boiling water will not always destroy organisms.
Chemicals like bleach destroy bloodborne pathogen (germs) like HIV, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C, but claiming that areas treated with bleach become sterilized cannot be done on a suicide scene, given the equipment and tools available. Reducing micro-organisms and eliminating their conditions for survival, their habitat, is the best we or anyone else can do.
Reducing bacteria count to a level as low as or lower than the pre-suicide act calls for professional cleaning. However, when a family or ort hers must clean, we have pages giving some suggestions at crimescenecleanup.com/Suicide_Cleanup.html
Protective equipment worn reflects the age of the suicide scene and possibilities for personal contamination.
My experience includes military trauma cleanup and seven years of homicide, suicide, and unattended death decomposition cleanup.
In the military I cleaning equipment soiled by blood and other materials. Many times my own equipment needed cleaning after helping others injured. I have no fear of blood or death scenes, but I do understand today's bloodborne hazards.
In the active army I served for 3 years, and then 20 years in the National Guard and Army Reserve. During these years decontamination training remained a central part of training for all soldiers because of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
My formal training derives mostly from the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning, and Restoration, IICRC, classes. I took classes from Carl Williams (RIP) a number of times. Carl remains one of the most prolific writers in the Janitorial and Sanitation industry.
Other instructors also offered class work and hands-on work in carpet cleaning, upholstery cleaning, floor inspection, water damage and restoration, mold inspection and restoration (NAMP), crime scene cleanup, and house inspection (AHIT).
I hold an Associate of Arts, general education, Bachelor's in Sociology, and Master of Science in Educational Counseling. I have held many teaching credentials, including adult education, English Language Arts (High School), English as a Second Language, and more.
I have both public and private school teaching experience.
As a retired teacher without employees, my prices remain below my competitions' prices in most cases. I clean throughout California. If a suicide occurs in a Southern California home, you most likely will not learn about my services until too late because of cronyism. See Crime Scene Cleanup Cronyism for more information on cronyism in coroner, medical examiner, and county administrator offices.
Suicide Cleanup
888-431-7233
Suicide Narrative
White Male Suicides - White Female Suicides - Black Female Suicides
Note: I use the term "American" for US citizens while I understand that all of the North, Central, South American geographical areas have "American" inhabitants.
If you have wondered about which group of people in our society commit suicide most often, you will not be surprised that single, older, white males lead all other sociological groupings. This group leads older, white women, a group accounting for the second most suicides. By now you may have begun to piece together what's going on in your life and anyone's life that you have lost to suicide.
Of the various sociological groups studied for suicide, black women have the greatest number of suicide attempts, but the lowest rate of suicide.
If we were to consider the broader, more obvious conditions these three groups experience during their lives, we might look at what follows as something to contemplate, add to, and further discuss with others.
White American males in our society have some baggage others do not have when born into the world. Granted, white males have many privileges others do not share, but they carry expectations others do not share. I will not write on male privileges, which have only come into the social discourse during the last generation. Whiteness also accords privileges not part of the social discourse until the last generation, except in scholarly books and journals.
White males suffer emotionally at times from the dominant ideology's "competitive" drive and "individualism." Whether or not these individualized relationships actually exist in our American society misses the point.
The point shows that the dominant American ideology places males at the top of the power hierarchy while expecting the most from white males' performance. Not all males buy into this ideology, or at least do not accept this part as applying to them. For these fortunate few, life goes on without the unmentioned pressures bestowed on those American males indoctrinated to the competitive, acquisitive, individualism of the dominant ideology.
So for the majority of males life in the US means competition and individualism from boyhood to manhood. The strident individualism came across the Atlantic with the Pilgrims, especially the Protestants. (See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.) With these colonialists came gun powder and firearms, which were used for game and dealing with indigenous populations.
Firearms happen to be the weapon of choice among American males chosing suicide. Handguns take the prize as the preferred firearm. We should expect this outcome because part of the dominant ideology bases itself on the romantisized American Western story so popular in the middle of the last century. The detective and murder mysteries have replaced the wester, but not its formula of individualism competition, and violence.
Popular westerns like "Have gun Will Travel," "The Rifleman," and others captured young males' imaginations. College courses on film began using The Six-Gun Mystique to explain the power of the western and handgun. Commercialized interests profitted wildly from this "mystique" and befor long it became deeply interwoven in the American consciousness.
Some will point to penny wester novels like Lewis Lamore's work and Jack London's work, to name a couple. These two played a role, but nothing like commercialized television role fallowing the end of Edward R. Murrow's genuine news television for profit beginning with the "I Love Lucy" series.
The emerging western set the bar for masculinity, and that bar reached for guns, competition, and individualism, all components of the American Western.
Add the above social and cultural baggage to surviving as a white male, and the outcome becomes apparent during periods of social change. Economic hardship cuts into the white males' ability to maintain the image of the individual succeeding by their own wits and skills, like western heros. Add the handgun to the floundering while males' picture of the world and the prospects for suicide increase.
Naturally, we look to older white males left alone in the world by divorce, death, and simple single lifestyles. Disease and other physical problems add to the burdens of life. Old age becomes the last issue to consider here. Often older people become objects of derision and scorn among the young, especially now that Social Security and other social services appear to go forward on the backs of the young. Needless to say, environmental collapse adds to these hostile feelings toward older generations.
Whatever we might believe about the above, white males account for about 73% of suicides in the USA. The majority of these use handguns. In Europe, the noose remains the preferred means of suicide for white males.
White Females
White females survive in "a man's world" and patriarchy set the tone in almost all areas of American life. Women divorce abusive husbands and become the sole means of support for their children. Women remain married to abusive husbands "for the sake of the children" and survive as punching bags for a child in a man's body, their husband.
When these women become lonely in their older years, they become at risk for suicide, especially by overdose.
Black Women
Black women figure highest in attempts and lowest in suicide. If we compare and contrast the two worlds of black women and white men we come up two staggering different worlds.
While white men bend toward individualism, competitiveness, and violence (football on Monday nights), black women bend toward community, cooperation, and religiosity.
What I've said about white women will apply to black women, and sometimes, many times, with sharper edges. Black women attempting suicide elicit concern from others in their community. The black woman's community usually has less wealth, fewer resources, and less social power in most situations outside of the government workforce.
Because of their poverty they live more closely with others and find solace in the comfort of others nearby "in the same boat." In brief, it's lonelyness and powerlessness for both white males and black females that leads to suicidial thoughts and action.
It's the males' competitiveness, guns, and attitude toward violence that leads to their suicide.
It's the black women's shared experience as discrimation objects and derision in white culture, until recently, that gives them a sense of surviving together.
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