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.
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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.
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‘Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,’ ibid
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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.
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Such an inflated consciousness…
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‘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
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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.
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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.
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”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.
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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.
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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
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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..
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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.
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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….”,
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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.
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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 .
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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…
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and you can have a giggle with life rather than being overwhelmed by it.
