November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  Some of the obstacles faced by gay and lesbian youth are exemplified in the short life of Jim Wheeler, whose story was told in the documentary film Jim in Bold. The middle of seven children in a close-knit Quaker family, Wheeler grew up in western Pennsylvania farm country, the son of a family physician and a substitute teacher. From early on, it was clear to his parents that Jim was different—a sensitive child more interested in painting, dancing, and playing with Barbie dolls than in playing football. Jim seemed happy, for the most part, but as he entered high school, his effeminate mannerisms and eccentric preferences made him a target for increasingly vicious teasing. Jim pretended the name-calling—sissy, fairy, faggot, queer—didn’t bother him and became only more determined to flaunt what he called his “punk-rock attitude,” dyeing his hair orange, showing off his multiple piercings, and polishing his persona as an artist. At sixteen, he told his family he was gay. They were not surprised. His mother told him she loved him but said it would be a hard road ahead. But his family wouldn’t know until after his death, when they found the poetry he’d written, just how hard it turned out to be—for instance, that after gym class one afternoon, some of the athletes had pulled him from the shower, thrown him to the floor, and urinated on him. In a rural area where to come out of the closet might well have been considered metaphoric suicide, Jim didn’t know anyone else who was gay. “He wanted to be normal,” one of his sisters later wrote. “And in his eyes I guess being normal meant not being gay. He could not see any future for himself.” When he began to talk of suicide, his family assumed he was being his usual histrionic self. But after Jim cut his wrists, his parents took him to a therapist, who told Jim that homosexuality was an unpardonable sin. The cure? Prayer. In any case, the therapist told Jim’s parents not to worry; Jim was a cutter and cutters never kill themselves. Five months after Jim’s high school graduation, not long after he had gone into therapy, Jim’s mother and older sister found him hanging just inside the door of his apartment. He was nineteen. After his death, they found a sad, defiant poem he’d written describing the shower incident. It ends with words “single gay male that’s me.”

  V

  BACKING INTO THE GRAVE

  IN HIS SURVEY of the etymology of the word suicide, linguist David Daube traces the various phrases that reflect a particular culture’s attitude toward the subject. The Old Testament has no specific expression for suicide; the act was merely described, as when “Saul took his own sword, and fell upon it.” The ancient Greeks had numerous ways to denote self-destruction, most of which emphasized dying rather than killing: “to seize death,” “to be delivered from life,” “to leave the light,” “to carry oneself off,” “to consume oneself,” “to dispose of oneself,” and “to get oneself out of the way,” among others. A noun for the act was not introduced until the second century AD when the Christian presbyter Clement of Alexandria observed that philosophers allow the excellent man “a sensible removal.” Ancient Rome’s vocabulary included the following phrases: “to seek death,” “to procure one’s own death,” “to cause violence to oneself,” “to fall by one’s own hand.” An unsuccessful suicide was “to wound oneself in order to die.”

  As “wounding oneself in order to die” became a sin and a crime, the vocabulary describing it became increasingly fierce. Someone who in ancient Greece elected “to flee the light,” in medieval England was said “to murder oneself,” “to destroy oneself,” or “to assassinate oneself.” Self-murder became the most popular way to describe the act, although the law favored the Latin felo de se. Others borrowed a term first used by Hamlet when he cried, “Oh that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ’gainst self-slaughter.” Donne, says Daube, introduced the more clinical self-homicide in Biathanatos. In 1618, Edmund Bolton employed the term self-killing. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton used a host of sympathetic synonyms: “to free themselves from grievances,” “to put an end to themselves,” “to dispatch themselves,” “to precipitate themselves,” “to fall by one’s own hand,” “to let himself free with his own hands,” “to make away with themselves,” and so on.

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word suicide—from the Latin sui, self, and caedere, to kill—was first used in 1651 by Walter Charleton, an English physician, when he said, “To vindicate oneself from extreme and otherwise inevitable calamity by sui-cide is not (certainly) a crime.” A. Alvarez cites an earlier usage in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, published in 1642: “Herein are they in extremes, that can allow a man to be his own assassin, and so highly extol the end and suicide of Cato.” In the 1662 edition of his dictionary, A New World in Words, Edward Phillips takes credit for the word: “One barbarous word I shall produce, which is suicide, a word which I had rather be derived from sus, a sow, than from the pronoun sui, unless there be some mystery in it; as if it were a swinish part for a man to kill himself.” Today, although there are dozens of slang expressions such as “offing oneself,” “taking the pipe,” and “hanging it up,” and euphemisms such as “to make away with oneself,” the word suicide is widely used in English. Not surprisingly, our vocabulary continues to reflect our attitude: while the act itself is no longer a crime, most people still speak of “committing” a suicide, as we “commit” crimes, incest, perjury, or faux pas.

  Although there is general agreement on the word, there is a great difference of opinion as to what it means. The definition of suicide would seem straightforward—“the act or instance of taking one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally”—according to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Yet even this description is imprecise. Everyone would agree, for instance, that a man who puts a gun in his mouth, pulls the trigger, and dies is a suicide. But what of the man who puts a gun in his mouth not realizing that it is loaded? What of the man who loses at Russian roulette? Is he a suicide or merely unlucky? A strict interpretation of Webster’s definition, in fact, might exclude many deaths that we classify as suicides but that are arguably “voluntary”—that of Socrates, for example, who was ordered to kill himself. And what of the Japanese samurai whose suicide is demanded by cultural tradition? The spy who takes his own life rather than divulge classified information? The terminally ill woman who asks her husband to put a fatal dose of pills on her tongue? The child who swallows poison from the medicine chest? The man who, addicted to nicotine, cannot stop smoking and dies of lung cancer? The people who, on September 11, 2001, rather than be burned to death, jumped from the World Trade Towers?

  There is, in fact, little agreement on exactly what constitutes a suicide. Over the years dozens of definitions have been proposed, and entire books have been written on the problem of terminology. For medical examiners suicide is a medical-legal classification, one of five modes of death including accidental, natural, homicidal, and undetermined. Many deaths, however, fall through the cracks between these categories. Warned by his doctor that to drink again would kill him, an alcoholic with cirrhosis of the liver continued to drink heavily and soon died. His mode of death was certified as natural. A twenty-five-year-old laborer with a history of mental instability and suicide attempts drove his pickup truck into a wall at dawn, leaving no skid marks. His death was certified as undetermined. A woman took an overdose of barbiturates in the kitchen at 4:30 p.m. She knew that every working day for three years her husband had come home at 5 p.m. and his first act was to get a beer from the refrigerator. This afternoon, however, her husband was delayed and did not get home until 7:30. Her death was certified as suicide.

  In 1637, John Sym, the rural English clergyman who was considered something of a suicide prevention expert, pointed out in his book Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing, that there were many ways of killing oneself, not all of them technically suicide. Sym divided suicide into “direct” and “indirect” categories. Indirect suicide included “eating to gluttony, and drinking to drunkennesse; using labour and recreations to surfeiting.” The commission of a mortal sin, he said, was indi
rect suicide, as were duels, keeping company with “accursed persons,” battle against a mightier adversary (“when self-conceited, wilfull, foole-hardy men will fight against their enemies, upon desperate disadvantages; and imminent perill of death”), and “when any doe out of a bravery, and gallantry of spirit, goe needlessly with a charge of money, or of men’s persons, or errands; either in the night, through a place haunted and beset with murderous robbers; or, at any time through knowne ambushments, and strong troupes of enemies.”

  Sym’s “indirect” suicide is the equivalent of Durkheim’s “embryonic suicide.” Durkheim observed that many people who had no conscious intention of killing themselves acted in ways that imperiled their life. He suggested that “the daredevil who intentionally toys with death,” “the man of apathetic temperament who, having no vital interest in anything, takes no care of health and so imperils it by neglect,” and “the scholar who dies from excessive devotion to study” had much in common with the “true suicide.” “They result from similar states of mind,” wrote Durkheim, “since they also entail mortal risks not unknown to the agent, and the prospect of these is no deterrent; the sole difference is a lesser chance of death.”

  Freud, referring to such examples as “half-intentional self-destruction,” said that people found many unconscious ways to express their death instinct. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life he described an officer who, shortly after his mother’s death, fell and was severely injured in a cavalry race, and a man who shot himself “accidentally” after being rejected by the army and by his girlfriend. Calling these “purposive accidents,” Freud wrote, “I have now learnt and can prove from convincing examples that many apparently accidental injuries that happen to such patients are really instances of self-injury.” This held true, apparently, even in the great psychiatrist’s own household. “When a member of my family complains to me of having bitten his tongue, pinched a finger, or the like, he does not get the sympathy he hopes for, but instead the question: ‘Why did you do that?’” In fact, when one of Freud’s children fell ill and was ordered to spend the morning in bed, the boy threw a tantrum and vowed to kill himself, “a possibility that was familiar to him from the newspapers,” noted Freud. In the evening his son showed him a chest bruise he’d gotten from bumping against a doorknob. “To my ironical question as to why he had done it and what he meant by it, the eleven-year-old child answered as though it had suddenly dawned on him: ‘That was my attempt at suicide that I threatened this morning.’”

  In Man Against Himself, Karl Menninger wrote that “in the end each man kills himself in his own selected way, fast or slow, soon or late.” Menninger cataloged four hundred pages worth of self-destructive behavior, from nail biting to world war, and divided them into three types. In “focal” suicide, the self-destructive urge zeros in on a specific part of the body and results in malingering, “purposive accidents,” impotence, frigidity, or self-mutilation. In “organic” suicide certain people lose the will to live and contrive their own illnesses and premature deaths via cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or emphysema. In “chronic” suicide, a person kills himself slowly, through alcoholism, asceticism, martyrdom, neurotic invalidism, antisocial behavior, or psychosis. All of these, said Menninger, were expressions of the death instinct and represented “variant forms of suicide.”

  In the six decades since Man Against Himself was published, researchers have refined and added to Menninger’s compendium of what is sometimes called “subintentioned death,” “slow suicide,” “silent suicide,” “suicide on the installment plan,” or “suicide by inches.” Some examples include smoking, drugs, reckless driving, obesity, high blood pressure, workaholism, procrastination, overexercise, high-risk sports, eating disorders, running away from home, and delinquency. Then there are those people who don’t take their medication; terminally ill patients who refuse lifesaving operations; people who continue to eat fatty foods in spite of high cholesterol levels; women who avoid doctors when they find a lump in their breast; gays who continue to engage in high-risk sex, knowing that the odds of contracting AIDS are high. The French writer Henri Barbusse once remarked that two armies at war form one vast mass of humanity committing suicide. Well into his nineties Karl Menninger still traveled the country to decry what he called “the great and growing suicide club America seems to be caught in”—the nuclear arms race.

  In his later work Menninger suggested that self-destructive behaviors are often, in fact, ways of postponing or averting true suicide. “The development of symptoms is a struggle for health, a struggle toward recovery, an effort to avert something which is even worse than that to which one must submit in order to escape it,” he said. “The organism says, anything rather than suicide, anything rather than give up the most precious thing of all, namely my life. Sickness, even neurosis, even crime, but not that awful oblivion, that awful nothingness.” Thus, according to Menninger, certain forms of self-destructive behavior may serve—paradoxically—as survival techniques. He warned that if substitutes fail, however, they often lead to the ultimate self-destruction of suicide.

  A dramatic use of self-destructive behavior as a way of staying alive is self-mutilation, the most common form of which is wrist-cutting, primarily in young females. Some wrist-cutters are diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, while others have no diagnosable disorder but suffer from low self-esteem, intense guilt, and an inability to express themselves verbally. Their act is often precipitated by the threat of impending loss or abandonment—the hospitalization of a parent, being left by a lover. Their tension builds, their anger turns inward, and they punish themselves by repeatedly cutting their wrists—or arms, legs, neck, face, or abdomen. Despite such violence, most cutters say they feel not pain but catharsis. As one researcher characterized the meaning of the act, “I bleed; therefore I am alive.” (Indeed, wrist-cutting seems to be a self-inflicted cousin of the common nineteenth-century medical technique of bleeding, in which physicians systematically removed small amounts of blood from depressed and suicidal patients.)

  This is the sort of affirmation described by Ellen Parker, a thirty-two-year-old hospital worker who had, when I met her, periodically been cutting her wrists ever since she was an adolescent. When Ellen was nine, her father died after a long illness. Her mother, who had spent many years caring for her husband, was also sickly, and Ellen felt ignored. A shy, reclusive teenager, Ellen often felt so much she thought she might explode; and at the same time she was terrified that she felt nothing at all, that she had no relationship to the real world. “At times I would get so frustrated that I would pound the pillow or go outside and throw rocks. Sometimes I’d even bang my head against the wall—but I couldn’t do that when my mom was in the house, so I had to find quieter ways to relieve the pressure.” The way she found was to cut her wrists, deep enough to bleed but not deep enough to require medical attention. Two decades later, despite years of therapy, Ellen still kept her feelings inside. About once a month, when she felt especially depressed, she went home and made four or five cuts on her arm, from her wrist toward her elbow, about three or four inches long. After washing and bandaging the cuts, she usually had a glass of wine and listened to music before it was time for bed. Ellen didn’t think of these incidents—her “ritual” as she called it—as suicide attempts. She had no intention of dying, and she knew the cuts were superficial. “It’s a way of relieving the pressure,” Ellen told me. “It’s kind of like letting out a sigh. I get a peaceful feeling and a kind of self-satisfaction at having hurt myself.”

  The form of “slow suicide” most likely to lead to the fast kind is alcoholism. As many as 30 percent of people who complete suicide and 23 percent of people who attempt suicide have alcohol use disorders. Or we can look at it from another statistical angle: an estimated 5 percent of Americans are alcoholic, and about 3 percent of them will die by their own hand. (People who abuse alcohol have a risk of suicide 115 times that of a psychiatrical
ly healthy population.) They are likely to be white, middle-aged, and unmarried, with a history of previous suicide attempts. Alcohol and/or drug abuse is especially likely to lead to suicide when combined with mental illness, particularly with depression. (Two of every three people with manic-depressive illness, and one of every four with major depression, have alcohol or drug problems; the rates for those with schizophrenia are nearly as high.) Those who suffer from a psychiatric illness and abuse alcohol are at far greater risk for attempting or completing suicide. Indeed, the majority of suicides involve a combination of alcohol and depression.

  While there is agreement that suicide and alcohol are closely related, there is less agreement on exactly how they interact. Certainly, alcohol and depression may form a vicious cycle: drinking can lead to depression; depressed people often self-medicate by drinking, which may only exacerbate their depression—and may, over time, alter the brain’s delicate chemistry. Alcohol and drugs, of course, also promote suicide by reducing inhibitions, encouraging impulsive and risk-taking behavior, and keeping the depressed person from seeking help. Some researchers believe alcoholism and suicide are different consequences of the same underlying causes. They agree with Menninger, who says that alcoholism is “a form of self-destruction used to avert a greater self-destruction.” Alcohol may be used as an escape, and when it fails to put sufficient distance between the drinker and the source of his unhappiness, the ultimate escape of suicide may be chosen. Others dispute Menninger’s hypothesis, pointing out that many alcoholics eventually kill themselves outright. They suggest the opposite progression—that alcoholism leads to social difficulties that lead to suicide. In a study of 147 suicidal male alcoholics, three-fourths of the sample reported that prolonged drinking led to rejection by friends, disruption in social relationships, and job difficulties, which precipitated suicidal thinking. Another study found that nearly one-third of alcoholic suicides had experienced the loss of a close relationship within six weeks of their death. Certainly, no matter what the sequence, increased drinking often leads to loss of control, and suicide can be a way of reasserting control. Alcoholism, like depression, can be a way of stopping one’s life at a certain point; suicide can be a way of stopping one’s life permanently. For some, alcoholism may be suicide in a more acceptable guise. According to his first wife, the writer Jack Kerouac maintained that because he was Catholic, he couldn’t commit suicide; he therefore planned to drink himself to death. He died in 1969 of a massive abdominal hemorrhage brought on in large measure by acute alcoholism.