1) There are many dominant risk factors for suicide, but some of the symptoms are much more difficult to recognize or treat. Out of these less obvious or difficult to treat symptoms, the most serious and important one is hopelessness. Much of this is due to the fact that many people do not see hopelessness as being a 'symptom' of anything, and therefore these same people do not associate something like this with suicide. However, most clinical professionals, when asked about this issue, do agree that someone that has lost hope for the future has a much higher risk of suicide than someone that has not lost this hope. In other words, people that feel as though they have nothing left to look forward to have a much higher chance of taking their own life than do people that feel there are still things in the future that they want to do, experience, and enjoy. This hopelessness may seem similar to a form of mental illness or to deep grief, but it is not the same as either one of those and is seen to be a very serious indicator as to whether someone is clinical depressed, and this was found to be especially true of young black males in poor and underprivileged neighborhoods.

             2) There has been seen to be a link between hope/hopelessness and the church, and blacks have often drawn their sense of hope from their spirituality. However, the church attendance of young black men has begun to decline, and therefore this raises the question of whether the suicide rate for these same individuals will begin to rise. However, for those black males that do go to church or gain spirituality through family worship and/or prayer, the suicide rate is lower, and the sense of hope for the future that they have is also higher than average. It seems that those that attend church, whatever their age, gender, or race, appear to have more hope for the future and more to look forward to than those that do not attend church and do not have any form of spirituality, which indicates that there is a sense of hopefulness that is found, for many people, through worship and spirituality.