Reading About Suicide
A year of learning, heartbreak, and reverence.
I finished Night Falls Fast by Kay Redfield Jamison a few days ago. It is the eleventh book about suicide I’ve read since beginning my intensive journey into the subject last year. Coincidentally, eleven is also the number of people who attempt or die by suicide each day in my city. With that in mind, this feels like a pertinent moment to step back and reflect on my experience delving into the world of suicide literature.
The Books
Every book on this subject has, one way or the other, contributed directly or indirectly to answering the ultimate question of “Why do people die by suicide?” What I have read has provided much perspective: scientific, academic, and lived.
Thomas Joiner’s aptly named book Why People Die by Suicide attempts to answer this question by presenting a thorough model for the suicidal process: his interpersonal theory of suicide. He builds off of the work of other suicidologists who have posited theories over the past century, such as Aaron T. Beck’s hopelessness model and Émile Durkheim’s pioneering study of suicide, which kickstarted its scientific inquiry. Joiner’s theory leads the way in my view — at least scientifically.
Closer to the source, Let Me Finish by Udo Grashoff is a collection of forty-five suicide notes presented and contextualized as neutrally as possible, allowing the final words of the dead to answer the question for themselves. Suicide notes are principal places for the truth of the act — though often contradictory and frustrating to study — about as intimate a picture of “why” as the living can construct.
With lived experience from all authors, books like A Very Human Ending by Jesse Bering, Night Falls Fast by Kay Redfield Jamison, and the classic The Savage God by Al Alvarez tackle self-inflicted death from all angles, with academic expertise and insightful prose. All three of them have provided reasoned and substantiated explanations while acknowledging the unfathomable nature of the act — something to be respected.
One personal favorite — which has influenced much of my thinking — is On Suicide by Jean Améry, which seeks to answer the question by defending that voluntary death is ultimately human and to be understood with “introspection and empathy.” He argues that since suicide is something that people choose out of necessity to their personal truths, it is a human right. I insist vehemently we inquire further on what this implies — to criticize his ethics especially — but his humanization of suicide is to be admired greatly.1
Inevitably, the question of “why?” is at the forefront of most people’s minds when they are trying to know more about the decision to die — myself included. The breadth of writing, commentary, and data is vast and impossible to know completely, and yet the answer remains elusive because to each attempt at understanding there is a gap.
The Gaps
After everything I have read thus far, I fear that the question may be entirely unanswerable. All models of suicide have their problems: outcomes aren’t measurable (which mitigated risk factor ultimately causes suicide rates to decrease cannot be determined), survivors are subject to societal pressure to conform (stigma surrounding an incomplete suicide attempt impedes honesty), reductionist points of view obstruct the totality of the act (“mental health is the sole/main cause of suicide” is a reductionist perspective), and we simply cannot speak to the dead.2
Conversations surrounding the choice to die are laden with stigma and the misplaced divide between the living and potential suicides — particularly online in Reddit forums like r/SuicideMeme and r/SuicideWatch, where the harms of stigma, as well as vitriolic contempt (from suicidal and non-suicidal alike), unite to showcase the suicidal individual as unheard and wounded — which is far too often the truth. When the living and suicidal are divided, people are (rightfully) hurt, and the subject of suicide becomes volatile. Reaching an understanding as to what causes people to kill themselves at all becomes increasingly difficult within this environment.
How can the question be answered, given the state of suicide being just as contorted and painful as it was prior to all this research? How can the question be answered if we all collectively shrug our shoulders and say, “that is just how it is,” slipping into the safety of our institutions of truth: medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and sociology — which, in all their scientific prowess, fail to give complete shape to the allure of death and the incomprehensible mark it leaves behind?
My Appreciation
Even with all of that said, I’ve found myself full of respect for the labors of love and commitment that each of these texts ultimately are — even if they are all wanting in some respect. Each book has taught me countless things about the subject, and I now feel caught up to speed with the front lines of established knowledge. There is a definite comfort I take from comprehending even a portion of it. At times I let the holes overwhelm me, but for the most part, I take solace in what I have learned.
Risk factors — what they mean for the prediction and prevention of suicide — are quantifiably backed and important: mental health, history of suicide, demographics, and genetics are all predispositions for suicide. This list could be much longer and provides endless combinations of factors to substantiate why they might coalesce into a final act of self-destruction.
Social triggers — adverse life events such as a breakup, job loss, death of someone close, or a transitional period — can be the spark that sets off a self-inflicted death. Generally, these exacerbate underlying predispositions, leading to a suicidal crisis. Again, this provides a solid generalized framework for why someone might take their own life.
A more modern interpretation is Joiner’s interpersonal theory of suicide. According to this view, in order for someone to kill themselves, they must believe that they can and want to. For someone to want to die, in his view, the suicidal individual must feel as if they don’t belong — an outsider — and that they are burdensome, ineffective upon their world. Any single component isn’t enough for suicide to occur; both capability and desire must be true at once. As all-encompassing as any theory I have read so far.
It is imperative to keep in mind that these scientifically backed descriptions must also hold a very real human being who is suffering to some unique capacity — we have to do everything in our power not to distance ourselves from those who suffer this despair (from people) be it in fear or in the safety of scientific “truth.” I talk about suicide as human in the post linked below.
Closing in on what might be the most meaningful point about what I have learned — specifically regarding the exploration of the ultimate question “why” — is that invariably, the people who are researching the subject have lived experience themselves, either as suicidal or through the death by suicide of a loved one.
I read these books and feel the distance at times, but then an introduction begins with a personal recounting of a tragic death, despite the factual nature of the book.3 I can’t help but become reverent. The epilogue concludes feats of intellectual rigor — which I had taken to like any math problem — with the story of a personal suicide attempt, all of the sudden touching my heart as well as my mind.4 These books constantly remind me of people’s vulnerability — not just the ones studied, but the ones doing the studying.
Few lives remain untouched by suicide over a lifetime. It is rarer still for someone so invested in the subject to write a book about it without having been impacted themselves. I have an enduring respect and care for anyone who takes up the pen to describe and understand suicide — it isn’t an altogether forgiving subject.
My Feelings
I struggle to describe the sensation of completing the last page of a book about suicide — the snapping shut of the back cover, and the slowly accelerating thoughts that rise from the heart and begin to ravage my nervous system. I always get chills.
You might have to read one of the books to understand. I recommend Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley to experience the sort of subtle disturbance I would say every book on suicide possesses to varying degrees.
One can read enough stories about people strangled, cut, and broken by their own hand to grow somewhat of a thicker skin for it — especially when it is presented as evidence for some model or theory of suicide. However, I refuse to ever be fully comfortable reading the stories of the now ominous times leading up, the fleeting moments of calm, that most suicides include. I will certainly never be able to resist the tears that flow when I see the wake left behind.
Suicide is the climax of the story — it lasts maybe a page or two — but the rising action and resolution are what really compel me. We are human beings, each containing universes of experience, who can suffer so gravely we wish, and do, snuff ourselves out. And the living, whose worlds are changed forever, are left to grieve.
My heart will always break as I watch each star get slowly plucked out of the sky — how they fall upon the heads of all those who loved the constellations. It goes without saying, but given the stigma and the inhumanity of some, I must say that I become more and more convicted in my demands for treating suicides as human beings deserving of nothing but empathy and compassion with each book I finish.
I have read books on suicide where experimental methodology, statistical analysis, and rather calloused scientific practices are discussed at length, but no matter how intensely technical the jargon gets, the underlying fact that we are talking about one of life’s greatest tragedies permeates every word.
Although unintuitive at first, killing oneself is not horror, nor is it drama — it is tragedy to the highest degree — we must honor this truth with dignity.
Again, every attempt at explanation is chock-full of argument, trying to describe and answer “why suicide.” In the end, no matter how persuasive the explanation, the reality that suicide is beyond fathoming is betrayed. We simply cannot comprehend the inner workings of a mind that is not our own — no matter how much we love them.
These books and the stories within them — the grim, the triumphant, and the truly humbling — have welled up a ball of inarticulable emotion inside me so enormous, I have felt on several occasions that I might implode.
I feel as if I have dived headfirst into a body of water I desperately want to reach the bottom of, knowing damn well I never will.
Conclusion
Still, I have hope. For love or for absurdity — what difference does it make?5
This is where I am now: writing and continuing to read. But more importantly, I clutch the people I love close. We are all still alive, right now. And this is the most important moment of our lives. To use the same quote that Kay Redfield Jamison used to conclude Night Falls Fast — by Douglas Dunn, in his poem “Disenchantments”:
Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
I hope to write more about On Suicide by Jean Améry in the future.
The posthumous examination of a life — better known as the psychological autopsy — can never yield the truth, as the one who definitively knows what happened is dead. Such is the paradox with which every suicidologist is confronted: to know the mind that is already gone.
Why People Die By Suicide begins with a retelling of the suicide of Thomas Joiner’s father.
The Savage God ends with the story of Al Alvarez’s own suicide attempt.
Read my essay on Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, as it contains the start of why I endeavor in a seemingly never-ending, never-answering subject like suicide.
It is admittedly abstract. Why I care about suicide so much is another piece I’d like to write about someday.
This moved me enormously. Your stance of compassion is truly the one to which I subscribe. For my son, always and forever.