It was a Friday night in January, and the Boston streets, still shiny with the afternoon’s rain, were crowded with honking cars. Everyone was in a hurry to get home and begin the weekend. In the subway station a thin young man with a saxophone played “Summertime.” But the evening was chilly, the trains were running late, and as the platform filled, the waiting commuters grew irritated. “Get us home!” shouted a bearded old man.
After the subway finally arrived, it traveled only one stop when a voice over the loudspeaker informed us that the electricity had been shut off between this station and the end of the line. Buses would deliver us to our destinations. Grumpy and impatient, the crowd spilled back into the streets. “What is it?” called out passersby. “Is it a fight? Did somebody die?”
I found a seat on the bus near the back. Behind me two young men complained loudly about having been forced off the subway. Suddenly they stopped talking and turned to look out the window. The flickering blue lights of police cars mingled with spotlights at the far end of a side street. Word filtered through the bus that the subway line had been closed down because the tracks, after coming aboveground, passed a cathedral from whose steeple a young man was threatening to jump.
“They got the whole street blocked off,” said the older of the two boys behind me. “Fire trucks, police, and everything.”
“Shit, man, if he really wanted to do it, he’d just run up there and jump,” said the younger boy disdainfully. He snickered, “Hell, I say go ahead and jump, but not on my time.”
The older boy, his voice quieter, said, “Why does he want to do that? Why does he want to die?”
“He don’t want to die,” said the younger boy. “He just wants to get his face on TV.”
They laughed, but the older boy fell silent again. “Ever think of doing something like that? I don’t understand it.”
“I’d never do it,” said the younger boy. “I mean, I like the hell out of living.”
“Maybe he got no reason for living,” said the older boy.
“Then go ahead and jump,” said the younger boy, recovering some of his bravado. “Or do it alone—go home, turn on the water, and slit your wrists. Get it done and let the rest of us go home. We got places to go.”
“People to see,” said the older.
“Drugs to do,” said the younger. He giggled, the other boy joined in, and they began to talk about their plans for the evening. At the next stop they got off the bus, jostling each other, laughing as they disappeared into the night.
When the bus reached the end of the line, I persuaded my brother, who had been waiting there for me in the car, to drive back to Boston. I wanted to find out what had happened to the man on the steeple. By the time we returned to the cathedral, however, the crowds were gone. A lone police car was parked in front. The officer told me that a drunken twenty-year-old man who had broken up with his girlfriend had climbed the scaffolding surrounding the steeple and stayed there, 150 feet up, seventy minutes before policemen, firefighters, and two priests managed to talk him down. He had been taken to the hospital for psychiatric observation. Now, saying he had to file his report, the sergeant excused himself and drove off.
The cathedral was in a rough-looking neighborhood whose streets were dark and deserted. The night was quiet except for the sporadic clatter of the subway, which, back in operation, swept by overhead. I looked up at the steeple and tried to imagine where the jumper might have stood.
Then I noticed a man about fifty feet from me, staring at the cathedral, his arms resting on the iron fence that surrounded the churchyard. I walked over and asked him whether he’d seen what had happened. No, he said, but he had heard about it. His voice was soft and listless. He wore old jeans, a flannel shirt, and a blue parka that was shiny with dirt. Shocks of gray hair stuck out from under his black wool cap. His face was thin and his beard was flecked with white. I guessed he was in his late thirties.
I shook my head. “Thank God he didn’t jump,” I said.
“Yeah,” said the man. He asked me if I was a reporter. I said no, but I was writing a book on suicide.
“Oh.” He nodded. “I’m a prime candidate.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because . . . things get you down,” he said. I must have looked confused because he added, “There is an entire group of people in this country that gets put down, kept down, and ignored.”
“By whom?”
“By everyone. By the federal government, by the laws, by big business.” He saw that I wasn’t convinced. “I’ll tell you what happened to me. I used to be a person, with an office and a degree and an apartment and a car and a life. I had a girlfriend, but she was a married woman and when her husband found out, he came to my house and punched me out and . . .”
As we stood side by side gazing up at the church, he told me of the breakup with his girlfriend, of financial troubles, of legal difficulties, of friends pulling away, of life in his cramped apartment, of his deep depression. As the story unraveled I had the sinking feeling that this could be a long evening, and I was cold because I had left my jacket in the car, where my brother waited with the engine running. “And I was committed to a mental hospital,” he was saying. “Once you’ve been in there, our society says you’re no good.” He paused. “I have no money. I have no job. My life is ruined. But don’t worry, I’m not going to run up there and jump now.” He shook his head. “But I think about killing myself every day.”
“What do you do when you feel like killing yourself?”
“I call a prevention center.”
“Do they help?”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
I shivered. “You’re freezing,” he said. He reached over and touched me lightly on the back. I shivered again but not from the cold. He took an almost empty pack of Marlboros from his jacket pocket and offered me one. I shook my head, and he lit one for himself. He took a puff and began to talk more about his broken life in the same leaden voice.
In the years since then, I have thought often of that evening. My encounters with the psychiatrists, the boys on the bus, and the lonely man at the cathedral gate raised many of the questions that this book attempts to explore. Between 1 and 2 percent of all Americans die by suicide, and some 4 or 5 percent make a suicide attempt at some point in their lives. Very few of us have not known someone, however distantly, who has taken his or her own life. In the course of writing this book, I talked with several hundred people who had intimate experience with suicide—people who had made attempts, family and friends of people who had killed themselves, psychiatrists, social workers, members of the clergy, biologists, hot line volunteers. But perhaps more surprising and, in some cases, more illuminating were the hundreds of other people I met in the course of my daily life who ended up telling me their stories. These included a middle-aged Scandinavian woman sitting next to me on a train who told me she’d been so depressed she had tried to hang herself with a belt earlier that year; a young minister I met at a restaurant who was about to take over a small Virginia parish in which there had recently been several teenage suicides; a woman at a bus stop whose mother, a cancer patient, was considering taking a fatal overdose; a man I met at a party who believed that anyone who hadn’t considered suicide must not have explored the true meaning of life; a psychiatrist haunted by thoughts of a patient who had killed herself eight years earlier; a young artist who told me that one evening shortly after she had moved to New York City she was eating dinner when the body of an upstairs neighbor fell past her window.
When I began the research that led to this book, I was surprised by the sheer volume of writing on the subject. As I turned from a seventeenth-century clergyman’s sermon on the sin of suicide to a neurobiologist’s paper on serotonin imbalance to a philosopher’s defense of the right to suicide to a novelist’s description of a character’s suicidal depression, I was struck by how fragmented and lacking in context the suicide literature seemed. Each book or paper approached the subject from a dif
ferent perspective, and reflected little knowledge of—or interest in—any insights from outside its own narrow focus. This parochialism was true, too, of the majority of mental health professionals and researchers I interviewed, many of whom were unaware of related developments even within their own fields. As our knowledge of suicide has deepened we have come to realize that the subject involves many different disciplines. Yet it seems to me that even a preliminary understanding of suicide is incomplete without some familiarity with all avenues of exploration.
This book is an attempt to bring some of those different vantage points together. It endeavors to put current thinking about suicide into a historical perspective by tracing the way people have thought and felt about the subject during the last four thousand years. It explores the various motives and meanings that suicide may have had to the people who killed themselves and the explanations offered by so-called experts. It discusses who commits suicide and why certain people and certain groups are more vulnerable than others. It explores the range of self-destructive behaviors, including those that do not immediately end in death: alcoholism, Russian roulette, and so on. It looks at the methods of suicide and the psychological significance those methods may have. And it describes the problems faced by those left behind after a suicide and how they deal with them.
Most people feel that suicide is a tragedy that should be prevented. But how can we prevent it when our understanding of its causes is still imperfect? This book attempts to describe the state of the art of suicide prevention, in crisis centers, therapists’ offices, hospitals, and the halls of government. It also raises the question of whether there are some suicides—those of terminally ill people, for example—in which intervention is inappropriate.
The book opens with a discussion of adolescent suicide. In 1983, as I started my research, a rash of teenage suicides in Plano, Texas, drew the national media’s attention. Indeed, the rate of adolescent suicide had nearly tripled since 1950. Suddenly, magazines, newspapers, and television shows trumpeted the “national epidemic” of suicide that seemed to plague upper-middle-class suburbs. Although I was aware that even at its highest the rate of adolescent suicide remained lower than for older Americans, I was intrigued by the issues this “epidemic” raised—and by how many of them were the same issues that had been raised for centuries in many different countries. And so when eight adolescents in the tricounty area north of New York City killed themselves during a four-month period in 1984, I decided to investigate the so-called Westchester cluster. Although every suicide is unique and suicide has different meanings and motives for different groups, according to age, race, religion, and so on, a detailed examination of this particular rash of suicides serves as an introduction and exploration of some issues inherent in all suicides. By beginning with a look at how suicide affected one age group in one area in one year, I hope to offer a window into the larger subject of self-destruction.
While I was researching this book, I was frequently asked whether I had a suicide in my family. People were, I think, surprised when I told them the answer was no. I, in turn, was surprised at their assumption that my interest in the topic must have been compelled by intimate personal experience. After all, what other subject touches so intensely on so many aspects—ethical, psychological, biological, cultural—of human life? Who could not be interested in such a subject? As I worked on the book, I also recalled the times that suicide had touched my life in various ways and with varying degrees of seriousness—my early fascination with Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and other suicidal writers; the vow I made with my best friend, when we were both caught up in the romantic angst of being sixteen, to swim out to sea and drown if we were still alive at twenty-five; the alcoholism that has frequently blighted my family tree; the pain and confusion I felt in college when I learned that a classmate had jumped to his death from a dormitory window. And although I have never thought seriously of taking my own life, I remember the occasional urge to find out what would happen if I swerved my car into the opposite lane; the desire to find a way to stop living—without dying—when a relationship of many years broke up; the drinking binges in college and graduate school that I realized only later were an expression less of collegial bonhomie than of fear and loneliness.
Certainly, these were relatively tame encounters with self-destruction, no more and probably no less than most people I know have experienced. I describe them to show not that I am closer to the subject than other people, but that the subject has touched all of us in some way—and to suggest that even the most extreme suicidal depression is but an extension of feelings most of us have had at some point in our lives. By the end of my research I had also come to believe that any of us, if sufficiently pushed by genes, bad luck, ill health, or a combination of these factors, might be drawn to the precipice. Part of my purpose in writing this book is therefore to chip away at some of the barriers our culture erects between “normal” people and “suicidal” people—barriers that I believe we erect from the fear that the difference is so slight.
As the man at the cathedral went on, part of me wanted to stay, to find a place to talk with him over cups of hot coffee, not because I thought he was going to climb the steeple and jump, not because I believed I could get him his former life back, but because he was lonely and depressed and had asked for help. But I saw the evening stretch out before me, filled with the sadness of his life and the dullness of his voice. I thought of my brother waiting in the car, of the drive out to the well-lighted house in the suburbs where dinner was waiting. I thought of how callous the young men on the bus had sounded, and my guilt prodded me to stay. But already my brain was furnishing my heart with excuses: this man was probably crazy; this man wasn’t crazy, and he didn’t need my help; I was exhausted after a long day at the conference.
He may have sensed my thoughts, for when I shivered once more, he said kindly, “You’re cold. You should go home.” He said good-bye and began to walk away. “Take care,” I said. Then, because that sounded lame, I added, “. . . of yourself.” I took a step toward the car. “Take care of yourself,” I called once more. I opened the door and slid into the warm car. Then I turned and watched him stuff his hands into his pockets and disappear into a dark side street.
1
ADOLESCENT SUICIDE
I
JUSTIN
JUSTIN CHRISTOPHER SPOONHOUR
OCTOBER 10, 1969
10:20 A.M.
7 LB 20 IN
THE GOLD LETTERING stands out against the cover of the white photograph album, now beige with age, coffee-spattered, and held together by tape. Inside, 114 snapshots, with captions written by the proud mother, lovingly document Justin Spoonhour’s first few years. Justin was less than three hours old: a picture of “Boy Spoonhour” in his hospital bassinet, a white blanket covering all but a puckered face with a pale shadow of hair. First day home: his mother, Anne, breast-feeding. At a month, he was easy to shop with—but where do you put the packages: Justin asleep in a supermarket shopping cart. About four and a half months—getting very fat and sassy: Justin snug in a comfy chair, a grinning, diapered Buddha.
Slowly, in the album’s pages, the prunish infant becomes an energetic, redcheeked child moving happily through a succession of milestones: Justin’s first Christmas; Justin sitting up; Justin learning to crawl; Justin’s first tooth; Justin standing; Justin beaming (Working on teeth five and six); Justin’s first birthday; Justin’s first step; Justin’s second Christmas; Justin standing on a chair (Pausing for a souvenir photo atop Mt. Everest—I did it all myself).
From the beginning, Justin Spoonhour was treated like a little adult. “We never talked baby talk to him,” says his father, Giles. “We always talked English.” Justin responded in kind: his first word was “McGovern” (his parents had volunteered for the senator’s 1972 presidential campaign), and his first sentence was “MerrillLynchBullishAmerica.” He was raised on a diet of Sesame Street. Even after he learned how to change chann
els, he spurned cartoons and stayed tuned to the educational television station. The Spoonhours’ house in Putnam Valley, New York, was crammed with books, and Justin was reading before he entered kindergarten.
At elementary school, Justin’s precociousness was not the only thing that set him apart from his classmates—there was also his appearance. Justin seemed to have a permanent rumple. His blond hair often hung down to his shoulders, uncombed; his shirts were untucked, his clothes unironed, his sneakers untied, and his fly frequently unzipped. He suffered from a bed-wetting problem until the age of eleven. Doctors prescribed an antidiuretic, but it helped only temporarily. His parents set an alarm clock in his bedroom so he could go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, but by then it was often too late. The problem embarrassed Justin, and Anne and Giles didn’t want to make him more self-conscious by questioning him. So each morning Anne would check his sheets and remind Justin to take a bath. Occasionally he forgot. At school he became a target for teasing: “Justin, you greaseball, did you ever hear of soap?” To his classmates the issue wasn’t that Justin was messy so much as that he was peculiar. One morning he walked into class wearing a three-piece suit for no apparent reason. At lunch the other children giggled and discussed how “stupid” it was. And even though he had worn a suit, they noticed, his hair was still uncombed.
Justin dismissed the teasing with a cutting remark or a simple “Shut up.” He never got into fights; he just walked away. At recess, while his classmates played, he usually sat alone, and when the class split into groups for an activity, Justin was always left out until the teacher chose a group for him. He was rarely invited to his classmates’ houses, and although his parents encouraged it, he seldom brought anyone home from school. Justin’s few friends tended, like him, to be on the fringes of grade school society: a foster child with a wild temper; a chubby boy with glasses and an attaché case; a shy boy who stuttered. On the rare occasions that Justin did bring home a friend, they inevitably quarreled and ended up playing by themselves. While his grades were good, Justin’s marks for “cooperation” were low. “It wasn’t so much ‘Justin doesn’t get along,’” says Anne, “as ‘Justin doesn’t even relate.’”
November of the Soul Page 2
