suicide – Andy White Blog

Suicide.

Suicide is becoming an issue of epidemic proportions. Almost daily, we see that some public figure has unexpectedly and inexplicably killed themselves.

More British soldiers and veterans took their own lives in 2012 than died fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan over the same period. A million adults in the USA report making a suicide attempt in the last year (source; Medical News Today) an increase of 30% in a single decade.

Why this avalanche of tragic deaths? And why does it seem to haunt ‘success’? How often do you hear of a suicide, ”s/he had everything going for him/her.” ?

People tend to think of suicides as the last resort of the failed and marginalized yet all too often suicide stalks the successful, the bright, the gregarious. The suicide of Anthony Bordain seems to have evoked such public grief and shock, not simply at his loss but at the incomprehension of why such a successful, outwardly happy man with a brilliant career and a young child that he loved, a man who ‘had everything’, should do such a thing.

Conversely, Bruno Bettleheim, a psychoanalyst who survived Dachau and Buchenwald, made the observation that despite the horror of their situation, surrounded by torture, degradation and imminent death, there was rarely ever a suicide. Yet, though he survived those horrors, he too would eventually kill himself years later in his luxury apartment in Santa Monica, surrounded by art treasures.

It seems entirely incongruous.

You might look with apparent comprehension at the high suicide rates of disenfranchised indigenous people and nod knowingly at the background of poverty, prejudice, and unemployment forgetting for a moment the loss of soul incurred by those who have been robbed of their sacred hoop, their mythic connection to ancestral lands, and feel you understand.

Yet incomprehension must set back in with the further consideration that those who profited in the process seem just as prone to suicide despite their newfound wealth, the outward trappings of success, the safety of protected positions and envied lifestyles. Statistics show that suicide rates are higher in industrialized nations with greater median incomes than in developing countries with far lower GDP’s and that white people are more likely to kill themselves than less privileged people of colour.

So what the fuck is going on?

There are a number of theories. Its colloquially said that suicide is the most sincere form of self criticism and on the surface of things that it is the result of depression.

”Depression represents the major cause of suicides. To understand the leading causes of depression is essential for suicide prevention.” Eric Herbert. (Income and Median Analysis).

Yet its equally the case that suicides occur when people are on the mend from depression.

”The saddest irony is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better.” R. Cavett.

Suicide is also as much a criticism of others as it might be of oneself. I don’t want your shitty world, or to quote the disturbed teenager Smut from Peter Greenaway’s movie ‘Drowning by Numbers’, whose final line before hanging himself is..

‘The purpose of this game is to punish all those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions. It is the best game of all where the winner is also the loser and the judge’s decision is final.”

This ‘punishment’ not withstanding, it might be equally fair to say that suicide is a form of ‘retroflected rage’, anger turned inwards..

”murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.” S. Freud.

and so we are really none the wiser.

Perhaps we need to look elsewhere…

The fact that suicide is in the top three causes of death amongst adolescents and in the top five for adults, (once you have eliminated being old as a cause of death, Alzheimers, Heart disease, Strokes etc) suggests that there is something in the fabric of our culture itself that herds us like Lemmings in what Noam Chomsky calls our ‘race to the precipice’.

I would like to suggest that this epidemic of suicides has to do with what could be described as the West’s cult of Ego, our attachment to and idealization of a life unbeset by doubt, hesitation or vulnerability, a lifestyle exemplified by Tennyson’s ‘Land of the Lotos Eaters’.. where the protagonists refuse to ask questions of meaning or purpose and are in conflict with any demands placed upon them by life..

‘Why are we weigh’d upon with heaviness,

And utterly consumed with sharp distress,

While all things else have rest from weariness?’

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore

Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;

O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

The mariners feel that the satisfaction of their personal desires is the goal of life. They are unable to find meaning in anything outside the ego’s reference points.

‘Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,’ ibid

and so are fated, having lived in a way where everything is obvious and self congratulatory, to emulate the lotus eaters who throw themselves from the cliff tops once they reach the second half of life because they are unsupported and unreplenished by the well springs of the Unconscious.

Such an inflated consciousness…

‘Is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.” C. G. Jung

The ego says, ‘the psyche is whatever I know of it’. It cannot accept that creative inspiration, meaning and purpose, the fire of life and the desire to live under any circumstances come from depths that underpin it and so it is reduced to enduring life rather than celebrating it. It creeps through life avoiding risk and danger, eternally shoring itself up against the unknown so as to remain in confident surety.

Life is precarious. We break like eggs. But if our response to anxious fragility is to continually shore ourselves up, seeking perennial safety, refusing chaos and risk, then our chances of finding meaning will be eroded and our exposure to destructive impulses will increase.

”The creative force which seeks to manifest in the individual is walled off by increasing rigidity which seeks only safety, for exploration includes dangerous possibility.” Frances Wickes.

An internal gulf opens up, threatening to swallow life itself. The ego doubles down, starts to carve itself into stoney certainty, sets its face into a parody of confidence and narcissistic bonhomie, projects its vulnerability and begins to feel threatened by a seemingly hostile and unsustaining world.

Rigidity builds windowless walls which shut out perception of creativity, unaware of the sound of the hard hammer whose blow is death of the soul.” ibid

Hillman, in his ‘Suicide and the Soul’, points out that suicide is doing on the outside what needs to happen on the inside. Something has to die..

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death. T. S. Eliot.

But this is not a literal death. Nor even the death or a ‘getting rid’ of ego. It is the death of a delusion that we are somehow separate from a life whose purpose is limited to our own personal satisfactions. It means relinquishing the helm and listening to the still small voice way down inside that wants your service, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you….”,

When I caught myself engaged in compulsive and addictive enactments that might easily have been the end of me, suicide by accident, the worst kind that cannot even take responsibility for pulling the trigger, I had the following dream…. I was in a community hall that seemed to have all the delights of life, diversions, amusements, arcades, frivolity… but then I noticed it had no windows, felt suffocated and had to get out. A young woman tried to stop me, pushing her breasts at me to try and divert my attention but I brush straight past her and with great effort stagger out into the street.

I knew I had to go into a shop that was guarded by bouncers who looked mean but let me in. Inside was an ancient library. I felt drawn to a particular shelf that required me to go out on a limb, very narrow floorboards above a yawning stairwell. A voice shouts out that there is great danger and I have to tread most carefully not to lose my footing. Then I see a small, thin volume covered in old vellum and know I have arrived at my goal. I pull it off the shelf. Its title is, ‘ The Forbidden Beauty.’ My heart surges with aliveness and joy .

To live well you have to shuck off the seduction of feeling eternally at home and familiar. You have to go in search of forbidden fruit, that which is truly sustaining, even if you don’t know where you are headed or what the goal may be. You have to go out on a limb and do things that are unscripted. You have to try things you’ve never done before, get reinvented by discomfort and danger, meet old situations with new attitude, break with traditions that no longer truly serve, take some risks, consider that you are deeper and wider than the puddle of consciousness that thinks its the only stretch of water in the world. Then the old Zen maxim, ”If you have to kill yourself be careful not to harm your body,” will begin to make sense…

and you can have a giggle with life rather than being overwhelmed by it.

Bad Baby.

Children need attention. If they don’t get it they will create it. The badly behaved child has simply had to resort to extreme measures in order to elicit something from otherwise empty vessels.

Even dog trainers know this.

It’s the owner.

The ‘naughty child’ is then rewarded in his efforts with shaming, which, though it has a pitiful prognosis, still gives emotional impoverishment a nucleus around which to cobble some semblance of going-on-being.

The problem with this, the price to be paid, is that such a child must then continue to behave in a way that elicits shaming in order to confirm their identity and continue to shore up that poorly self construct.

The Rule of Intentionality says that things have a way of panning out as they are supposed to. If you married someone who runs you down, then they are fulfilling a sacred service and ought to be paid. If you wake up after a drinking binge full of remorse and self loathing then that’s the purpose of getting so drunk. Many a junkie is equally addicted to the identity of being failed and shameful, formed way before they ever laid hands on their poison and much more difficult to give up.

Fulfilling expectation is instinctual. The Psyche takes a bet that baby will be born into adequate environs. Neural pathways are wide open to any signal or stimulus that gives baby information about herself on the basic assumption of a good enough environment that she’s hardwired to expect.

So the child attributes parental failing to herself. The parent is full of distaste because baby is distasteful. So that’s what she has to be. And sometimes it’s so close that you can’t see it. In fact it..

”may go unnoticed for the simple reason that s/he cannot conceive of an alternative kind of relation of Self to Other.” Jean Liedloff.

The feeling of intrinsic shame cannot be readily endured and so the Psyche grabs hold of the next best thing to bonding which is to identify with mother instead. She accepts the booby prize of being special, more like sisters now, which both hammers a few rusty sheets to her ramshakle hovel and shields her from the shame that underpins it, now invisible but still an enduring structure in the Psyche. Whilst being special and praised for all kinds of other things that have little to do with you may get you through the day, the underlying need to confirm the shame is biding its time.

”Instinctive forces do not reason. They assume the immense weight of their experience of Nature’s ways that it will serve the individual to be stabilized according to his initial experience.” ibid

So even though the narcissistic character is full of vanity and bluster, full of the archetypal power of mummy, consumed with specialness, so is he compelled by yet a deeper force to end up in the gutter one way or another, to bungle life despite himself.

In my opinion this is why Mr Trump seemingly does everything to hasten his own demise. Alienating his own secret service, making enemies of people who have dirt on him. He’s mocked for doing stupid things. These stupid things have an agenda, the end game of which looks like self-destructiveness but they might actually serve to keep him out of hospital. In the meantime the mockery and vilification will do nicely.

Sometimes things don’t make sense until you include in the mix a need to be scorned and hated. The apparent goal of domination and control is actually the means to an end, to obtain that which serves internal security better than loyalty, philanthropy or crushing your enemies. Humiliation.

Who is a stinky baby!

And so while it seems that fate comes to him from the outside, from the woodwork, from people dishing enough dirt, enough stink; it has all been carefully if unconsciously orchestrated and for a while shame and specialness will share the stage in a masochistic self-immolation of First and Only.

While all this entertainment is going down the rest of us run the risk of forgetting that Mr. Trump is a symbol. He is an expression of the Collective Psyche, the natural product of a culture that denigrates Mothering and rejects the Divine Feminine. This cancer runs through all of us Chosen People. Are you not special? Do you not have a political system so superior that it is exported through the bomb bay doors of Magnanimous Benevolence killing other mothers and babies for their own good every day of the week?

or at least if there is profit in it?

Strangely the number of enemies killed by our generous instruction in Afghanistan these last couple of years is not as high as the number of our own soldiers committing suicide in the privacy of their barracks.

Not to mention a hundred people a day in America alone who die of opioid overdose and the fifty thousand others a year that find more creative ways of commiting suicide in the face of unbearable shame.

Why else does a person kill themselves if not because they can no longer hold up their head? Behind all the Western facade of technological and moral superiority lurks a syndrome whose ultimate purpose is dark implosion.

and its way bigger than Trump.

Shame is systemic in our culture. If we do not wish to be ruled by tyrants then getting rid of them is only the beginning.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

On Wanting to kill Yourself.

If you believed the story about Lemmings throwing themselves from cliffs, as I did, for decades, what else are you so sure of that just ain’t so?

Turns out it was a lie. Lemmings do not throw themselves from clifftops. Apparently the whole thing was invented by Walt Disney who wanted to sex up a documentary he made in 1958 called, ‘White Wilderness.” According to Canadian Wildlife and Fisheries the sets were fake, the Lemmings had to be bussed in from Manitoba where they were herded about and finally thrown, manually, into the sea. All in aid of Walt’s ‘True life adventure’ series…..

”The lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off a cliff by the Disney filmmakers.” R. Woodford.

Meantime the narrator Winston Hibbler trills,

“A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny.”

The lie is as obsessively strange as the story.

http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=56

The fantasy is more curious and interesting than the motive for deception.

Perhaps it says more about Disney and the culture he was helping to mould than he might have wished. It is the Disney generation, after all, that have a taste for marching off cliffs like never before, not the sensible and much maligned Lemming.

Beachy Head is a favourite clifftop for Britons to kill themselves. It even has a beer named after it, ‘Beachy Head’s Christmas Jumper, critisised by families of the deceased as ‘insensitive’. The clifftop is patrolled by chaplains who are about to be de-funded despite awards from the Queen. A gift shop in town sells sombre writing pads of just a few leaves and disposable pens with black ink.

No, that last bits not true, about the shop.

After several tours of combat duty what began to weigh upon me most heavily was not the horror of war, nor what I had done, or seen, or had levelled at me. It was how easy it had been to persuade me to march from the cliff top even without any great desperation to die or madly scribbled goodbyes.

Do we have a ‘death instinct’ as a species, or is there something peculiar about a culture that immolates itself on a steady basis? Recently released statistics of US service suicides show that troops are actually killing themselves at a higher rate than are killed by Isis, though the figures seem to be consistent with a shocking three-fold increase in US civilian suicides since 2000.

What is going on?

You might be tempted, along with Walt’s phoney commentator, to postulate that sudden increases in suicides were about overpopulation or some dire tragedy unfolding so desperate we’d die to avoid it, but the evidence points to the contrary. Countries with the lowest GPU and the toughest lives are also the least at risk from suicide. Psychoanalyst and Auchwitz survivor Bruno Bettleheim made the observation of physical and mental extremis that …

‘Despite the inhuman deprivation in the camps there was scarcely ever a suicide.’ B. Bettleheim.

Others are of the opinion that suicide is an act of revenge.

”It is always consoling to think of suicide. In that way one gets through many a bad night.” F. Nietzsche.

though in all fairness Fredrick, a dose of tertiary syphilis combined with the terminal mercury poisoning used to treat the 19th C pecker would wear down anyone’s will to live.

There is a fantastic movie called, ‘Drowning by Numbers,’ a macabre look at the vast grey area between murdering yourself and murdering others. It puts an astute line into the mouth of Smut, an adolescent boy in a family of killers and sycophants who finally hangs himself with a skipping rope,

”to punish all those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions.” Smut

all of which would seem to bear out the anonymous saying..

‘when you commit suicide you are killing the wrong person.’

‘Retroflected’ rage is rage turned back upon oneself, but with the intent to castigate those left behind. I’ve known several people to be saved from suicide by realising how much they wanted to (justifiably) kill their nearest and dearest.

The wish to kill oneself is what Marion Woodman would call, ‘concretisation’, doing on the outside what needs to happen on the inside, doing in the flesh what needs to happen in the psyche, making a symbolic equation between matter and identity. We mistake the pointing finger for the moon and believe it is ourselves that have to die rather than our situation, our self-construct, or a belief system that no longer serves.

”Without dying to the world of the old order, there is no place for renewal, because it is illusory to hope that growth is but an additive process requiring neither sacrifice nor death. The soul favors the death experience to usher in change. Veiwed this way, the suicidal impulse is a transformative drive..” James Hillman.

There’s an old buddhist saying,..

”if you are going to kill yourself be careful not to harm your body.” anon.

The dying has to happen, by itself, from within. This is trixy for anyone with humungous control issues. In fact, you could say that suicide was a way of trying to cheat death itself by taking on the job ahead of time, when what life you have, when death itself, cannot be something to look forward to as meaningful experience. Suicide is a logical choice of any life lived purely for its own ends and for whom there is no mystery.

On page one of a Google search on the subject you will find www.findangel.org/‎ whose banner runs..

‘Do not try to predict the future,’

It’s an insightful warning to those in their legion whose narcissistic control issues are so enfragiled that they have to know what’s happening next all the time, even to the point of orchestrating their own demise.

‘Live as though you had centuries, then you live hopefully.’ C. G.Jung

We all intuit that there is more to this life than meets the eye, some mystery that the mind cannot fathom, some sense of self that lies outside time and space, unconstrained by the clay of mortal frailty. We have a longing to be aquainted with this realm and can be tempted to hurry the process for want of being fed in ‘this’ world, forgetting that anything existing outside time and space is, by definition, already here….

The longing to escape is the longing to find meaning irrespective of one’s circumstance and station, meaning which the ego realises it cannot provide for itself, in which it is defeated, but of which it can avail itself by turning, finally, to its own deep roots.

You are the tree not the leaf.

There is an apocryphal story of a Rabbi and his group picked out for torture before death in the Nazi camps. They finally had to dig the pit of their own mass grave. They were stripped and thrown in. Soldiers stepped forward cocking automatic Shmeisers.

‘Well’, said the captain, what have you to say now Rabbi?

The Rabbi replied, ‘ We have one another down here, I am in the bossom of my People and already in the arms of Eternal Life. What about you?’

this article is adapted from my book on self-destructiveness, ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane.’ https://andywhiteblog.com/2016/06/11/going-mad-to-stay-sane-2/

Going Mad to Stay Sane. Reprint.

Self destructiveness can be a spring board for a soulful life like no other if we can realize the meaning in the message, if we refrain from putting a lid on it with medication or inveterate ‘fixing’.

The book tells the story of King Midas from Greek mythology who wished that everything he touched be turned to gold. He only realizes what a curse he’s bought on himself when he embraces his daughter…..

It also tells the backstory, what kind of parents he had and what the family dynamics were that could foster such a terrible desire. How does he live? How does Midas resolve his issues? How does he now approach Dionysus who granted him his hideous wish.

The story uses allegory to reveal how we grow through adversity and foolishness. It looks at the deeper significance of self-destructiveness, as a symbol of something meaningful that can be transformative.

The book has a new preface by Dr Dale Mathers who is a Jungian analyst with his own new book on the shelf, ‘Alchemy and Psychotherapy’.

Enjoy the book and find new ways to make sense of old patterns.

Books are signed and cost £20 plus p+p.

We’re Sending You Away…

When I was first sent to boarding school I was so excited. Soooo excited. Excited. Excited. Excited. After all it would be a full thirty years before some kind soul laid their hand on my shoulder and reminded me that the closest comparisons in the literature were the Nazi’s concentration camps with which I would become fascinated without quite knowing why….

We’re sending you away…

I was being honoured. Honoured, it was a great priviledge. One that would make me a man. ‘Its the best school in the country,’ my father told me proudly, the specks of spittle dancing in the corners of his mouth. Oh, my God, how fantastic. My manhood! A noble and proud and superior manhood was now my sure inheritance.

In my final year of incarceration one of my few friends in that place asked me, ‘Andy, do you remember the first thing you ever said to me?’ ‘No.’ ‘Fuck off’.

Start as you mean to go on. How else does the entirely unprotected field the daily maelstrom of feral teenage boys, entirely deprived of feminine contact, fed on inflated visions of their moral ascendency over the entire world whilst desperatly hiving off the underlying shame, humiliation and rejection of being sent away by torturing one another on a more or less continuous basis.

We’re sending you away…..

to play a game, one where you get to be the lords of the universe who will know themselves by being treated as scum and treating one another as scum, where kudos and pride are measured in caprice and malice and you get to know just how much we love you by having nothing to do with your growing up.

By the time I was fourteen I had been beaten with sticks, whips, cricket bats; sexually molested, felt up, and forced to publically have sex with my own bundled bedding. Is that rape? Yes it is.

But then something really weird happened.

I was in afternoon prep. I got called out by the housemaster and motioned to follow him to his house down the hall. I went. He invited me in and closed the door. We went through to the dinning room. He motioned me to sit. I sat. He went away, then came back with a slice of cake on a plate and a glass of coke. ‘It’s your birthday,’ he said, giving me this information as you might assert that Mogadishu is the capital of Yemen.

He put the things down and went away. I ate the cake in silence. Then I drank the coke. Then I waited. Then I got up and left.

I couldn’t think straight for days and that cake repeated on me endlessly until I realised that the reason I was choking so much on my gift was that it meant the very best I could hope for in this marvellous world of priviledge was a moment to be envied by everyone else in a room so empty I could hear the echo of my own heartbeat.

Why is this important?

Because the best people going to the best schools of the best religion generally turned out rather badly. And then they run the country.

I just heard ———— ——– killed himself.

”Last seen in his car…..”

I trawled through his face book page trying to make sense of it. But it already made perfect sense. A narcissistic bully, fed all his life on the myth of his unbounded superiority, entirely invested in power to compensate the desperate and terrible insecurities engendered in being sent away, the worthlessness, the shame, the horror of a world where rape was normal, suddenly got to the point where his denial and compensations ran out of their batteries and as ever with the narcissist if he could not have his quota of being better than, tough at 50, then what else was there but to blow his brains out?

His brother was a terrible bastard. He would walk up and down the line of us little fags in his study, stripped to the waist, up and down, up and down, eventually lashing out violently at … who knows, someone, maybe you, maybe..no-one. Up and down. Whose turn today? If not in the morning then maybe in the evening. I wound up in the sanatorium, not with bruises but, as I discovered much later, hysterical blindness bought about by acute, ongoing terror.

We’re sending you away….

This blog is a forum to explore the reality of the grown up children who, one way or another, were sent away, rejected or violated. It is also about how we are taught to send away, reject and violate – the underbelly of Western Civilisation.

My book,’Going Mad to Stay Sane’, about to have its third edition published, explores the legacy of parents who either invade or abandon their children and what those children can do to re-member themselves.

See the post of the same title below to preorder.

Coming out for the first time later in the summer is ‘Abundant Delicious, the secret and the mystery’, which shows how we can use our woundedness to discover who we are and celebrates the capacity and responsibility of the human spirit to triumph in the face of the greatest adversity, the split reality of a divided world.