The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

by Shankar Vedantam

  “If you were to make a list of the people most unlikely to complete the act of suicide,” Michele Shinnick told me, “my husband’s name would be number one.”

  ——

  Whenever someone takes their own life, our automatic response is to ask what was going on in their life. Taking one’s life seems profoundly irrational, and we always look for evidence of mental disorder and stress, marital unhappiness, or a fall from grace. Shinnick had his share of troubles. He was not entirely happy at internal affairs, but he had just retired. Being a cop was certainly stressful—Shinnick had been standing at the harbor at Liberty State Park when the September 11 attacks took place. He saw the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center, and he helped count the dead in the days that followed. Shinnick had once been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after his car got stuck on some tracks. A train rammed his vehicle, and Shinnick was in and out of work the following year as he recovered from injuries. That was in 1993, fifteen years before he took his life. By the time of his death in 2008, the PTSD diagnosis had long faded from everyone’s memory. On the plus side, Shinnick was a respected member of his community and a successful cop. He had a wonderful marriage and family. He had deep religious faith. Many people with much less going for them endure more difficult challenges and never contemplate suicide.

  Michele Shinnick told me that four other police officers in the local area had taken their lives in the months after her husband’s suicide. “It really is an epidemic.”

  That is no exaggeration. Suicide among police officers is underreported; newspapers and local TV stations do not offer wall-to-wall coverage of police suicides the way they memorialize cops killed on the beat. The different kinds of attention paid to homicide and suicide obscure the fact that there are more than twice as many suicides among police officers in the United States as there are homicides. John Violanti, a research professor in the school of public health at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has spent years studying suicide among police officers. Contrary to popular notions about the risk of police work, Violanti and others have found that the risk of officers taking their own lives vastly dwarfs the risk that they will be killed in action. Drug wars and firefights; muggings, robberies, and assaults; murderers, rapists, and serial killers collectively pose a much smaller threat to your average cop than the risk that he will put his service revolver to his head and shoot himself.

  When scientists study epidemics, they don’t study individuals. It is true that epidemics preferentially strike the vulnerable; a person with AIDS has a greater risk of catching the flu than a healthy person. But if you want to stop an epidemic, you don’t go after individual patients or the idiosyncratic things that place individuals at risk. You go after the common factors behind the epidemic. You look for cures or vaccines, and ways to halt the epidemic before it spreads. In the case of malaria, you stop an epidemic by preventing the breeding of mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are the means—the vector—by which malaria is transmitted. You don’t destroy the malaria parasite by curbing mosquitoes, but destroying the vector keeps the parasite from infecting people. Mosquito eradication is a more effective way to stop a malaria epidemic than treating individual patients one by one with quinine. The difference between the two approaches—one broad scale and the other individualized—is the central difference between a public health approach to an epidemic and a medical approach.

  When we probe the mental and emotional antecedents of someone who has committed suicide, we are implicitly pursuing a medical approach. When we tailor interventions to individuals—counseling people who are stressed and asking what is going on in their lives—we are pursuing a medical approach. We are going after the problem of suicide one individual at a time. Every person is different from every other, because the constellation of symptoms, risks, and circumstances is different for everyone. But is there another way to think about suicide, to think about it as a public health problem? Is there a kill-the-mosquitoes-to-halt-malaria approach to suicide?

  John Violanti and other public health experts have asked themselves what it is about police work that places officers at high risk for suicide. The conventional explanation is that police work is stressful. You don’t know who lurks behind each corner when you are patrolling a beat, and you have no idea if the driver you pull over for speeding on a beautiful day is a drug dealer packing heat. But Violanti, like all good scientists, decided to put his intuitions to the test: He compared the risk of suicide in three stressful professions. He studied 8.5 million death certificates in twenty-eight states to find out the relative risk of suicide among police officers, firefighters, and military personnel. All three lines of work place people at personal risk and involve high stress; all involve unpredictable and long hours that can interfere with family life.

  Violanti found that military personnel and police officers had a far higher risk of suicide than firefighters. Cops turn out to have about four times the suicide risk of firefighters. Black cops in the United States have nearly five times the suicide risk of black firefighters. White women who are police officers are twelve times more likely to commit suicide than white women who are firefighters.

  The central difference among cops, military personnel, and firefighters, Violanti concluded, is that cops and military personnel carry guns. Nearly all police suicides involve the use of guns—the vast majority are service weapons. Guns don’t make people suicidal, but they provide the impulse of suicide with a vector—in exactly the same way that the mosquito provides the malaria parasite with a vector. If cops were to check their guns at police departments when they left work, Violanti figured, a substantial number of police suicides might vanish.

  Large numbers of police officers—and their family members—are also killed in accidental shootings involving service weapons. When you add together the number of police officers killed in accidents, the number of family members of cops who are killed in accidents, and the number of family members of cops who commit suicide, this pool of victims forms an even larger group than the number of police officers who commit suicide. No one knows exactly how often service weapons are implicated in all these deaths, but it is certain they are used frequently. If officers checked their weapons when they went off duty, it could reduce those deaths, too.

  Violanti used to be a cop, and he understands how cops think. He knows the idea would never fly. Police officers such as Ed Shinnick think of themselves as being on call all the time. Even when they are off duty and in civilian attire, cops want to be ready to intervene in emergencies. Newspapers abound with stories of how off-duty police officers halted convenience store robberies because they were carrying their service weapons. Some police departments actually require police officers to carry a gun with them at all times. In Jersey City, Ed Shinnick was required to purchase his weapon. After he retired, the gun belonged to him.

  Police officers think their biggest risk of getting killed comes from bad guys on the street. Hundreds of books, thousands of movies, and millions of pages of newsprint have been devoted to the general subject of cops and robbers. When was the last time you saw a movie or read a book about a cop committing suicide? Even if such a movie were made, you can bet it would never become the next Die Hard. Our intuitions tell us that cops are primarily at risk of getting killed in the line of duty. As a general rule, movies that contradict our intuitions—even intuitions that are demonstrably false—are movies that few people will care to watch.

  The data on the relative risks of homicide and suicide are stark. Cops are only the most dramatic example of what happens when people have ready access to handguns. America’s long debate about gun control has centered on the conflict between those who feel guns protect them from criminals and those who feel the availability of guns allows criminals to get their hands on weapons. Gun-control advocates say that the ready availability of guns in the United States makes gun-violence inevitable. Gun enthusiasts say, “Duh. The bad guys have weapons already and won
’t turn them in if we tighten gun laws. The only smart thing to do is to keep a gun in your home to defend yourself.”

  Neither side pays much attention to the evidence, which shows that people who have guns in their homes are at greater risk of being shot and killed than people who do not have guns in their homes. The risk does not come from homicidal maniacs or muggers or rapists. The risk comes from people using their own guns to shoot themselves or their family members. The gun debate in America should not be between those who argue that individuals have a right to protect themselves and those who argue that the interests of society should come first. The issue is whether people who live in homes with guns are safer as a result of owning a gun, and the answer, unequivocally, is no. The combined risk of accidents, suicide, and domestic violence dwarfs the risk of homicide at the hands of a stranger. Each year in the United States, nearly twice as many people kill themselves as are murdered.

  Only a small number of the four hundred thousand suicide attempts in America each year involve guns, but because people who shoot themselves usually kill themselves, gun suicides account for more than half of all completed suicides.

  When the District of Columbia banned handguns in 1976—civilians were effectively prohibited from buying, selling, transferring, or possessing weapons—the suicide rate in the city of Washington, D.C., fell by 23 percent. The drop was immediate, and it was entirely because of a reduced number of handgun suicides. The researchers who conducted the study measured suicide rates before and after the handgun ban. They found the suicide reduction was limited to Washington, D.C.—where handguns were banned—and was not observed in the suburbs—where no changes were instituted to gun laws. The decline in suicide in Washington, in other words, was not part of a general reduction in suicide risk in the metropolitan area. Suicides in Washington, D.C., that were not gun-related, moreover, did not show a decline after the handgun ban. The entire reduction in suicide was because there were fewer gun suicides. If you looked at a twenty-year period—with the gun ban right in the middle of that period—there were more than thirty-one suicides per year in Washington before the ban, and only twenty-four suicides per year after the ban. The researchers also found, contra the intuitions of gun enthusiasts, that the ban was also associated with a steep decline in the homicide rate. The decline in homicide was also entirely due to a reduction in shooting deaths, and the decline was limited to Washington and not its suburbs. The District of Columbia, by the way, has one of the lowest suicide rates in the country; if you were to cut suicide by a quarter in places such as Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico, which have much higher suicide rates and many more people than Washington, D.C., you could significantly reduce the scale of suicide in the United States.

  If you were a public health official and someone told you there was a way to curb a malaria epidemic by 23 percent, you would be ecstatic. But lawmakers usually don’t think like public health officials. They trust their intuitions, and their intuitions tell them that owning guns makes people safer. In 2008, led by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the highest court in the United States reversed the handgun ban in Washington, D.C., on the grounds that it was unconstitutional: “We hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.” The Second Amendment, which guarantees citizens the right to bear arms, Scalia added, “elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” In a poll published in The Washington Post, 76 percent of people agreed with the Supreme Court decision.

  The idea that a gun can protect you is such an intuitively appealing idea. A robber breaks into your home; you grab a gun from your nightstand and shoot the intruder. How many times have we seen movies where brave people stand guard outside their homes, rifles in hand? Advocates for gun ownership are only following their intuitions. The Second Amendment, in fact, enshrines our collective intuition about guns and self-defense into the Constitution. We believe we are safer when we have weapons to defend ourselves. What the framers of the Second Amendment did not foresee is that the long-barreled muskets of the eighteenth century—which were difficult to use to commit suicide—would one day be replaced by handguns, and the greater threat to the lives of Americans would come not from murderous strangers or an authoritarian government but from suicide, accidental shootings, and family members using handguns to kill one another.

  We certainly feel more control when we have a gun in our possession, and it is easy to confuse the feeling of control with safety. Indeed, this is an unconscious bias in the hidden brain. Over millennia, evolution caused animals, including humans, to experience anxiety in situations where they lacked control—because those situations were more dangerous than situations in which the animal did have control. The unconscious rule of thumb that links control with safety breaks down in modern life, however. People feel safer barreling down a highway at seventy miles an hour—without seat belts—than they do sitting in a passenger plane going through turbulence. The fact that we are in control of the car gives us the illusion of safety, even though all the empirical evidence shows we are safer in the plane.

  Suicide rates in states with high levels of gun ownership are much higher than in states that have low levels of gun ownership. Alabama, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico have twice the rate of suicide of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawaii, and New York. The United States as a whole has a very high suicide rate compared to other industrialized countries. Researchers working for the federal government once examined the suicide rate among children in the United States and twenty-five other industrialized countries over a single year. The suicide rate among American children was more than twice the average suicide rate among children in the other twenty-five countries. The homicide rate among children in the United States was five times higher. Guns were responsible for much of this. If you measured only gun-related homicide and suicide, American children were eleven times more likely than children in the other twenty-five countries to commit suicide by shooting themselves, were nine times more likely to be killed in accidental shootings, and were sixteen times more likely to be murdered. There were 1107 children shot to death in all the countries; 957 of these victims—86 percent—were children in the United States.

  The researchers Arthur Kellermann and Donald Reay once examined all gun-related deaths over a lengthy period of time in King County in the state of Washington. They were trying to find evidence for the common intuition that gun owners are safer because they can protect themselves and their families should someone break into their homes. Kellermann and Reay identified nine deaths during the period of the study where people shot and killed an intruder. These are the stories that gun advocates endlessly relate to one another. In the same period, guns in people’s homes were implicated in twelve accidental deaths and forty-one homicides—usually family members shooting one another. The number of suicides? Three hundred and thirty-three.

  The gun lobby has often questioned the accuracy of these studies and reports. Rather than seek more accurate answers, however, it has leaned on Congress and successive administrations to cut off funding for research into firearm-related violence. After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showing high rates of gun-related suicide and homicide among American children was published, Congress slashed funding for CDC firearm-injury research. Much of the suicide and homicide data is years old today because the research has effectively been choked off.

  “Guns do not cause violence,” said Kellermann, an Emory University researcher. He is a Southerner who grew up around guns, and he understands and appreciates gun culture. “The trigger does not pull the finger…. However, guns amplify the consequences of violence, and that amplification might be to an extent you cannot reverse. You can treat an overdose patient and stop t
he bleeding if they cut themselves, but guns have one of the highest completion rates for suicide. It is heartbreaking.”

  If you visit the website of the National Rifle Association, you will find that it is devoted to the idea that people have a right to defend themselves against criminals. What is never mentioned is the risk that gun owners pose to themselves. When we think about it intuitively—when we let our hidden brain do the thinking for us—the risk of suicide, accidents, and domestic violence feels remote compared to the risk of homicide. If we are smart people, if we are responsible gun owners, if we are not mentally unstable or defective, surely the suicide statistics will not apply to us? That is the way most of the thirty thousand people who kill themselves every year in America think, too. Stop for a moment and think about that number—more than ten times the number of Americans who died in the September 11 terrorist attacks kill themselves every year in the United States. It’s early 2009 as I write these words. At least two hundred thousand more Americans have died from suicide than from terrorism since September 10, 2001. Which would you say poses a greater risk to the average American? If you are taking about ninety seconds to read each page of this book, someone in the United States will likely have committed suicide since you started reading this chapter.

  “If you bought a gun today, I could tell you the risk of suicide to you and your family members is going to be two- to tenfold higher over the next twenty years,” epidemiologist Matthew Miller at Harvard told me. “There are not many things you can do to increase your risk of dying tenfold.”