As we go through our journey of life, we run into a lot of issues and stumble at points. This is a regular occurrence with most people. Nobody gets through life unscathed and these are things we must deal with. However, some people are dealing with ailments on top of the everyday problems we run into. Depression, anxiety and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) are some of the problems many of us face. When dealing with one of these problems and then adding the hard parts of life, it can lead to bad things. Suicide being one of these. IGY6 is part of the program to help the cause but first, let’s talk about the problem more in depth.

The suicide epidemic is why Project Semicolon was created. It is to help those that are considering suicide or self-harm as an answer for their problems. The semicolon is used when an author was going to end their sentence but still had more to say. You can add a semicolon to the end of a would be sentence and continue on with another though. The idea behind this is to let those considering suicide that their story is not over. Put a semicolon at the end and continue moving forward.

Just to elaborate on how serious suicide is in the U.S., let’s go over a few stats. Suicide ranks 10th in the United States for leading cause of death. There are 44,965 suicides in America every year. For every suicide, there are 25 attempts and it costs the country $69 billion a year. In addition to those startling facts, on average, there are 123 suicides daily. In 2016, 51% of suicides were committed using a firearm. Men commit suicide at a rate of almost 4 times the number of women and of those men, white males are far more likely to do so.

These stats should go to show you the seriousness of the suicide problem in the states and Project Semicolon does a great job of increasing awareness for this issue. Let us move on for the topic of this post which is the IGY6 tattoo and what it means. We will talk about the IGY6 tattoo and what it means for the people wearing it and how it relates to the issues at hand. By the end of this post we hope you have a better understanding of the problem and what people are doing to help.