Jennifer Michael Hecht | Vox

Depictions of mental illness can save lives. But A Star Is Born gets one thing very wrong.

2019-02-18T14:23:25-05:00

For two full minutes toward the end of A Star is Born, we watch Jackson Maine, played by Bradley Cooper, as he exits his car, still running in his driveway, and silently breaks our hearts. Walking slowly into his garage, holding a belt, he locates a cabinet to stand on and walks back to the open garage door. We see his face, full of emotion, and know he intends to end his life. Down comes the garage door and the camera cuts to a concert where Ally, his wife, played by Lady Gaga, is singing, “Why did you do that?” Viewers are spared the death itself, but those two minutes are an exceptionally graphic depiction of the suicidal decision.

Right away, in tweets and reviews, fans and critics of Cooper’s version of this classic story praised its cinematic power, but cautioned potential viewers about the trigger for suicide. Professionals worried about that belt in his hand even as they were moved by the film. “It thoughtfully shows what leads someone to this, and I cried at the end,” said Kita S. Curry of Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, to USA Today. “I just wish the method hadn’t been so clearly conveyed to people. And it’s a method that’s on the rise.”

This 2018 A Star Is Born is the fourth film to bear the name, and every iteration ends with a suicide. In all of them, a jaded star, always a man, discovers and falls in love with a talented ingenue, always a woman, Every time, he struggles with her success, and eventually kills himself. Cooper’s version gives the jaded male star some backstory, describing a barren childhood with an alcoholic father. But this version also plays into the fantasy that Jackson’s suicide releases his wife into stardom.

The depiction of suicide in art versus media

The suicide rate in the US has been rising for almost two decades, so when one of the movies up for Best Picture features a dramatic example of such a death, we need to take a close look. Studies have shown that how we discuss suicide in the media affects the real suicide rate. Celebrity suicides have an outsize influence and are often followed by a rise in suicides for those of the same gender and similar age. There is ample evidence of the fatal influence a suicide can have on vulnerable people who feel linked to the death, perhaps through profession, school, or family. This suicide contagion can intensify with sensationalist news coverage.

Art is different, of course. Studies show that compared to news written without due care, exposure to fictional suicides has a smaller influence on actual deaths. Perhaps it’s partly because fiction often depicts the devastation a suicide can have on family and friends. Studies show that television programs that center on the suffering of survivors are less likely to give rise to a surge in such deaths. And we can’t forget that art also saves lives. Tragic art can be good company in hard times, and any art can inspire the creativity and curiosity that makes life worth living.

Part of what makes this version of A Star Is Born so compelling is that it nakedly portrays dark realities of misery, addiction, and love. When Jackson falls down drunk at a party, Alley waves off concerned looks; this is normal. Another time, drunk and hot for a fight, he tells his sweet, self-conscious wife that she’s ugly. To anyone who has struggled with addiction in themselves or someone close, there is solace and communion in witnessing these raw secrets unfold in open view. And to the extent that a film gets the public talking about this subject, it enacts the most lifesaving work of culture.

Still, there are dangers that must be addressed. A Star Is Born can be seen to support Jackson’s fantasy that his death is a gift to Ally’s career, and that plays into dangerous myths.

Jackson’s suicide is shown as “good” for Ally

The Star Is Born model is sublimely simple: He’s in decline; she’s full of hope; as they fall in love and marry, she gets famous and he gets drunker, culminating in a televised awards show where she wins and he ruins it spectacularly. (In Cooper’s version, the broken man joins his wife onstage to accept her award and is so inebriated that he obliviously begins to urinate.) In each film, the wife gives up big career breaks to stay home by his side, but he decides that she is better off without him, and for her sake, he takes himself out through suicide. There is a lovely balance to this form, even without a causal relationship, as a simultaneous look at celebrity in two of its normal phases.

The awards show incident sends Jackson into rehab, and he returns sober and hopeful, until things quickly go south. Ally’s agent lays into him, saying he’s hurting her career just by association; then Ally tells him her tour has been canceled, and he knows she’s given it up to support his recovery. Later that night, Jackson finds a pill bottle stashed in the glove compartment, and its rattle is the sound of the end. When we next see Jackson, he’s staggering from his car. Senses diminished, he is won over by the fantasy that he can take the burden of himself out of the world by suicide.

The glitch in Jackson’s suicidal logic is realistic. The decision is triggered when he is reminded of a primal humiliation. It is a common misperception that suicide is fundamentally a result of long-term, treatment-resistant depression. Researchers working with “psychological autopsies” — interviews with those who knew the person — have found impulse to be a major factor in suicides, and often within a few months of a notable humiliation or loss. Studies also show that the vast majority of people who seriously attempt suicide and are thwarted never go on to kill themselves. One study checked in on survivors of suicide attempts from the Golden Gate Bridge over several decades, and found more than 90 percent alive, or dead by other causes. For many, if you can make it through your worst night, you can make it.

The terrible fallacy of Jackson Maine’s suicide is that by killing himself, he’s helping Ally. The film itself plays into the myth of the “generous” suicide by ending with Ally’s apotheosis, showing her performing for a full, elegant hall, now a grande dame of stardom. This is not the mood at the end of some previous versions of the film: in the 1954 edition, when Judy Garland’s Esther is led away from her husband’s funeral, fans mob and grab at her, snatching off her veil; the look on her face suggests she’ll never be a happy star again.

This story keeps getting made because of our fascination with fame and addiction. I don’t know if we have to keep making this movie, but we ought to be aware of how the story plays into dangerous myths. Cooper’s film does show the harm done from suicide, in the tears of Jackson’s widow and brother. But it also stokes the fallacies and fantasies about what suicide can do for you. In A Star Is Born, Jackson comes back to grace through death. It may sound good, but he’s not there to experience it, and his loved ones are not made glad. Dead is dead is dead.

Count this essay as a small voice in the wind reminding us all that the film makes suicide seductive, and it does so because of our skewed cultural ideas about fame, success, and failure. I admire the film for what it is, but am ultimately more engaged when works of art find a way for us to survive, to use our pain to help others with similar struggles, and to muscle through the difficult realities of modern love, art, and stardom.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It, along with several other books of history and poetry. She holds a PhD in the history of science and culture from Columbia University.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

How the media covers celebrity suicides can have life-or-death consequences

2018-06-08T12:21:48-04:00

The recent deaths of chef, TV host, and author Anthony Bourdain, 61, and the fashion designer Kate Spade, 55, by suicide raise some of the same issues as the coverage of DJ Avicii’s death in April of this year.

“Avicii reportedly committed suicide with broken glass bottle” was Page Six’s headline. “Avicii’s suicide caused by self-inflicted cuts from glass,” reported TMZ. “In Avicii’s death, suicide details emerge,” the Los Angeles Times said.

Sensational headlines like these continue to crop up following the death of 28-year-old DJ and artist Tim Bergling, better known as Avicii, who died by suicide last month.

The news of Avicii’s death is deeply painful and confusing for many. It’s shocking that someone with so much could be so sad: He was young, beautiful, talented, wealthy, and widely loved. But shock is not a good excuse to throw ethics out the window when it comes to reporting his death.

I’m a historian of culture and philosophy who recently researched and wrote a book about how different societies have understood suicide, and how that has had both tragic and terrific consequences. Watching the coverage of Avicii’s death is, for me — given the research on how suicide spreads — like watching a slow-motion catastrophe.

Studies have shown, over and over, that the way we talk about suicide publicly can have astounding consequences. News of one person ending their own life can lead to more suicides, especially for people similar to the victim in age and gender. When they occur within professions, schools, ethnicities, or towns, experts call them suicide clusters, or speak of contagion, or social modeling. The media effect appears to be strongest in young people.

When someone struggling with mental health is suffering and knows that someone like them responded to that suffering by killing themselves, it puts death on the table. Media contagion research shows a dose effect: the more exposure to media reporting of suicide, including the number of articles and the prominence of the death, the greater the copycat effect.

Changing the way a suicide is reported in the press can reduce suicides. In 1989, a national conference of suicidologists, psychologists, and journalists pooled their knowledge and came up with a set of media guidelines for reporting on suicide, the goal being to keep vulnerable people alive.

Some rules were straightforward: Don’t mention “suicide” in the headline. Don’t mention the method of suicide in the headline, and avoid a detailed description of the method in the article. Others were more subjective: Don’t “glorify” the act; don’t engage in “excessive” reporting of the suicide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the guidelines.

We have decades of robust, replicated, international research showing that these details matter. When people in a vulnerable state are bombarded by reports of the specific details of a suicide, including the method, it triggers ideation and action. A 1987 study discovered that an 80 percent drop in suicides by subway in Vienna was due to the rollout of ethical media reporting as well as a prevention campaign. Long before we had statistics, coroners in Victorian England would not return weapons used in a suicide to the family because they knew it increased the risk that someone else would put the tool to the same use.

The spread of online news and social media makes it harder to stick to guidelines

Traditional newspapers were at least somewhat responsive to the guidelines. Research has shown that Kurt Cobain’s death, which occurred a few years after the CDC released suicide reporting guidelines, was generally reported responsibly. The New York Times headline, “Kurt Cobain, Hesitant Poet Of ‘Grunge Rock,’ Dead at 27” prudently omitted even the fact of the suicide from the headline. We can’t measure the effect clearly since other proactive measures were taken to support vulnerable people, especially in Seattle, where Cobain was based. Still, after his death, the suicide rate did not go up.

But on the internet, where information spreads with little oversight, adhering to guidelines is much harder. Researchers are finding that features of the internet — like search algorithms and hyperlinks to similar stories — multiply the impact of irresponsible reporting. New studies examining the impact of online news media and social media in Canada, Japan, and the UK on the suicide media contagion suggest that the internet is exacerbating the problem.

In 2014, after news broke that Robin Williams had taken his own life, headlines on Fox News, the Daily News, and even the New York Times included details that he “hanged himself,” some even noting that a belt was used.

A meme depicting Disney’s Aladdin character saying, “You’re free now, Genie,” in reference to the Williams-voiced Genie character, went viral. Experts winced. It made the suicide seem like a triumph and suggested that the dead are somewhere better or freer. In the new environment, even established media dropped its self-control.

For the four months that followed, the suicide rate went up 10 percent, according to the CDC data. The rise was especially dramatic among middle-aged men. A study out of Columbia University showed that suicide by strangulation rose by 32 percent, compared to about 3 percent for other methods used. These are real lives gone.

Celebrity suicides have an outsize influence. People recognized the phenomenon before modern statistics: After publication of Wolfgang Goethe’s Sufferings of Young Werther, there was a rash of suicides across Europe notably similar to the one in the novel. It was called the “Werther effect.” After Marilyn Monroe’s death, suicides increased by 12 percent.

If you or anyone you know is considering suicide or self-harm, or is anxious, depressed, upset, or needs to talk, there are people who want to help.

In the US:

Crisis Text Line: Text CRISIS to 741741 for free, confidential crisis counseling
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
The Trevor Project: 1-866-488-7386

Outside the US:

The International Association for Suicide Prevention lists a number of suicide hotlines by country. Click here to find them.
Befrienders Worldwide

After Cobain’s death, suicidologists set up prevention supports such as community outreach in Seattle, and they worked: The number of calls to suicide hotlines in the region increased, but not the number of suicides. Likewise, anti-suicide programs instituted at schools at the start of a suicide cluster can be effective, some research has shown.

The internet age is still relatively new, and we’ll know more in the future about how to balance freedom of speech and public health. But for now, news sites should stick to the guidelines. If they choose not to, as so many have following Avicii’s death, I’d encourage them to think harder about the issue, get the facts, and make a public statement about their policy on reporting these deaths. That might jump-start the national conversation we need to have.

And we all play a part. Everyone can be smart about what they post and avoid words or pictures on social media that could perpetuate bad practices and even endanger someone vulnerable.

If you have intrusive suicidal thoughts in a period of a few months after the suicide of someone you admired or feel similar to, ask for help. Call a suicide hotline or get to a doctor and talk about how you’re feeling.

Avicii’s music videos, so upbeat and positive, are almost unbearably poignant to watch now. The internet, as always, is overflowing with content about his death. But we all need to be aware that words can be a deadly arrow. The press and everyone else posting and sharing messages about this tragic death need to communicate responsibly. Doing so could save a life.

Jennifer Michael Hecht holds a PhD in the history of science and culture from Columbia University. Her books include Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It and Doubt: A History.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

10 things I wish people understood about suicide

2018-09-14T15:09:27-04:00

Like most secular people, and many religious ones, for most of my life I believed the dominant cultural idea about suicide: that it was everyone’s private choice. That it was morally neutral. And that since we cannot presume to comprehend the pain that concludes in such an act, we should drop the subject. I no longer think any of that is true.

What caused me to change my mind? I lost two friends to suicide, within about a year and a half of each other. I, too, couldn’t help but think about suicide sometimes. I’m a poet and a historian, and I’ve written a lot about the history of secular ideas, so I thought hard about what I was going through. I noticed it was strange that we all feel so alone in our suicidal suffering and yet how keenly we feel connection when someone we know dies by suicide. I started to think of the positive side of what that pain tells us. We are not as alone as we think, and we can make a huge contribution to society just by staying alive. I had often read that one suicide can lead to more suicides. That means even if you believe that are a terrible burden right now, your suicide would be a much bigger burden.

I came to these conclusions by writing first a poem, and then a blog post about suicide. Responses were moving and made me feel that I had to learn and write more. Thus began a period of deep research on suicide throughout history and today.

We are not as alone as we think, and we can make a huge contribution to society just by staying alive

What I learned is that, compared to ours, most societies have had stronger messages about rejecting suicide, because of what we mean to each other and because of what we owe to our future self. Socrates is often remembered as a suicide. But in the jail cell where he took the hemlock, Socrates told his students and friends that they must not kill themselves, unless they too are condemned to it in court; and Aristotle also spoke of suicide as wrong because “the just and the unjust always involve more than one person.” We moderns have lost contact with this and other crucial ideas because of a turf war between religion and secularism. It was time to rethink the secular stance on suicide on its own terms. This research became my book, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It.

Let me clarify that I am not talking about end-of-life care, which I believe should include the right to die, especially in an age when people are medically kept alive for so long. I sometimes say that I am addressing “despair suicide.” Loosely, I am talking about a person whose loved ones, or medical caretakers, would think needs to keep living.

After several years of thinking and writing, I’ve boiled down ten ideas for how we can think differently about suicide.

1) We don’t have the right to suicide

Suicide hurts other people terribly. For some it is fatal: Throughout history people have noted that one suicide can lead to more suicides, in all sorts of groups. After the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, some young men across Europe killed themselves dressed as Werther, or holding the book, and by many accounts there was a rise in suicide in countries where the book was available.

Now modern statistical studies repeatedly demonstrate the existence of suicide clusters, each representing a real rise in the suicide rate in certain high schools, colleges, regiments, and towns, age groups, and professions. You may remember headlines, over the past few decades, about suicides among farmers, policemen, among teens in the eighties; at certain colleges, or in a particular college dorm. Recently there have been major headlines about a shocking rise in suicide rates among baby boomers, military personnel, and Native Americans (especially the young).

There are a variety of indications of the significance of influence. In the 1970s researcher David Philips, now a sociology professor at University of California San Diego, followed the rise in suicides after the death of Marylyn Monroe and other celebrities and called it the Werther Effect. The rise is strongest for those of the same age and gender as the celebrity. Beyond celebrities, studies show a robust correlation between media reports about suicide and an increase in actual suicide in the area that hears about it, again especially among people of the same age and gender. Media influence on suicide seems especially potent with adolescents and young adults. There is even a dose response, such that more exposure to such news leads to more suicidal behavior.

Victor Hugo rejected suicide because, “As soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide is murder.” And Jean Jacques Rousseau had a wise character tell a younger, suicidal friend that suicide must be rejected for many reasons, including that it might cause more suicide. Suicide is too harmful to be a right.

2) Staying alive is a life-saving social contribution

Because of the power of suicidal influence, staying alive through your dark night keeps other people alive. In a very careful and large study out of Johns Hopkins in 2010, researchers found that the suicide of a parent of a child under 18 triples the children’s suicide rate, with different patterns of hospitalization and death depending on the child’s age at the time of parent’s suicide. A 2014 study shows that a parent’s suicide attempt increases the likelihood that the child will make a suicide attempt fivefold, “even after adjusting for the familial transmission of mood disorder.”

That means that if you don’t kill yourself, your daughter is less likely to kill herself; and if you make it through, maybe she does too. An ex-Army Ranger quoted this idea from Stay in a personal essay on suicide for the Daily Beast and added: “If you want your Ranger buddy to survive, you have to accept help and fight through your own battles.” I don’t know why we cannot always see our own value, but when people realize that getting help and surviving will keep others alive, they feel less self-indulgent when they take steps to make it through the crisis. We save each other’s lives when we look after ourselves. Society should express gratitude to those who stay alive for others, and I’m happy to start. Thank you. We are often telling people to get help, but we don’t tell them why.

A suicide prevention sign on the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco (Jamie McCaffrey)

3) We need to consider the rights of our future selves

Albert Camus, famous for announcing that we must all confront the question of suicide, is less famous for his powerful conclusion that we must reject suicide. He argued that more life is always better, even if it is not happy. Camus says that what you will learn from experience is unknowable until you get there, and very much worth the wait and struggle.

Just as our culture minimizes the interconnected nature of our selves, it also sees the self as an unchanging agent. We forget that we will change and grow in ways we cannot now imagine. Who are we going to become? We should make an effort to have respect for that person.

Many figures through history have reminded us that even when all seems lost, circumstances sometimes change abruptly. The Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne offered many tales of suicides completed just before everything changed for the better, and other tales of the rejection of suicide leading to a wonderful and storied life. For we moderns, there might also be a new drug or other intervention, if we can wait for it.

There are certain people who need to give the “future self” idea particular thought. Up until age 25, the brain’s prefrontal cortex isn’t finished growing. Until then, you do not know how you will experience the world in a few years. The prefrontal cortex is the location of executive function: planning complex cognitive behavior, personality expression, decision-making, and moderating social behavior. You are about to get much better at getting what you want to get. For now, find a way to wait. For we who are older, if you are going through a period of life that is infamously taxing, remember that things may get better for you too, if you can trust your future self to know things you do not yet know.

4) Suicide is among the top ten killers of Americans

In 2000 the number of American suicides was 30,000, and it began rising. The last full count was in 2012, and it was up to 40,600. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people between the ages of 15 and 24. In a recent study of college students, suicide beat out alcohol as a cause of death.

Meanwhile, most suicides are older white men. Women attempt suicide more, but men die of it more. That’s most likely because men have more access to guns; in 2010 suicide accounted for 61 percent of gun deaths in the US. Suicide kills more than murder.

When people try to kill themselves and survive, they overwhelmingly report being glad they lived

As for war, a 2012 study showed that more US military personnel died of suicide than of combat or transport accidents that year. (The numbers for 2013 just came out this week: while active military suicides are down, there has been a rise in suicide among reservists.) In the general population suicide recently out-killed car accidents.

The World Health Organization estimated that the global rate of suicide is up 60 percent since 1945. In 2010, in the developed world, suicide became the number-one killer of people ages 15 to 49. Except for the three worst years of the disease, it has killed more people annually than AIDS. Worldwide we are at a million suicides a year.

5) Suicide is often impulsive, such that if the impulse is thwarted, the person lives

When people try to kill themselves and survive, they overwhelmingly report being glad they lived, according to studies and observations by suicidologists. A follow-up on 25 years of people who tried to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge showed 96 percent alive or having died of other causes. We often think of suicide as the unavoidable end point of a life-long battle with agonizing depression, but it often isn’t that, or isn’t only that. Recent humiliation or loss is very often a determinant.

We think of military suicide as the result of PTSD and other direct results of the wars, but note that the study on military suicides in 2012 showed that a full third of the deceased had never been deployed, while more than half had recently suffered the loss of an important relationship, or a humiliation at work. A recent study of police suicides showed that 64 percent were described as “a surprise.” There are news reports of popular and successful college students who gave little sign of depression suddenly ending their lives. If part of the problem is that in certain groups, at certain times, suicide seems like a popular option, it is useful to name that and to be ready to resist it. If you do not want to someday die of suicide, tell yourself now that you are on the lookout for such inclinations and that you are prepared to reject them.

A sign on the Aurora Bridge in Seattle (Justin Kraemer)

6) Physical barriers to suicide have been shown to work and so can conceptual ones

Studies show that when we put up a barrier fence on a bridge famous for suicides, the people who go there to jump do not go to another bridge. Bridge barriers lower the real, overall suicide rate. That is why we are finally putting up a barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge — as a chorus of experts in various fields explained, suicide barriers save lives. The act is so impulsive that most of the time people do not seem to plan ahead enough to find a backup bridge and make sure it is climbable and high enough to do the job.

In the 1990s the United Kingdom was seeing a lot of suicide by acetaminophen overdose, so they legislated that the drug had to be sold in smaller quantities. Deaths by acetaminophen overdose fell significantly. The number of overdoses stayed constant, but far fewer were fatal. People survived because the act is so impulsive that they only ingest what is in the house, so smaller bottles save lives.

In the US over half the gun deaths are suicides and over half the suicides involve guns. Having immediate means is bad. If you are looking after yourself, see that it would at least take you a few hours and a bit of effort and human interaction. I have heard from several men and women who store their guns in someone else’s home for this reason.

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said suicide is always a rushing of one’s defenses, and added that there is nothing worse than rushing your defenses. Wittgenstein felt suicidal off-and-on his whole life and three of his four brothers committed suicide, but he had worked out reasons suicide was wrong and he didn’t do it. As a rule, we cannot usefully tell ourselves not to be depressed, but it seems that we can usefully tell ourselves not to commit suicide.

7) We can’t always trust our moods, so we should train ourselves to override suicidal impulses

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Our moods do not believe in each other.” Of the roughly 40,000 people who commit suicide a year in the US, surely some would not have predicted such a death for themselves. Some just got caught in a bad moment, with lethal means, and no solid ideas about not doing it. There is a part of many suicidal people that fiercely does not want to die; the part of us that calls hotlines, for instance. That part of us needs encouragement.

There are people reading this who do not see themselves as at risk for suicide but who will die that way, unless they take some mental action now. Inoculate yourself, as much as you can, by thinking some of this over in this new context. Don’t let yourself be killed by the classic blind forgetfulness of misery. Practice remembering that depression casts an illusion of constancy whenever it arrives.

There is a part of many suicidal people that fiercely does not want to die. That part needs encouragement.

I received a letter from one man, a lawyer, who told me that my presentation of the numbers regarding the suicide of parents with children under 18 had settled the matter for him after decades of painful vacillation. It was a relief. He also gave me a great insight: he writes a note to himself when he is happy, because when he feels bad only his own handwriting can show that he ever felt happiness, or ever would again. Decide now not to let your worst mood kill off all the others.

8) If individuals knew how common suicidal thoughts are, they would be less frightened of their own

A lot of people think about suicide — my educated guess is well over half the population. A 2006 study of 26,000 college students (undergraduate and graduate) showed that over half had considered suicide at some point. Eighteen percent of undergraduates had thought seriously about it. Anecdotally, when I speak to adults, most of them confess to sometimes wanting to die. Thinking about it is not an indication that you should do it, or will do it. Take the thoughts seriously as an indication that all is not well, and find someone to talk to. But the thoughts are too common to be terrifying. If we all knew how many of us sometimes think about it, we would be less inclined to be pushed around by our ideation.

9) Our increasing suicide rate is a trend, and trends can be slowed or reversed

The suicide rate goes up and down. The mechanism that makes sense to me is that people copy each other’s behavior ever more, until they reach a saturation point and begin to see that behavior as old-fashioned. When that feeling is forgotten, the cycle starts again.

Human societies have stopped trends in the past, even with very addictive drugs. There are social trends that were endemic for centuries, like foot binding, dueling, and the Atlantic slave trade, that were stopped by a re-examination of what is good and a rejection of something that is causing suffering and waste. Perhaps we can change this, too.

I am sure the conditions of one’s life matter tremendously to people’s moods, but whether or not suicide is on the table as a response to that pain is often based on things that trend, like how many suicides you have heard of, by people similar to you. We can make a point of not dying by trend. Of course, the part of our suicidal thoughts that come from trauma, neglect, and bad chemistry needs to be taken care of, and the part of our suicidal ideation that comes from economics, politics, war, and the loss of the natural world ought to be a spur to action. But sometimes what makes the difference is whether suicide seems like a viable response to suffering for a person like you, and we can be on guard against that.

Anti-suicide graffiti (Daniel Lobo)

10) If we manage to lower the suicide rate and keep it low, people in the future will look back at our age and see a massacre

What would you think if I told you about a civilization where 40,000 men, women, and children took their lives every year? How is this not a kind of blood sacrifice? Suicide notes are full of people explaining that they are a burden. How did they get that idea? Our culture told them that it is up to them to decide if life is worth living. They have been told it is up to them to weigh their contributions and deficits, joy and anguish. What a cruel and wrong-headed thing to tell people.

I believe that community and culture make meaning and it is not up to any one of us to sustain meaning all the time. Imagine that tomorrow morning you wake up alone on the planet. Would you do anything the same? We make life and meaning together, in the context of others. Can you imagine trying to know about meerkats by grabbing one specimen and looking it over in the lab? We are what we are together and we should say so. Or don’t say anything about it, but stop saying it is morally neutral to kill yourself, and stop saying it is everyone’s choice. If this society is in any way complicit in making us hate ourselves, I don’t think we should listen to it invite the miserable to die and get out of the way. For many of us who think about suicide, part of the appeal is to shove life back in life’s face. I think the better rebellion is to stay alive.

Editor: Eleanor Barkhorn

Lead image: Shutterstock