Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves

ISBN-13: 9780226755557

Media Type: Paperback(First Edition)

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Publication Date: 10-23-2020

Pages: 272

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Jesse Bering is the author of Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, and The Belief Instinct. He is the director of the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

the call to oblivion

Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange. The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.

Virginia Woolf, "The Death of the Moth" (1942)

Just behind my former home in upstate New York, in a small, dense pocket of woods, stood an imposing lichen-covered oak tree built by a century of sun and dampness and frost, its hardened veins crisscrossing on the forest floor. It was just one of many such specimens in this copse of dappled shadows, birds, and well-worn deer tracks, but this particular tree held out a single giant limb crooked as an elbow, a branch so deliberately poised that whenever I'd stroll past it while out with the dogs on our morning walks, it beckoned me.

It was the perfect place, I thought, to hang myself.

I'd had fleeting suicidal feelings since my late teenage years. But now I was being haunted day and night by what was, in fact, a not altogether displeasing image of my corpse spinning ever so slowly from a rope tied around this creaking, pain-relieving branch. It's an absurd thought — that I could have observed my own dead body as if I'd casually stumbled upon it. And what good would my death serve if it meant having to view it through the eyes of the very same head that I so desperately wanted to escape from in the first place?

Nonetheless, I couldn't help but fixate on this hypothetical scene of the lifeless, pirouetting dummy, this discarded sad sack whose long-suffering owner had been liberated from a world in which he didn't truly belong.

Globally, a million people a year kill themselves, and many times that number try to do so. That's probably a hugely conservative estimate, too; for reasons such as stigma and prohibitive insurance claims, suicides and attempts are notoriously underreported when it comes to the official statistics. Roughly, though, these figures translate to the fact that someone takes their own life every forty seconds. Between now and the time you finish reading the next paragraph, someone, somewhere, will decide that death is a more welcoming prospect than breathing another breath in this world and will permanently remove themselves from the population.

The specific issues leading any given person to become suicidal are as different, of course, as their DNA — involving chains of events that one expert calls "dizzying in their variety" — but that doesn't mean there aren't common currents pushing one toward this fatal act. We're going to get a handle on those elusive themes in this book and, ultimately, begin to make sense of what remains one of the greatest riddles of all time: Why would an otherwise healthy person, someone even in the prime of their life, "go against nature" by hastening their death? After all, on the surface, suicide wouldn't appear to be a very smart Darwinian tactic, given that being alive would seem to be the first order of business when it comes to survival of the fittest.

But like most scientific questions, it turns out it's a little more complicated than that.

We won't be dealing here with "doctor-assisted suicide" or medical euthanasia, what Derek Humphrey in Final Exit regarded as "not suicide [but] self-deliverance ... thoughtful, accelerated death to avoid further suffering from a physical disease." I consider such merciful instances of death almost always to be ethical and humane. Instead, we'll be focusing in the present book on those self-killings precipitated by fleeting or ongoing mental distress, namely, those that aren't the obvious result of physical pain or infirmity. Our primary analysis will center on the suicides of otherwise normal folks battling periodic depression or who suddenly find themselves in unexpected and overwhelming social circumstances. Plenty of suicides are linked to major psychiatric conditions (in which the person has a tenuous grasp of reality, such as in schizophrenia), but plenty aren't. And it's that everyday person dealing with suicidal thoughts — the suicidal person in all of us — who is the main subject of this book.

Benjamin Franklin famously quipped that "nine men in ten are would-be suicides." Maybe so, but some of us will lapse into this state more readily. It's now believed that around 43 percent of the variability in suicidal behavior among the general population can be explained by genetics, while the remaining 57 percent is attributable to environmental factors. When people who have a genetic predisposition for suicidality find themselves assaulted by a barrage of challenging life events, they are particularly vulnerable.

The catchall mental illness explanation only takes us so far. The vast majority of those who die by suicide, with some estimates as high as 90 percent, have underlying psychiatric conditions, especially mood disorders such as depressive illness and bipolar disorder. (I have the former, coupled with social anxiety.) But it's also true that not everyone with depression is suicidal, nor, believe it or not, is everyone who commits suicide depressed. According to one estimate, around 5 percent of depressed people will die by suicide, but about half a percent of the non-depressed population will end up taking their own lives too.

As for my own recurring compulsion to end my life, which flares up like a sore tooth at the whims of bad fortune, subsides for a while, yet always threatens to throb again, the types of problems that trigger these dangerous desires change over time. Edwin Shneidman, the famous suicidologist — yes, that's an actual occupation — had an apt term for this acute, intolerable feeling that makes people want to die: "psychache," he called it. It's like what Winona Ryder's character in the film Girl, Interrupted said after throwing back a fistful of aspirin in a botched suicide attempt — she just wanted "to make the shit stop." And like a toothache, which can be set off by any number of packaged treats at our fingertips, psychache can be caused by an almost unlimited number of things in our modern world.

What made me suicidal as a teenager — the ever-looming prospect of being outed as gay in an intolerant small midwestern town — isn't what pushes those despairing buttons in me now. I've been out of the closet for twenty years and with my partner, Juan, for over a decade. I do sometimes still wince at the memory of my adolescent fear regarding my sexual orientation, but the constant worry and anxiety about being forced prematurely out of the closet are gone now.

Still, other seemingly unsolvable problems continue to crop up as a matter of course.

* * *

What drew me to those woods behind my house not so long ago was my unemployment. I was sorely unprepared for it. Not long before, I'd enjoyed a fairly high status in the academic world. Frankly, I was spoiled. And lucky. That part I didn't realize until much later. I'd gotten my first faculty position at the University of Arkansas straight out of grad school. Then, at the age of thirty, I moved to Northern Ireland, where I ran my own research center for several years at the Queen's University Belfast.

Somewhere along the way, though, my scholarly ambitions began to wear thin.

It was a classic case of career burnout. By the time I was thirty-five, I'd already done most of what I'd set out to do: I was publishing in the best journals, speaking at conferences all over the world, scoring big grants, and writing about my research (in religion and psychology) for popular outlets. If I were smart, I'd have kept my nose to the grindstone. Instead, I grew restless. "Now what?" I asked myself.

The prospect of doing slight iterations of the same studies over and over became a nightmare, the academic's equivalent of being stuck in a never-ending time loop. Besides, although controversial issues like religion are never definitively settled, I'd already answered my main research question, at least to my own satisfaction. (Question: "What are the odds that religious ideas are a product of the human mind?" Answer: "Pretty darn high.")

With my professorial aspirations languishing, I began devoting more and more time to writing popular science essays for outfits such as Scientific American, Slate, Playboy, and a few others. My shtick was covering the salacious science beat. If you'd ever wondered about the relationship between gorilla fur, crab lice, and human pubic hair, about the mysterious psychopharmacological properties of semen, or why our species' peculiar penis is shaped like it is, I was your man. In fact, I wrote that very book: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?

The next book I was to write had an even more squirm-inducing title: Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us. Ever wonder why amputees turn on some folks, others can't keep from having an orgasm when an attractive passerby lapses into a sneezing fit, or why women are generally kinkier than men? Again, I was your clickable go-to source.

Now, perhaps I should have thought more about how, in a conservative and unforgiving academic world, such subject matter would link my name inexorably with unspeakable things. Sure, my articles got page clicks. My books made you blush at Barnes & Noble. But these titles aren't exactly ones that university deans and provosts like to boast about to donors. Once you go public with the story of how you masturbated as a teenager to a wax statue of an anatomically correct Neanderthal (I swear it made sense in context), there is no going back. You can pretty much forget about ever getting inducted into the Royal Society. "Oh good riddance," I thought. Being finally free to write in a manner that suited me — and with my very own soapbox to say the things I'd long wanted to say about society's soul-crushing hypocrisy — was incredibly appealing.

There was also the money. I wasn't getting rich, but I'd earned large enough advances with my book deals to quit my academic job, book a one-way ticket from Belfast back to the U.S., and put a deposit down on an idyllic little cottage next to a babbling brook just outside of Ithaca. Back then, the dark patch of forest behind the house didn't seem so sinister; it was just a great place to walk our two border terriers, Gulliver and Uma, our rambunctious Irish imports. The whole domestic setting seemed the perfect little place to build the perfect little writing life — a fairy tale built on the foundations of other people's "deviant" sexualities.

You can probably see where this is heading. Juan, the more practical of us, raised his eyebrows early on over such an impulsive and drastic career move. By that I mean he was resolutely set against it. "What are you going to do after you finish the book?" he'd ask, sensing doom on the horizon.

"Write another book I guess. Maybe do freelance. I can always go back to teaching, right? C'mon, don't be such a pessimist!"

"I don't know," Juan would say worriedly. But he also realized how unhappy I was in Northern Ireland, so he went along, grudgingly, with my loosely laid plans.

* * *

I wouldn't say my fall from grace was spectacular. But it was close. If nothing else, it was deeply embarrassing. It's hard to talk about even now that I'm, literally, out of the woods.

That's the thing. Much of what makes people suicidal is hard to talk about. Shame plays a major role. Even suicide notes, as we'll learn, don't always key us in to the real reason someone opts out of existence. (Forgive the glib euphemisms; there are only so many times one can write the word "suicide" without expecting readers' eyes to glaze over.) If I'll be asking others in this book to be honest about their feelings, though, it would be unfair for me to hide the reasons for my own self-loathing and sense of irredeemable failure during this dark period.

It's often at our very lowest that we cling most desperately to our points of pride, as though we're trying to convince not only others, but also ourselves, that we still have value.

Once, long ago, when I was about twenty, I met an old man of about ninety who carried around with him an ancient yellowed letter everywhere he went. People called him "the Judge."

"I want to show you something, young man," he said to me after a dinner party, reaching a shaky hand into his vest pocket to retrieve the letter. "See that?" he asked, beaming. A twisted arthritic finger was pointing to a typewritten line from the Prohibition era. As I tried to make sense of the words on the page, he studied my gaze under his watery pink lids to be sure it was really sinking in. "It's a commendation from Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor of New York back then. Says here, see, says right here I was the youngest Supreme Court Justice in the state. Twenty. Eight. Years. Old." With each punctuated word, he gave the paper a firm tap. "Whaddaya think of that?"

"That's incredibly impressive," I said.

And it was. In fact, I remember being envious of him. Not because of his accomplished legal career, but because, as I so often have been in my life, I was suicidal at the time; and unlike me, he hadn't long to go before slipping gently off into that good night.

One of the cruelest tricks played on the genuinely suicidal mind is that time slows to a crawl. When each new dawn welcomes what feels like an eternity of mental anguish, the yawning expanse between youth and old age might as well be interminable Hell itself.

But the point is that when we're thrown against our wishes into a liminal state — that reluctant space between activity and senescence, employed and unemployed, married and single, closeted and out, citizen and prisoner, wife and widow, healthy person and patient, wealthy and broke, celebrity and has-been, and so on — it's natural to take refuge in the glorified past of our previous selves. And to try to remind others of this eclipsed identity as well.

Alas, it's a lost cause. Deep down, we know there's no going back. Our identities have changed permanently in the minds of others. In the real world (the one whose axis doesn't turn on cheap clichés and self-help canons about other people's opinions of us not mattering), we're inextricably woven into the fabric of society.

For better or worse, our well-being is hugely dependent on what others think we are.

Social psychologist Roy Baumeister, whom we'll meet again later on, argues that idealistic life conditions actually heighten suicide risk because they create unreasonable standards for personal happiness. When things get a bit messy, people who have led mostly privileged lives — those seen by society as having it made — have a harder time coping with failures. "A reverse of fortune, as society is constituted," wrote the eighteenth-century thinker Madame de Staël, "produces a most acute unhappiness, which multiplies itself in a thousand different ways. The most cruel of all, however, is the loss of the rank we occupied in the world. Imagination has as much to do with the past, as with the future, and we form with our possessions an alliance, whose rupture is most grievous."

Like the Judge, I was dangerously proud of my earlier status. The precipitous drop between my past and my present job footing was discombobulating. I wouldn't have admitted it then, or even known I was guilty of such a cognitive crime, but I also harbored an unspoken sense of entitlement. Now, I felt like Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall by Albert Camus. In the face of a series of unsettling events, the successful Parisian defense attorney watches as his career, and his entire sense of meaning, goes up in smoke. Only when sifting through the ashes are his biases made clear. "As a result of being showered with blessings," Clamence observes of his worldview till then,

I felt, I hesitate to admit, marked out. Personally marked out, among all, for that long uninterrupted success. I refused to attribute that success to my own merits and could not believe that the conjunction in a single person of such different and such extreme virtues was the result of chance alone. This is why in my happy life I felt somehow that that happiness was authorized by some higher decree. When I add that I had no religion you can see even better how extraordinary that conviction was.

Similarly, what I had long failed to fully appreciate were the many subtle and incalculable forces behind my earlier success, forces that had always been beyond my control. I felt somehow, what is the word ... charmed is too strong, more like fatalistic. The reality was that I was like everyone else, simply held upright by the brittle bones of chance. And now, they threatened to give way. I'd worked hard, sure, but again, I'd been lucky. Back when I'd earned my doctoral degree, the economy wasn't so gloomy and there were actually opportunities. I was also doing research on a hot new topic — my PhD dissertation was on children's reasoning about the afterlife — and I was eager to make a name for myself in a burgeoning field. Now, eleven years later, having turned my back on the academy, fresh out of book ideas, along with a name pretty much synonymous with penises and pervs, it was a very different story. Career burnout? Please. That's a luxury for the employed.

I just needed a steady paycheck.

---

Excerpted from "Suicidal"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Jesse Bering.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

<

Table of Contents