Suicides In Seattle

Two young women, 20somethings both, killed themselves in Seattle last week. I didn't know either, but certainly know several of their friends and acquaintances in the loose confederation of artists, musicians, techies, waiters and late-night freethinkers with which I run. Suicide is such bullshit.

I didn't ask too many questions, because, as some of you know, I have written at-length on the topic before and that it's rough terrain for me to re-visit. The general picture I get, though, is of talent going down the toilet. That sucks, and it'll suck 31,000 times a year in this country.

What staggers me is that this country has been unable to do much about suicide for as long as anyone has tried to do anything about it. The annual rate of suicide in America runs at about 10.5 people per 100,000 residents. It has dropped about 5 percent to 10 percent in the last 50 years, despite untold billions of dollars being spent on psych research, psych meds, psychosocial treatments, health care, housing, telephone help lines and public health education campaigns. None of that has worked to much effect by any honest reckoning of the situation.

To give you an idea of just how ineffectual some well-meaning initiatives have been, check this out: in 1999, the federal government announced its goal of halving that rate by 2010. That would take it down to the rate od death attributable to AIDS/HIV to give you a comparison. The move was part of then-Surgeon-General David Satcher's call to action on mental illness in America, which begat the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. The basic idea is that we would carve into--OK, bad metaphor--the suicide rate by way of advances in treatments, public recognition that mental illness was addressable/destimatization and public outreach efforts. In other words, your basic public health approach. Last time I checked, America's suicide rate hadn't budged aside from year-to-year fluctuations.

That's discouraging, of course. But it's also hopeful. The answers to addressing this problem are to be found outside of current methods. I only wish I knew what to replace them with that would be effective in a society-wide fashion.

My own thoughts went something like this:

"Suicide is most often the impulsive act of a desperate man. I can do a cage match with desperation, but the wild, mad, suicidal impulses truly horrify me. You can get to a point of desperately wanting to stick a gun in your mouth faster than you can read this sentence.

Somehow, two things have reeled me in when I've been in that state of mind and being. First, the somewhat dopey principle that I could never do that to my parents, especially my mother. Second, a sense that even in the darkest of my dark moments, my life can't possibly end that way. I'm too interested in the world and human mechanics not to want to watch the parade. Albert Camus, who called suicide the only philosophical problem, had a similar explanation: 'In a man's attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body's judgment is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation'. I'll buy that."

I am very sorry that those two young women weren't buying.

You can find the Freedom Commission's entire report here. It is fascinating reading, especially in light of how little progress has been made on addressing mental illness and suicide in America in the years since.