November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  When the media turned to the teenage suicides occurring north of New York City, it treated Westchester and Plano as if they were virtually interchangeable. Ladies’ Home Journal, for instance, portrayed Westchester County as “a sprawling bedroom suburb that could be the definition of upward mobility.” Television news reports ran footage of gracious homes, rolling hills, and young girls show-jumping horses. The word affluent was used so often that it made wealth sound like a terminal illness. “‘Contagious’ Teen Suicides Worry Town” was the headline for a story in the Dallas Times Herald, which like many other accounts dismissed the “affluent suburb” of New York as if the suicides had occurred in a single community, not in eight different towns in three different counties with a total population of more than a million. The eight teenagers, in fact, represented a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and lived in towns ranging from the prosperous bedroom community of Mount Vernon, to rural Putnam County, to the racially mixed, largely blue-collar towns of Peekskill and North Tarrytown. The majority came from families whose circumstances could be described as modest. Most of the victims’ families had lived in their communities for many years. None of the victims knew one another or attended the same school. None of the suicides was directly linked to a previous suicide, although the teenagers may have read or heard about them. It would have been difficult not to because almost every day there seemed to be another newspaper article or television spot about the “Westchester suicides.”

  The press was prone to make the cluster larger than it actually was. When Christopher Ruggiero, the seventeen-year-old son of the fire chief in Pelham, was found hanged by his bathrobe sash in his bedroom closet on February 21, five days after Jimmy Pellechi’s death, most newspapers assumed he had become the fourth suicide in the Westchester cluster. Several days later the county medical examiner said that Ruggiero’s death was not a suicide. People were perplexed. Then an article appeared in the New York Times on autoerotic asphyxiation (AEA). A practice familiar to medical examiners and coroners but little known to the public, AEA is a form of masturbation in which erotic sensation is enhanced by decreasing oxygen to the brain, usually by means of a noose around the neck. Although sexual pleasure, not death, is the goal, an estimated five hundred to one thousand practitioners a year—most of them young white males—go too far, become unconscious, and asphyxiate. Whether or not it results in death, the practice is clearly masochistic, risk-taking behavior. Yet deaths due to AEA are ruled accidents. Many, however, are mistakenly classified as suicides. In Christopher Ruggiero’s case, although his death was lumped with the other suicides, swelling the Westchester cluster beyond its actual extent, the medical examiner ultimately ruled that the death was due to “undetermined circumstances.”

  What exactly is a cluster? Are some adolescents more vulnerable to suggestion than others? Are some towns more vulnerable than others? Do suicides cluster by method? In Plano, four were by carbon monoxide, four were by gunshot; in Westchester, five of eight were by hanging. What are the geographical boundaries of a cluster? If a teenager in New Jersey reads about a cluster in New York and kills himself, is he part of the New York cluster or the possible beginning of a New Jersey cluster? Do clusters spawn clusters? Did Plano beget Westchester? Do older people commit suicide in clusters? If there were a cluster in Harlem instead of an affluent suburb like Plano, would we hear about it? Have there always been clusters or is the media merely reporting them more fully? Does reporting contribute to clusters? Are certain kinds of coverage more lethal than others?

  While the term cluster is new, the phenomenon it describes is probably as old as suicide itself. As Forbes Winslow, an English physician, observed in 1840, “The most singular feature connected with the subject of suicide is, that the disposition to sacrifice life has, at different periods, been known to prevail epidemically, from a perversion, as it has been supposed, of the natural instinct of imitation.”

  There are several ways in which “the natural instinct of imitation” can work. Throughout history, during times of religious persecution, political oppression, or social upheaval, there have been instances in which a city, a country, or a religious group has been swept by a collective impulse to suicide. Classical Greek and Roman history is filled with accounts of entire towns and armies that chose death over surrender. When Philip of Macedon besieged the city of Abydos, he triggered a frenzy of suicide among its inhabitants. Hoping to stanch the self-slaughter, he withdrew his army for three days. When he returned, there was no one left alive. In AD 73, Jewish zealots defending the fortress of Masada in Israel chose death over surrender to the besieging Roman legions. Nine hundred and sixty men, women, and children died. In 1190, in York, England, more than five hundred Jews under siege by idle ex-crusaders killed one another to avoid persecution and torture; at Verdun in 1320, another five hundred did the same. In 1944, after surrendering to Allied troops, much of the Japanese population of Saipan completed suicide. Soldiers blew themselves up with grenades; civilians walked off cliffs or drowned themselves in the Pacific.

  Collective suicide has also been occasioned by plague. “In the year of Grace 665,” wrote Roger of Wendover, a thirteenth-century monk and historian, “there was such an excessive mortality in England, that the people crowded to the seaside, and threw themselves from the cliffs into the sea, choosing rather to be cut off by a speedy death than to die by the lingering torments of the pestilence.” Seven centuries later the Black Death of 1348–50 spurred an even greater toll of suicides, including many Jews who, falsely accused of causing the plague by poisoning the wells, burned themselves to escape the gentiles’ fury. In A Journal of the Plague Year, his imaginative reconstruction of London’s Great Plague of 1665, Daniel Defoe wrote, “Some threw themselves out at windows or shot themselves, or otherwise made themselves away, and I saw several dismal objects of that kind.” An outbreak of smallpox among American Indians on the Central Plains during the 1830s set off an equally virulent outbreak of suicide. As one observer noted, “Very few of those who were attacked recovered their health; but when they saw all their relations buried, and the pestilence still raging with unabated fury among the remainder of their countrymen, life became a burden to them, and they put an end to their wretched existence, either with their knives and muskets, or by precipitating themselves from the summit of the rock near their settlement. The prairie all around is a vast field of death, covered with unburied corpses.”

  Collective suicide often occurs in the face of an enemy less tangible than a disease or an army but no less real to its victims. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Old Believers, a Russian Orthodox sect that insisted the Antichrist was to arrive in 1666, burned their villages around them. In less than a decade some twenty thousand had taken their own lives. In Tiraspol, Russia, in 1897, twenty-eight members of a religious sect buried themselves alive to escape the census, which they regarded as sinful. In May 1910, when it was widely believed that the earth was about to pass through the tail of Halley’s comet, clusters of suicides were reported in Spain, France, and the United States. In 1978, under the spell of their charismatic leader, Jim Jones, who persuaded them that their way of life was threatened by a hostile outside world, 912 members of the People’s Temple drank cyanide-laced grape Kool-Aid at Jonestown, Guyana. Collective suicide has even been occasioned by ecstasy. During the dancing manias of the fourteenth century, hundreds of frenzied Italians and Germans tarantellaed off the cliffs.

  In these instances a collection of individual impulses seems to detonate simultaneously, often under the influence of a leader who acts as a sort of lethal pied piper. At other times, a single suicide seems to set off a chain reaction in which the act of suicide is passed like a baton from despairing person to despairing person, often using the same method. In ancient Greece, Plutarch described such an episode:

  A strange and terrible affliction once came upon the maidens of Miletos from some obscure cause—mostly it was conjectured that some poisonous and ecstatic temperament
of the atmosphere produced in them a mental upset and frenzy. For there fell suddenly upon all of them a desire for death and a mad impulse towards hanging. Many hung themselves before they could be prevented. The words and tears of their parents and the persuasions of their friends had no effect. In spite of all the ingenuity and cleverness of those who watched them, they succeeded in making away with themselves.

  The epidemic abated when city magistrates decreed that the corpses of suicides would henceforth be dragged naked through the marketplace, whereupon, as author A. Alvarez observed, “vanity, if not sanity, prevailed.” Similar rashes of suicide among women are said to have occurred in Marseille and Lyons during the Renaissance. In 1792, after a soldier hanged himself from a beam at Les Invalides hospital in Paris, five other wounded soldiers hanged themselves from the same beam within a fortnight, and a total of fifteen took their lives before the corridor was closed. After the suicides of two of his grenadiers at Saint-Cloud, Napoleon issued an order asserting that “to abandon oneself to grief without resisting, and to kill oneself in order to escape from it, is like abandoning the field of battle before being conquered.” (Napoleon himself had contemplated suicide as a melancholy teenager and is said to have attempted it by overdosing on opium after the death of his mistress, Josephine.) In 1928, in Budapest, after 150 drownings were recorded during the months of April and May, a “suicide flotilla” patrolled the Danube, saving nine of ten would-be suicides. Primitive tribes, recognizing the possibility of contagion, have devised more direct remedies. In African Homicide and Suicide, anthropologist Paul Bohannan writes, “The East African societies all destroy the tree on which or the hut in which the suicide occurred, burning it and the rope expressly so that an epidemic of suicides will not occur.”

  Adolescents may be especially susceptible to imitation. “A child is more open to suggestion than an adult, in suicide as in all other matters,” observed David Oppenheim in 1910. “In fact, the power of suggestion shows itself with horrifying clarity in many youthful suicides.” Oppenheim, a professor of classical languages in Vienna, was speaking in Sigmund Freud’s living room at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The meeting, perhaps the first interdisciplinary symposium on suicide, had been called in response to a crisis that bore remarkable similarity to the situation in the United States in 1984. An epidemic of adolescent suicide seemed to be sweeping Europe, Russia, and the United States around the turn of the century. In Moscow, to cite just one example, seventy children in a single school district took their lives between May 1908 and October 1910. The epidemic was widely reported in the press, and writers, doctors, and clergymen rounded up a familiar list of suspects: illegitimacy, divorce, excessive ambition, lack of discipline in the schools and in the home, and a general weakening of the moral fiber. “To all this may be added the weakmindedness which springs from forced, hothouse education, begun too early and goaded on too fast . . . ,” wrote one American critic. “Boys and girls to-day are often men and women in the experience of life and its excitements, and ennuyés or blasés at an age when their grandparents were flying kites and dressing dolls.”

  Those words could have been written today, and the discussion that took place in Freud’s living room in 1910 was not unlike those heard at dozens of recent youth suicide symposiums. Freud’s distinguished panel talked about the social conditions that made suicide more likely, while noting that the focus must be on psychological vulnerability to stress rather than on the stress itself. They criticized journalists who oversimplified or sensationalized the problem, and raised concerns about the role of imitation. “The sensational fashion in which so many newspapers present such news [of a suicide],” observed Karl Molitor, “and the aura of martyrdom they delight in placing around these unfortunates, can all too easily induce another victim to follow the fatal example.” They called for better research and for suicide prevention education.

  One issue raised in Freud’s living room that is increasingly debated today is the effect of music and literature on imitation. Certain books, videos, movies, and music are accused of acting as spurs to suicide. An oft-cited name on the list of rock musicians whose lyrics have been said to inspire suicide is Ozzy Osbourne. “Suicide is the only way out / Don’t you know what it’s really all about,” sang the heavy-metal star in “Suicide Solution,” from his album Speak of the Devil. The song was a favorite of John McCollum’s. A nineteen-year-old from Indio, California, one October night he went to his bedroom, put Speak of the Devil on the stereo, put on the headphones, and shot himself with his father’s pistol. His father filed suit against Osbourne and his record company, claiming that Osbourne’s “violent, morbid, and inflammatory music . . . encouraged John McCollum to take his own life.”

  Each generation has its Ozzy Osbourne. Two hundred years ago it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (published in 1774, when the author was twenty-four) is perhaps the most famous prod to youthful suicide in history. The hero is an angst-ridden young man who shoots himself when his love for a married woman goes unrequited. The book touched a nerve. Like Werther, young men all over Europe dressed in blue tailcoats and yellow waistcoats. Like Werther, they talked and acted with exaggerated sensitivity. And, like Werther, some of them shot themselves. Romantic suicidal melancholy was dubbed Wertherism, and those whose suicides were linked to the book were said to have been suffering from Wertheritis. Goethe biographer Richard Friedenthal writes, “One ‘new Werther’ shot himself with particular éclat: having carefully shaved, plaited his pigtail, put on fresh clothes, opened Werther at page 218 and laid it on the table, he opened the door, revolver in hand, to attract an audience and, having looked round to make sure they were paying sufficient attention, raised the weapon to his right eye and pulled the trigger.” The book was banned in Leipzig and Copenhagen; when an Italian translation appeared in Milan, the Catholic clergy bought up and destroyed the entire edition.

  Goethe was not the only author whose works, according to some people, encouraged a preoccupation with death and suicide. In an 1805 sermon, “The Guilt, Folly, and Sources of Suicide,” New York City minister Samuel Miller asserted that “the mischievous influence on popular opinions produced by many dramatic representations and by licentious novels, may probably be considered as leading to many cases of the crime before us.” As the Romantic Age bloomed, Byron’s Manfred, Chateaubriand’s René, and Lamartine’s Raphael were all accused of sparking suicides and were duly reviled by the clergy. Even Thomas Paine’s 1796 treatise, The Age of Reason, was accused of sponsoring suicides by “weakening the moral principles.”

  In 1928, when thirteen boys and girls killed themselves in thirteen weeks in the town of Liesva in the Ural Mountains, investigators from Moscow found they had been members of a suicide club formed in honor of Sergei Esenin, a Russian poet who had hanged himself in 1925. The students held meetings at which they discussed Esenin’s poetry and debated “Is life worth living?” and “Is suicide justified?” In 1936, in Budapest, the suicides of eighteen young people were linked to the popularity of a ballad called “Gloomy Sunday.” The lyrics of “The Hungarian Suicide Song,” as it came to be known, concluded with the words “My heart and I have decided to end it all.” (Thirty-two years later, Reszo Seress, the song’s composer, jumped to his death from his apartment window.) In the late forties, many adolescent suicides in the United States and Canada were attributed to the pernicious effects of horror comic books; in Montreal, policemen initiated a campaign to ban them from the newsstands. More recently, several films have been accused of romanticizing suicide and triggering the deaths of young people. The Deer Hunter, a film about the Vietnam War that contains a graphic depiction of Russian roulette, has been linked by researchers to at least forty-three Russian roulette deaths since its release in 1978. After the death by hanging of Robbie DeLaValliere, the first of the Westchester cluster, many people blamed the film An Officer and a Gentleman, in which a charismatic young naval cadet hangs himself.
DeLaValliere had seen the film and had talked of it frequently before his death by hanging.

  As Goethe himself noted, however, art reflects rather than creates the mood of a time. Robbie DeLaValliere was a troubled youngster long before he saw An Officer and a Gentleman. And John McCollum, the heavy-metal fan who killed himself while listening to “Suicide Solution,” had other problems besides Ozzy Osbourne. According to news reports, he had dropped out of school in the ninth grade and had “had some trouble with the law,” including an arrest for drunken driving. (His father’s suit against Osbourne was dismissed by a judge, who commented, “Trash can be given First Amendment protection, too.”) As one columnist observed, “We must grieve with Jack McCollum for the loss of his son. But there’s no reason to blame the artist who may have been his son’s only solace in a hostile and extremely unbearable world.” At a conference on youth suicide, a young woman in the audience voiced a similar point of view: “Maybe we should look at rock music not as a cause of problems but as a symptom of our time. Instead of condemning our youth we should start listening to them. And instead of banning their music we should start listening to it.”

  Long before Plano and Westchester, media accounts of actual suicides were blamed for triggering further suicides. In 1828, English physician George Man Burrows wrote, “When the mind is beginning to aberrate, [it is] very essential to prevent persons affected by moral causes or inclined to suicide, from reading newspapers, lest the disposition and the mode be suggested by something similar.” While Burrows recommended that vulnerable people be kept from newspapers, William Farr, director of vital statistics for the British Registrar-General’s office, urged the press to control themselves. “No fact is better established in science than that suicide (and murder may perhaps be added) is often committed from imitation,” he wrote in 1841. “A single paragraph may suggest suicide to twenty persons; some particular, chance, but apt expression, seizes the imagination, and the disposition to repeat the act, in a moment of morbid excitement, proves irresistible. Do the advantages of publicity counterbalance the evils attendant on one such death? Why should cases of suicide be recorded at length in the public papers, any more than cases of fever?”