November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  Although Cain’s insurance agent is wrong—people have killed themselves by jumping off the backs of moving trains—his basic point is correct. There are many ways to complete suicide. The National Center for Health Statistics has enumerated at least forty-four general categories. The method one chooses depends on race, sex, occupation, availability, psychology, and, to an extent, fashion. In ancient Greece death by hemlock was popular; hanging, as Euripides observed, was considered “unseemly.” In Rome, chic suicides fell on their swords or opened their veins in a warm bath. According to the scholar Servius, Roman suicides by hanging were “cast forth unburied.” Such class snobbery persisted into the eighteenth century, when an Englishman, learning of a friend’s suicide by that method, remarked, “What a low-minded wretch to apply the halter! Had he shot himself like a gentleman I could have forgiven him.” The lower classes usually chose the noose, of which a French author observed, “Hanging is a type of death of which the infamy is so well established that a man who would choose it in despair, unless he were the dregs of society, would be unpardonably dishonored among honest men. One must take poison, shoot oneself, or die by fire. Drowning is another vulgar death.” Nevertheless, in Paris, where life centered around the Seine, drowning seems to have been à la mode in the nineteenth century. Downstream at Saint-Cloud, fishermen who found the bodies of suicides in their nets were paid a fee for each corpse they brought to La Morgue.

  The introduction of domestic gas in the nineteenth century and the proliferation of prescription drugs in the twentieth brought about a radical change in suicide methods. “Not only have they made suicide more or less painless, they have also made it seem magical,” wrote Alvarez in The Savage God. “A man who takes a knife and slices deliberately across his throat is murdering himself. But when someone lies down in front of an unlit gas oven or swallows sleeping pills, he seems not so much to be dying as merely seeking oblivion for a while. . . . In suicide, as in most other areas of activity, there has been a technological break through which has made a cheap and relatively painless death democratically available to everyone.”

  In most countries firearms, hanging, and poison are the most common methods of suicide, but their frequency varies from culture to culture. Only in the United States, where gun control restrictions are minimal, do firearms rank first; they account for some 60 percent of suicides, followed in order of frequency by hanging and overdose. Until recently, American women killed themselves most often by overdose; now firearms account for the majority of female suicides. Availability is a key factor; in England, where gun control laws are stiff, domestic gas ranks first, while firearms are used in a mere 2 percent of suicides. In China, the only major country where a nearly equal number of men and women kill themselves, self-poisoning is disproportionately popular, perhaps because of the easy availability of agricultural pesticides combined with scant access to emergency medical care. But the popularity of any given method is subject to change. In Sri Lanka, for instance, jumping into a well was the preferred way until the introduction of indoor plumbing rendered wells obsolete. Self-poisoning with pesticides now tops the list.

  In Norway, a disproportionate number of suicides are by drowning. “Since many Norwegians live and work on the water, it is perhaps not surprising that some of them choose to die in the water as well,” observed Herbert Hendin, an American psychiatrist who has made extensive studies of suicide in particular geographic or ethnic groups. In Suicide in America, Hendin pointed out that half of all black suicides in New York were by jumping, compared to about 25 percent in the city as a whole and less than 3 percent in the rest of the country. He suggested that just as life in Norway centers on the sea, life in Harlem centers on its rooftops. “Sexual experience, fighting, and drug usage frequently take place on the Harlem rooftops,” he wrote. “In this context, it is not surprising that jumping from the top floors or roofs of such buildings is a very common method among black suicides.” In the South, where guns are an accepted part of many households and children learn to handle them at an early age, firearms are used in suicide more frequently than in the rest of the country. In some cultures, of course, certain forms of suicide have demanded traditional methods: the belly-cutting of the Japanese samurai; the hurling onto her husband’s funeral pyre of the Indian widow; the self-immolation of political protesters, beginning with Buddhist monks in the early years of the Vietnam War.

  The popularity of suicide methods also varies according to profession. A study of physicians, who complete suicide at three times the rate of the general population, found that 55 percent of all physician suicides use drugs—to which they have easy access—while only 12 percent use guns. Dentists use anesthetic gas more frequently, chemists tend to swallow cyanide, merchant seamen have a higher rate of drowning, and more miners kill themselves with explosives than any other group. In a rash of ninety-three suicides by New York City policemen between 1934 and 1940, nine of ten killed themselves with their service revolvers. These examples suggest not only that availability is crucial, but that people tend to use methods that relate to how they have lived their lives.

  While the majority of suicides die by gunshot, hanging, or poison, less than 1 percent a year in the United States kill themselves by what the National Center for Health Statistics refers to as “unspecified means.” This rubric covers a variety of methods that seem as infinite as the variety of causes for suicide. Over the past two centuries people have completed suicide by jumping into volcanoes, vats of beer, crocks of vinegar, retorts of molten glass, white-hot coke ovens, or slaughterhouse tanks of blood; by throwing themselves upon buzz saws; by thrusting hot pokers or broomsticks down their throat; by suffocating in refrigerators or chimneys; by locking themselves into high-altitude test chambers; by crashing airplanes; by jumping from airplanes; by lying in front of steamrollers; by throwing themselves on the third rail; by touching high-tension wires; by placing their necks in vises and turning the handle; by hugging stoves; by freezing to death; by climbing into lion’s cages; by blowing themselves up with cannons, hand grenades, or dynamite; by boring holes in their heads with power drills; by drinking boiling water, hydrochloric acid, or Drano; by walking in front of cars, trains, subways, and racehorses; by driving cars off cliffs or into trains; by swallowing poisonous spiders; by piercing their hearts with corkscrews or darning needles; by starving themselves; by swallowing firecrackers; by holding their heads in buckets of water; by beating their heads with hammers; by pounding nails or barbecue spits into their skulls; by strangling themselves with their hair; by walking into airplane propellers; by swimming over waterfalls; by hanging themselves with grapevines; by sawing tree limbs out from under themselves; by swallowing glass; by swallowing hot coals; by swallowing underwear; by stabbing themselves with spectacles sharpened to a point; by cutting their throats with handsaws, sheep shears, or barbed wire; by forcing teams of horses to tear their heads off; by decapitating themselves with homemade guillotines; by exposing themselves to swarms of bees; by injecting themselves with paraffin, cooking oil, peanut butter, mercury, deodorant, or mayonnaise; by crucifying themselves.

  Such imaginative methods, which account for only a tiny fraction of suicides, receive wide publicity—they are often used as supposedly “humorous” filler items in newspapers—and contribute to the idea that all people who commit suicide are insane. (Indeed, the use of a more bizarre method may well reflect a greater degree of psychopathology.) Yet on closer inspection such methods may seem unusual but not inexplicable. The man who jumped into a vat of beer was a brewer; the man in the high-altitude test chamber was an air force technician; the man who lay in front of the steamroller was a construction worker; the man who blew himself up with a cannon was a soldier; the man who constructed a guillotine and decapitated himself was an assistant executioner in Corsica.

  In his 1920 paper “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” Freud described his analysis of an eighteen-year-old Viennese girl who had attempted suicide. Th
e girl had been strolling with an older woman with whom she was infatuated. They encountered the girl’s father, who disapproved of the liaison. He scowled at his daughter. The woman told the girl they must separate, and the girl immediately flung herself over an embankment onto a railway line. Freud, pointing out that the German word niederkommen means both “to fall” and “to be delivered of a child,” believed that the girl’s attempt expressed her desire to bear her father’s child, and punishment for her murderous rage toward her mother. In a footnote to the paper he wrote, “That the various methods of suicide can represent sexual wish-fulfillments has long been known to all analysts. (To poison oneself = to become pregnant; to drown = to bear a child; to throw oneself from a height = to be delivered of a child.)”

  Freud’s tidy explication—one wonders, for instance, whether the girl would have run several miles to find a high place from which to jump had there been none at hand—has inspired numerous other attempts to invest suicide methods with universal symbolic meanings. “The choice of the manner of dying is in itself a significant tell-tale feature,” wrote Freud’s disciple Wilhelm Stekel. “Women who ‘have fallen’ or who struggle against temptations, throw themselves out of the window and into the street. The man who entertains secret thoughts of poisoning somebody, takes poison; one who yearns after the flames of love, sets fire to himself; he who believes himself surrounded by poisonous thoughts, turns on the gas.” Stekel, who was in poor physical health, killed himself at age seventy-four by overdosing on aspirin. It is not known whom he secretly wished to poison other than himself. In Man Against Himself, Menninger linked drowning to a desire to return to the womb; psychiatrist Joost Meerloo traced hanging to sexual frustrations and claimed that “jumping out of the window may quite paradoxically signify a wish to grow up.” In the late 1970s, psychiatrists Sidney Furst and Mortimer Ostow suggested that suicidal male homosexuals stab or shoot themselves as an expression of their desire to be attacked by another man’s penis. As for homosexuals who jump from heights, this was considered an expression of sexual guilt for “phallic erection under improper circumstances.”

  As far-fetched as such interpretations seem, choice of method is rarely random, as Hendin demonstrated in his fascinating discussion of method and motive in Suicide in America. “Some suicides use their control over how they choose to die to express their feelings about why they want to die,” he wrote. “A prisoner can hang himself because it is the only method of suicide available to him, but hanging is also used to express a variety of suicidal motivations. Some people hang themselves as punishment for their desire to choke others: one patient who did, used to ‘playfully’ choke his wife. For other suicidal individuals, hanging represented how choked and ‘hung up’ they felt. One such young man came from a family that blocked his every independent constructive effort, while constantly holding out hope of what they would do for him in time. No one could have more effectively ‘hung up’ anyone than this family ‘hung up’ their son, and his final retaliation was to hang himself.” People whose anger, self-hatred, or need for punishment is especially intense may use particularly violent methods, according to Hendin. An enraged man who lost his job, fell into debt, and was deserted by his wife killed himself by sealing off the kitchen, turning on the gas, stabbing himself in the chest, and then hanging himself. Hendin suggested that “the multiplicity of methods helped this man express the intense feeling that he was being attacked on all sides.” It was no accident, in all senses, when a man depressed over his impotence blew himself up with a stick of dynamite; a lonely Massachusetts spinster suffocated by locking herself into her hope chest; a woman who felt abandoned by her family shut herself into an abandoned refrigerator in her basement; a talented young climber, despondent over breaking up with his girlfriend, leaped off the cliffs he had so often scaled, executing, as he fell, a perfect swan dive; an elderly opera buff in failing health jumped to his death from the top balcony of the Metropolitan Opera House.

  Many suicidal people are impulsive and use whatever method is at hand. A man in traction transferred the pulleys and cords from his fractured leg to his neck and strangled himself. Prisoners hang themselves not necessarily because of sexual frustration, as Menninger implies, but because the only available means are their shoelaces, shirts, or bedsheets. One particularly desperate inmate chewed through the veins in his wrist. Mental hospital patients manage to procure a variety of tools: plastic bags, windows, broken glass, nails, coat hangers. Other suicidal people may plot their death for weeks, months, or even years, making lists of possible exits, sifting through the pros and cons, weighing the merits not of whether to live but how to die. “Suicides have a special language,” wrote Anne Sexton in her poem “Wanting to Die.” “Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.” Sexton thought and wrote about suicide for years before fatally overdosing in 1974. Some suicidal people are extremely choosy—their method must be in keeping with their personality. Women (and some men) may reject shooting, jumping, or stabbing because they don’t want to disfigure their face or body. Hospitalized after many attempts with pills, one woman told her doctor, who was concerned at her being placed on a high floor of the hospital, not to worry. She could never jump, she said, because she was afraid of heights. (A young Chilean, slightly less acrophobic, tied a handkerchief over his eyes before leaping from a twelfth-floor ledge.) Some people go to great lengths to kill themselves by a certain method and will accept no substitute. “A man who has attempted to drown himself will not readily be induced to cut his throat, and vice versa,” observed one nineteenth-century doctor. A study of six people who survived leaps from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge revealed that the bridge had assumed an almost mystical significance for them. All six said they had planned suicide only from the Golden Gate, and no other bridge—or method—would do. This type of insistence—conscious or unconscious—is illustrated by the story of the man on the window ledge. A policeman, drawing his revolver, cries, “Don’t jump or I’ll shoot!” The man obediently comes inside. This tale, of which several variations are told, may be apocryphal, but it is certainly psychologically accurate.

  “It takes a tremendous amount of energy to figure out how you’re going to kill yourself,” says a forty-seven-year-old woman who tried. “I wanted something that was final and wasn’t going to be messy. I didn’t want to jump off the roof; I might end up only half-dead, and I wouldn’t like that. I didn’t want to blow my head off—I didn’t happen to feel that physical disembodiment would be a particularly pleasant thing for everybody.” She chuckles ruefully. “I kept thinking about what would be easiest for everyone else. Of course the easiest thing would have been if I’d lived.” One night she drove to a nearby field, hooked up a vacuum cleaner hose to the exhaust pipe, zipped herself into a sleeping bag, and stuck the hose into her mouth. The police discovered her the next morning, curled in her sleeping bag, unconscious. She was revived at the hospital. No one could figure out how she had survived until a friend realized the car had a catalytic converter that filtered out carbon monoxide. She had taken the wrong car.

  Like this woman, some suicides go to great lengths to avoid hurting loved ones by trying to make sure they won’t find the body or that they won’t find a disfigured corpse. Others, consciously or not, design their suicides to punish, blame, or take revenge—a contemporary form of the oriental practice of “killing oneself upon the head of another.” A mother who disapproved of her daughter’s fiancé killed herself at the wedding reception. A California woman lay across the tracks in front of the commuter train on which she knew her husband was returning home. One July 4 a thirty-year-old New York man, depressed over breaking up with his girlfriend, stuck a powerful firecracker in his mouth, lit it, and blew himself up on the front steps of her home. In his book The Undertaking, Thomas Lynch describes the case of a cuckolded man who lay down beside his sleeping wife and sawed through his throat with an electric carving knife; she was eventually awakened not by th
e hum of the knife but by the warmth of her husband’s blood on her body.

  A decision related to choice of method is whether to leave some final word. Only one in five or six suicides leaves a note. Suicide notes have been written or typed on ordinary paper, hotel stationery, prescription slips, therapists’ appointment cards, in books of poetry and prayer books. They have been etched in dirt, printed on a mirror with lipstick, written on a blackboard with chalk, scrawled in blood, carved in wood, typed on a computer, and dictated onto audiotape and videotape. While they are usually addressed to spouses, family members, lovers, and friends, suicide notes have also been addressed to psychiatrists, police, coroners, the press, “to whom it may concern,” or to the entire world. One man wrote to his dog, “Bow wow and good-bye, Pepper.” Almost a third of those who leave notes leave more than one; one man left several notes in every room of his house. Most are left at or near the scene of the suicide, but some are mailed or e-mailed. Some are hastily scribbled, others go through many drafts. Some are written in poetry, in styles ranging from free verse to rhymed couplets. Suicide notes have been as long as dozens of pages and as short as a few words. One man simply wrote, “No comment.” Another, “Good-bye, suckers.”