November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  The triggering event need not be momentous. One often reads newspaper accounts of teenagers who kill themselves for seemingly trivial reasons: the fourteen-year-old boy who, according to his parents, shot himself because he was upset about getting braces for his teeth that afternoon; the girl who killed herself moments after her father refused to let her watch Camelot on television. For Justin Spoonhour, not receiving a flower on Valentine’s Day or having his plans rejected by his church’s Youth Group may have been the triggering event. Such incidents are often misinterpreted by the media or even by family and friends as the “reason” for a suicide, but they are usually the culmination of a long series of difficulties. “Interpersonal loss, perceived, actual, or anticipated, oftentimes is the last blow,” says psychologist Alan Berman. “A relationship, a breakup, or a fight with one’s parents may open wounds of deeper pain.” The triggering event may seem to verify the lack of self-worth the teenager may have felt all along. “They are like a trivial border incident which triggers off a major war,” wrote A. Alvarez in The Savage God.

  The triggering event may seem inconsequential to adults, but it may be a matter of life and death to the teenager. “If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind,” wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch. “Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.” Says psychiatrist Samuel Klagsbrun, “For adolescents, the moment is everything. They think, ‘I’ve got pain, and the pain is lasting for more than two minutes—that means the pain will last forever.’”

  To an adolescent in pain, suicide can seem like an instant cure. This is “like treating a cold with a nuclear bomb,” as one therapist puts it. “When young people are suicidal, they’re not necessarily thinking about death being preferable, they’re thinking about life being intolerable,” says Sally Casper, former director of a suicide prevention agency in Lawrence, Massachusetts. “They’re not thinking of where they’re going, they’re thinking of what they’re escaping from.” Casper recalls a fifteen-year-old girl who came to her agency one day. “In one pocket she had a bottle of sleeping pills, and in the other she had a bottle of ipecac, a liquid that makes you want to vomit. She said, ‘I want to kill myself, but I don’t want to be dead. I mean, I want to be dead, but I don’t want to be dead forever, I only want to be dead until my eighteenth birthday.’”

  This girl was indulging in what clinicians call magical thinking. Like Wordsworth, who observed, “Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being,” suicidal adolescents may not fully understand the permanence of death. They may describe it as a sanctuary, a womb, a long sleep, or a tranquil vacation. They may feel, in the words of the theme song from M*A*S*H, that “suicide is painless” and what comes afterward is pleasant. They might agree with Peter Pan: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” But at some level they may not realize that it is an adventure from which they cannot return. “I thought death would be the happiest place to be,” a seventeen-year-old Texas girl who had attempted suicide three times after breaking up with her boyfriend told Newsweek. “I thought it would be like freedom, instantly. You’d be flying around happy and you wouldn’t be tied down to earth.”

  “Suicidal teenagers may be grieving over some sort of loss in their lives, whether it be that of their self-esteem, a relationship, or a family problem,” says Los Angeles child psychiatrist Michael Peck. “But if you could say to them, ‘Don’t commit suicide because I can get you away from the pain without dying,’ they’d likely be ready to do it.” A study by psychologists Roni Cohen-Sandler and Alan Berman found that suicidal children have a black-and-white perspective. In solving problems they give up looking for alternative solutions and become frustrated and depressed. And the pain may become so great that death is seen as the only option. As one fourteen-year-old girl told Berman, “If I died, I wouldn’t hurt as much as I do now.”

  “Suicidal adolescents suffer from tunnel vision,” says psychologist Pamela Cantor. “They are looking down a long tunnel, and all they see is darkness. They don’t know where they are in the tunnel; they think it goes on forever. They don’t know that there is light at the other end.” Perhaps more accurately, at a certain point the suicidal adolescent believes that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that light is suicide. This was expressed by a depressed fourteen-year-old girl who made repeated suicide attempts, one of which was fatal. About a year before she died, she wrote this poem:

  I wandered the streets,

  I was lonely; I was cold.

  Weird music filled the air.

  It grew louder and louder.

  There was no other sound—

  Only weird, terrible music.

  I began to run as though I was being chased.

  Too terrified to look back,

  I ran on into the darkness,

  A light was shining very brightly, far away.

  I must get to it.

  When I reached the light,

  I saw myself,

  I was lying, on the ground.

  My skin was very white.

  I was dead.

  Serotonin dysfunction, locus of control, and impulsiveness may help us understand some of the factors that might lead a young person to suicide, but they do little to explain the 300 percent jump in the adolescent suicide rate from the midsixties to the midnineties—or to explain its recent, modest decline. To account for the three-decade jump, a host of explanations have been proposed: the unraveling of America’s moral fiber, the breakdown of the nuclear family, school pressure, peer pressure, parental pressure, parental lassitude, child abuse, drugs, alcohol, low blood sugar, TV, MTV, popular music (rock, punk, heavy metal, or rap, depending on the decade), video games, promiscuity, lagging church attendance, increased violence, racism, the Vietnam War, the threat of nuclear war, the decrease in the average age of puberty, the media, rootlessness, increased affluence, unemployment, capitalism, excessive freedom, boredom, narcissism, Watergate, disillusionment with government, lack of heroes, movies about suicide, too much discussion of suicide, too little discussion of suicide. While none of these factors have been proved to have more than an incidental correlation with the rising rate of suicide, all of them represent very real reasons why, as one psychiatrist says, “it may be more difficult to be a kid today than at any other time in history.”

  According to psychiatrist Calvin Frederick, “The primary underlying cause of the rising suicide rate among American youth seems to be a breakdown in the nuclear family unit.” While the disintegration of the nuclear family is an easy target—it has been blamed for everything from asthma to schizophrenia—there is evidence that at a developmental stage when they are most in need of it, adolescents have been receiving less support. In the same years that the adolescent suicide rate tripled, so, too, did the divorce rate. A causal relationship to suicide cannot be proved, of course—indeed, a few studies have suggested that divorce as a factor in adolescent suicide may be attributable to underlying psychiatric problems in the adolescent and/or his parents. Yet a correlation exists: while more than 50 percent of American couples eventually divorce, an estimated 70 percent of adolescents who attempt suicide come from divorced families. Even where there are two parents in the house, they are not likely to be home. Along with 91 percent of America’s fathers, half the mothers of preschoolers and two-thirds of all mothers with children over six now work outside the home. Parents increasingly subcontract child-raising duties to day care, babysitters, and, most of all, to children themselves. Cross-cultural studies show that parents in the United States spend less time with their children than parents in any other nation in the world.

  An adolescent’s diminishing support extends beyond the nuclear family. The pioneer spirit that once sent American families west in search of opportunity now sends them crisscrossing the country in pu
rsuit of upward mobility, leaving behind the traditional backing of friends and extended family. Over a five-year period, one-quarter of the population moves. Both the executive blueprint for success and the blue-collar struggle to stay employed demand more movement than ever and result in less chance for a child to make a place for himself. There are new schools to attend, new cliques to break into, new identities to establish. The Houston study of nearly lethal suicide attempts found that among the factors increasing the likelihood of an attempt were frequency of moving, distance moved, difficulty staying in touch, and recentness of move—especially if that move took place within the previous twelve months. When their sixteen-year-old son killed himself a year after the family moved for the fifth time, one Texas couple decided to have the body cremated. “Where would we bury him? Where is home?” said his mother. A sixteen-year-old whose family had moved from New Rochelle to Shaker Heights to Houston hanged himself from an oak tree in the backyard of their rented house, leaving a note: “This is the only thing around here that has any roots.”

  Over the last several decades there has also been a fundamental change in child-rearing philosophy: parents have been encouraged to give their children “space.” But with too much space, teenagers may feel as if they’re growing up in a vacuum. “Once childhood is over, there is a tendency for parents to stop parenting,” says psychiatrist Michael Peck. “They just say, ‘If that’s the way you feel, do your own thing.’ And so all the things that kids used to do at age seventeen or eighteen, they’re being given the freedom to do at twelve and thirteen. Many parents are afraid to teach their children, afraid to set rules and enforce them. But a feeling that they can do anything they want is terrifying to kids.” Peck says many of the suicidal young people he sees in his practice get little clear-cut guidance, lack goals, and feel “a sense of floating along in time without direction.” Left to their own devices, adolescents are turning to sex, drugs, and alcohol earlier than ever. By age fifteen an estimated one-third have had intercourse. By sixth grade one-third have tried beer or wine and one-tenth have tasted hard liquor. A Weekly Reader survey found 30 percent of fourth graders felt peer pressure to drink. Young people who begin drinking before they turn fifteen are four times more likely to become alcohol-dependent than those who start between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one.

  Parents who struggled hard to get where they are can’t fathom why their children are so distressed. “I know two or three other people whose children have been suicidal, and the kids always blame the parents,” a St. Louis woman, whose seventeen-year-old daughter had recently taken a nonfatal overdose, told me. “I don’t think it’s all mom and dad’s fault. I don’t think these kids learn how to be responsible for themselves. They can’t handle the slightest rejection, not only by parents but by boyfriends, and in school. My husband and I grew up in what is now the ghetto. When we went to school, you were lucky if your dad had a job. The stress you had was whether your father came home with a paycheck, whether you had enough for bus fare to school, whether there was food on the table. For kids today the stress is ‘Do I have an Izod shirt? What boy am I going with?’ I’ve talked to more people who say, ‘My son won’t go to school today unless he has Nike sneakers.’ I have a friend whose son has been going with a girl. When she tried to break off the relationship, he attempted suicide. So his mother bought him a car, thinking it would help.

  “I think they’ve had it easy. We overindulge them. We’ve given them material things, but we haven’t made them responsible people. As long as you say yes, they’re fine. The minute you say no, they’re off the deep end. To this day, my daughter never says, ‘I attempted suicide,’ she says, ‘My parents drove me to it.’ But you can’t blame everything in the world on parents; you have to learn how to cope with these things. If it’s the parents’ fault, why didn’t I turn out this way? I had a mom who never knew I was there and a father who beat me. But I never blamed them. I just figured that’s the way it was. When we were young, we were so busy trying to survive, we didn’t have time to think about committing suicide.”

  With parents acting like peers, where do adolescents learn to cope in a crisis? “I’ve had more kids tell me, ‘I don’t know how people solve problems—I’ve never seen anybody do it in my life,’” says Dallas pediatrician John Edlin. “Adults of the current generation have great difficulty dealing with the pain in their lives. What do you do if you have a fight? You get a lawyer and get separated. What do you do if something goes wrong at work? You get a lawyer to see if you can sue the boss. There’s no feeling that things can be worked at. Kids pick that up. Why work it out? I won’t be going to this school tomorrow. My parents divorce each other. What are my role models for how to handle pain?”

  While parents spend an average of two minutes a day communicating with their child, the television set spends an average of three and a half hours a day with their child. The average American will watch more TV by the time he is six than he will spend talking to his father for the rest of his life. (A study of 156 preschoolers found almost half preferred watching TV to being with their fathers.) By the time he graduates from high school, he will have logged twenty thousand hours in front of the TV, compared with eleven thousand in the classroom. Parted from this third parent, children may experience severe separation anxiety. Television doesn’t cause suicide, of course, but adolescents often watch it to reduce loneliness and may thus become less likely to develop real relationships. A thirteen-year-old boy whose family had recently moved to northern California was reluctant to go to his new school because he was overweight. He stayed in his room and watched the television he had been given as a reward for earning good grades at his previous school. His father removed the TV from his room, telling him he would get it back when he returned to school. Hours later the boy shot himself, leaving a note that said, “I can’t stand another day of school and especially another minute without television.”

  Real life may pale next to television. “TV bombards kids with the glamorous and the thrilling, and then they have to go out and live their lives, and their lives are not glamorous and thrilling,” says a high school counselor. “TV doesn’t help kids understand that life on a day-to-day level can be boring and mundane and upsetting. Being held up to that image when you have to face the realities of your life can be discouraging, if not depressing.” And on TV no problem is so great that it can’t be solved in an hour.

  Often the solution is achieved by violence. By the time he is graduated from high school, the average child will have witnessed two hundred thousand acts of violence, forty thousand murders, and at least eight hundred suicides on television. One study computed that murder is one hundred times more prevalent on television than it is in reality, and that television crime is twelve times more violent than crime in real life. “Television has brought about the virtual immersion in violence into which our children are born,” George Gerbner, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, told a House subcommittee during hearings on “The Social/Behavioral Effects of Violence on Television” in 1981. Since then, more than a thousand studies have concluded that children saturated in television violence—or in video game violence—are more apt to solve their own problems that way. At a Congressional Public Health Summit in 2000, six prominent medical groups warned that children exposed to media violence tend to exhibit increased antisocial and aggressive behavior; to be less sensitive to violence and victims of violence; to view the world as violent and mean; to see violence as an acceptable way to settle conflicts; and to want to see more violence—on TV, in video games, and in real life.

  Violence on television—or in movies, video games, and books—reflects violence in the outside world, and the chicken-or-the-egg question of precedence will continue to be debated. Whatever the cause, violence as a solution is increasingly used inside and outside the family. And a teenager ready to explode is more likely than ever to have the means at hand. As the adolescent suicide rate tripled
from the 1950s to the 1990s, the rate of gun ownership in the United States soared, as did the rate of youth suicide by firearms. “The increase in the use of guns accounts for almost all of the increase noted in youthful suicide,” psychologist Alan Berman observed.

  Personal struggles can appear even more hopeless when the outside world seems no better off—when on any given day a teenager can pick up a newspaper or turn on a television and learn about starvation in Africa, terrorism in the Middle East—or in the United States—and an abundance of murders, muggings, accidents, and natural disasters. At the breakfast table children pour milk from a carton that bears the faces of children their age who are missing and perhaps kidnapped; in coloring books they fill in a picture of a boy running from a stranger who has offered him a ride; at the mall they are fingerprinted so they will more easily be traced if they disappear. Teenagers live in a paradoxical world in which the 350,000 commercials they see by the time they graduate high school tell them to be the fastest, the strongest, the brightest, the best-looking, the wealthiest, and the winningest, while forty thousand TV murders, the morning paper, and the evening news tell them they might not be alive tomorrow. Adolescents are caught between these extremes, and the gap between who they are and who they are told they should be grows larger. And the powerlessness of the outside world to solve its problems may match the powerlessness a teenager feels inside. Faced with an increasing sense of impotence, an adolescent may believe that the one thing he still owns is his life, and suicide is the only way he can exercise control over his universe. If I can’t control my life, I can control my death. And to that growing number of voices chanting “USA! USA! USA!” and “We’re number one! We’re number one!” which beats like a tom-tom on a teenager’s brain, there is a flip side, expressed in the lone answering voice of the seventeen-year-old senior who, at his high school graduation in Massachusetts, stepped to the podium and announced, “This is the American way,” pulled a gun from beneath his robe, and shot himself, although not fatally.