It truly does happen every day.
Initially, however, Kurt’s widely reported death caused great alarm among public health officials, who feared it was the perfect storm to threaten vulnerable youth. Celebrity suicides have been known to cause copycats, or “suicide clusters.” When Marilyn Monroe died in 1962, her suicide was extensively studied because she was such a high-profile celebrity with passionate fans. The following month there were two hundred more suicides than usual in the United States. Given Kurt’s large fan base among an age group already at risk, a catastrophe was feared after his death.
Immediately after Kurt’s death, every suicide or suicide attempt in the Seattle area was examined for potential linkages by researchers. One young man did go home after Kurt’s public memorial service and take his own life, and that suicide was widely reported in the press, with speculation that it could be the first of a wave.
There are many websites devoted to Kurt conspiracy theories, suggesting that he did not take his own life; a few of these sites also record copycat suicides. These sites argue that the “crime” of Kurt’s supposed murder is all the more heinous and tragic because it resulted in the deaths of further innocent victims. One of these conspiracy websites lists nineteen “Cobain-related sympathetic ‘copycat’ suicides”; another says there are “at least sixty-eight.” Their salacious reports have received widespread media attention.
But what has not gotten as much exposure is the science and detailed statistical analysis by public health experts after Kurt’s suicide. Remarkably, the statistics in King County, where Kurt lived and died, show that the number of suicides actually went down in the months following Kurt’s death. It wasn’t a huge decrease, but it was significant given generally rising suicide rates. Moreover, the fact that there wasn’t a huge spike was the opposite of what researchers expected, the opposite of what has been reported numerous times in the media, and is in stark conflict to what has been claimed countless times on those conspiracy websites.
Dr. David A. Jobes is a leading suicide expert and the author of one of those studies done after Kurt’s death. He says the figures on the decrease in suicides in the wake of Kurt’s death initially surprised him, but they’ve been confirmed by several further analyses. Another extensive study showed suicides went down significantly right after his death, even in places as far from Seattle as Australia, where Kurt was beloved.
I was in my office when news of Kurt’s suicide came to me with that phone call, but Jobes had perhaps an even more surreal experience learning about it. He was actually attending an international convention of suicide researchers that week; he heard the news sitting in a bar discussing trends in the field when a breaking news report came across the television in the background. “It was the headline story,” Jobes told me, “and I was with a guy from the CDC, and our jaws just dropped. ‘This is going to be bad,’ we said. We thought there was going to be an epidemic.”
Jobes’s extensive study found the opposite occurred. The paper he published speculates several reasons: “The lack of an apparent copycat effect in Seattle may be due to various aspects of the media coverage, the method used in Cobain’s suicide, and the crisis center and community outreach interventions that occurred.” Jobes says another key was outreach by the medical community in the previous year to establish a protocol for suicide coverage, urging media outlets to include suicide resources in their reports. Kurt’s death “was the first time where articles appeared with little boxes that listed hotline numbers, signs of depression, and places to get help,” Jobes said. He says Kurt’s death was something of an “outlier of a celebrity suicide in that it arguably led to reporting that did some good.”
Vicki Wagner, executive director of Seattle’s Youth Suicide Prevention Program, says Kurt’s death still has a role in raising awareness two decades later. “It made young adults, and certainly teens, much more open to talking about suicide, and normalizing it, even if it’s a topic that is never really normalized,” she says. “His death made kids look at the reality of what the impact of your suicide would be.”
In Jobes’s study, his researchers actually went into the homes of people who took their lives after Kurt’s death and searched for Nirvana CDs and posters and examined notes for linkages. Statistically, when a band sells thirty-five million CDs, their music will likely show up on the shelves of some of those who will take their lives, but Jobes and other researchers looked beyond that. What they found demonstrated that Nirvana fans did not kill themselves simply because of his death. “The results were what we call a ‘proactive non-varietor effect,’” Jobes says, meaning that the attention and circumstances of Kurt’s death may have actually encouraged people to seek help: his research concluded that Kurt’s death statistically decreased suicides among Nirvana fans in the period studied. In some strange way, Kurt dying may have saved lives.
Of all the field notes that Jobes reported in his extensive research, none was more eerie to read about than the case of one young Nirvana fan who did attempt, and succeeded, at taking her own life just a week after Kurt’s death. She had been well aware of resources that the media reported were available, but in her final note to the world she wrote that she couldn’t make use of that help. But she also made a remarkable revelation in her suicide note—she wrote that although she loved Kurt, she was taking her life not because he had, but because of her own issues and depression. “In her note,” Jobes says, “she said she wanted to ‘own’ her own suicide, and didn’t want it linked to his. Some went into this believing an ecological fallacy,” Jobes says—the assumption that people who killed themselves after the death of a celebrity did so because of that news story. In the instance of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, science does not back up that assumption, and in fact the opposite was true.
Exactly why a person chooses suicide is an inexact science. The only subject who can definitively explain his motivation is dead. Still, Jobes speculates several key factors that played a part in minimizing copycats and lowering the suicide rate following Cobain’s. One was Kurt’s chosen method of death, which alone diminished copycats because of the intense violence involved. The thought of pain can halt suicidal impulsivity, and while this may seem counterintuitive, it’s a correlation suicide researchers find often: it’s also why sharp spikes under a bridge can halt suicides at that location. Though media coverage of Kurt’s death had lurid moments, the fact that Kurt’s method of suicide was widely reported in detail made it less romantic to young fans. The Seattle mayor’s office and governmental offices in other cities also put out press releases that gave contacts for resources, another critical part of the response.
Another key element Jobes cites as a suicide-deterrent factor was Seattle’s public memorial for Kurt. It drew thousands to Seattle Center on Sunday, April 10, 1994, just two days after Kurt’s body was discovered. It was one of the most extraordinary events I’ve ever witnessed.
Immediately after the news of Kurt’s death was disclosed on Friday, fans gathered at the public park that was next to his home in Seattle’s Denny-Blaine neighborhood. I drove there myself when I finally got out of my office that nightmare day. I saw fans weeping, holding candles, or propping photographs of Kurt against the park benches. As at many of the events that were related to Kurt and Grunge, I had dual roles: I was a fan myself, and grieving, but I was also a journalist. Looking at the greenhouse where he’d been discovered, I still couldn’t believe he’d been alive in that room not long ago, but now the whole place was covered in yellow police tape. We would later learn, when the medical examiner determined Kurt most likely died on April 5, that his corpse had lain undiscovered in that greenhouse for three days.
It became obvious that a larger public Seattle memorial needed to happen. The Seattle music community quickly organized a vigil and scheduled it for Sunday the tenth at Seattle Center’s fountain pavilion. Several radio stations helped spread the word and agreed to broadcast it. Though the main purpose was to honor Kurt, there was also so
me subterfuge in the planning: it was scheduled to run at the same time as the private funeral. There had been some fear that fans would swamp the funeral, which was to be an invitation-only affair. Press were also barred from the funeral, even local press, even newspapers Kurt used to pay twenty dollars to advertise in.
When I walked onto the Seattle Center grounds that Sunday, I expected a crowd, and the seventy-four-acre public park was filled with Nirvana fans. Police estimated seven thousand were in attendance, but there could have been many more, as there were pockets of fans for blocks around Seattle Center, sitting in circles, playing guitar, lighting candles, holding pictures. At the memorial, a small stage platform was set up with speakers, and I went behind it, ran into Marco Collins, and asked him what exactly was going to happen. “I don’t really know, and I’m one of the organizers,” he said. “A few people will talk, and we are going to play this tape Courtney made.”
Marco said a few words when the event started, and so did a couple of other DJs. Then a short recording by Krist Novoselic was played that urged fans to find their own muse, follow Kurt’s punk-rock ethic, and never forget that “no band is special, no player royalty.” Next was Courtney’s tape. She began by announcing she was recording it in their bed. The crowd was completely silent as she spoke. I have never been in a crowd of seven thousand and had them be that quiet—never. The recording was so clear you could hear Courtney taking a drag off her cigarette. She said was going to read Kurt’s suicide note. “Some of it is to you,” she said, referring to Kurt’s fans. But before reading it, she asked the crowd to yell “‘asshole’ really loud.” And they yelled it. It was kind of a loud communal wail of anger, pain, sadness. Then, for the next fifteen minutes, Courtney herself wailed, screamed, and read virtually every line of Kurt’s suicide note.
If the idea for the memorial had begun as subterfuge to keep the masses away from the nearby private funeral, it turned into the most amazing spectacle of public grief I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of. Not long after her recording was over, when the private funeral ended, Courtney even showed up at Seattle Center. She was holding Kurt’s suicide note. She sat with groups of fans and let them hold and read Kurt’s note. Shakespeare never wrote such drama for the stage.
But the entire event, more through happenstance than planning, turned into brilliant public health policy. Because Courtney, and the media, specifically addressed how Kurt died, Jobes thinks the public memorial at Seattle Center was the absolute turning point. Courtney spoke very specifically about what Kurt did to himself, which Jobes says took away any glamour that might have been associated with the act and showed how much pain was left for others after his suicide. “It was really powerful for her to read that note, with all her rage,” Jobes says, “because it punched a hole into the romantic expectation of suicide.” After Love’s recording was played, a suicide-prevention expert talked to the crowd, offering options and information on how to seek help. In the end, Jobes says, “it was a disaster averted.”
Jobes has studied suicide for years, and as it grows as a cause of death, he says education, rather than a moral reaction, is key. Particularly within rock music, he says, Tipper Gore’s attacks on violent lyrics were completely misguided given what science has found: “We’ve done three different studies on suicidal rock music lyrics, things like Pearl Jam’s ‘Jeremy.’” While fans of these songs may show increased suicidal thoughts, their exposure to what Jobes calls a “pro-social response” actually decreases their suicide rate. In other words, being sad and listening to a song about sadness helps you feel better, not worse, and rock music doesn’t lead you to kill yourself.
Jobes has also extensively researched suicide notes. Kurt’s, he reports, unfortunately fits into a pattern that is all too common, what researchers call “the perceived burdensomeness syndrome.” It means that suicidal people believe that those around them will be better off with them gone. “A person convinces themselves they are not only ending their own suffering, they are giving the people they love a gift,” Jobes says. “They misperceive.”
In his years as a researcher, Jobes has also researched the impact of suicide on the families left behind. The greatest tragedy of the “perceived burdensomeness syndrome,” he says, is that those left—those families, those friends, those music fans—are “never better off.”
I knew very little about suicide or heroin addiction before I began to write about Kurt’s life, and I’ll admit I approached his history with judgments. To face my own preconceptions, I was forced to confront my biases and to educate myself, particularly about drug addiction.
I came from a family burdened by alcoholism. There were more than a few parallels in my own story to Kurt’s: we were both from divorced families; we both grew up in small towns in Washington State, isolated from the larger city; and we both turned to the arts, to a degree, because we didn’t fit in on the football team. In my own internal emotional life I knew darkness, too. Still, no matter how strained my childhood had been, it hadn’t led to heroin addiction. Therefore I thought of heroin addiction—as do many in society—as the worst of the worst, the lowest moral choice.
But as I began to study drug addiction, I saw that any judgments, good or bad, didn’t solve the problem. Many of our laws about drugs are based on making those sitting on high moral ground feel superior about their own choices, but they don’t solve our public health crisis. That’s where my beliefs have moved now: that the our current punishment-based drug policies only cost us more in resources, without treating addiction as the disease it is.
My feelings shifted for several reasons, but in part because of a public health official who worked for King County. This woman spent a considerable amount of time helping me understand the face of drug addiction in Seattle, where an estimated ten thousand opiate addicts live. Statistically Seattle, like many port cities, has always had a higher incidence of heroin use than other locales. Seattle is also on the West Coast corridor where the heroin trade is controlled by Mexican drug cartels. The cartels are adept at distribution, and as a result their brand of heroin, black tar, is cheap and plentiful. It also represents a type of heroin that leaves users—Kurt included—particularly susceptible to secondary infections from the many agents used to cut it. Though figures on the exact size of addict populations are difficult to compile, in the twenty years since Kurt’s death, things have only gotten worse in Seattle, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. In 2013, the DEA called heroin Seattle’s “public enemy number one” due to an increased number of busts, ninety-eight local overdose deaths in 2012, and a rising crossover from prescription drug addicts switching to heroin because it’s cheaper.
That health worker who filled me in on heroin addiction explained in great detail what using the drug entailed in terms of acquiring and injecting it and its long-term physical and health consequences. I needed to understand these things, to understand what the fabric of life meant for Kurt. There are an estimated ten thousand opiate addicts in Seattle. Those thousands of addicts have to figure out, every day, how to buy, use, and finance their addictions. Some of them steal stereos, but many support their addiction with jobs, as Kurt did. One of the professions where drug addiction is highest is among medical workers—nurses, doctors—because they work in high-stress environments and have easy access to drugs. These aren’t down-and-out street people, but rather professionals with lives and families. Addiction crosses all economic barriers, genders, ethnicities, and neighborhoods.
I learned what Narcan was, why people around Kurt always had a supply of this overdose-prevention drug, and that Washington State is one of the few where it is legal to possess it without a prescription. In many other localities, just carrying Narcan, which has no use other than saving the life of someone overdosing, is illegal. I learned that while I’d always thought overdose was the biggest heroin health risk, there were many other deadly infections possible from the black tar heroin sold in Seattle. I learned that hepatitis C will soon kill
more people than AIDS and cost our nation billions to treat. I later discovered that many of the friends Kurt used heroin with have hep C now, and that he almost certainly had it, too.
All of this opened my eyes, but the next stop in my heroin-education tour also had an effect. It was important that I research the physiological effects of overdose to understand two key pieces of Kurt’s history: why he didn’t die from numerous overdoses, and how he was able to take a large amount of heroin on his final day, and still take his own life with a gun. Needless to say, these were not assignments I thought would ever be in my appointment book when I was in journalism school. The second point was critical, however, because most of the conspiracy theories on Kurt’s death—there is a industry of them with books, websites, and a supposed “nonfiction” film—begin with the concept that Kurt was so high there would be no way he could have taken his own life.
To believe there was a conspiracy, you would first have to believe that the two dozen Seattle police who filtered through this high-profile case were all—every one—somehow in cahoots in a cover-up when they concluded beyond any doubt that it was a suicide. I have since come to know that if someone wants to believe a conspiracy theory, though, the more factual data you present, the more their paranoia increases and their doubt grows. Like a Whac-A-Mole game at the arcade, no matter how much you beat them down, they spring back renewed. Presidential historian Robert Dallek was recently quoted in The New York Times suggesting that the reason so many can’t accept that Oswald killed Kennedy is because to do so “shows people how random the world is, how uncertain. I think it pains them; they don’t want to accept that fact.” With Kurt’s fans, I think something else is at play, too: if they can blame someone else, anyone else, for Kurt’s choices, then they can see him forever as an innocent victim, and that makes them feel less betrayed by his actions.
Here We Are Now Page 10
