89 linking suggestion and suicide: Phillips has also investigated the effect of mass media on aggressive behavior. In a 1979 study of California motor vehicle deaths, he found that front-page suicide stories may provoke an increase in auto fatalities. Three days after a story, fatal car crashes increase by more than 30 percent. The rate of single-car crashes is most affected, suggesting that some of the drivers may have had self-destructive motives. Again, the greater the publicity, the greater the rise in the number of deaths. In addition, he found significant similarities between the dead driver and the person described in the suicide story. Phillips has also linked murder-suicide stories to a rise in U.S. plane crashes. (D. P. Phillips, “Suicide, Motor Vehicle Fatalities, and the Mass Media: Evidence Toward a Theory of Suggestion,” American Journal of Sociology 84 (5) (1979): 1150–74; D. P. Phillips, “Airplane Accident Fatalities Increase Just After Newspaper Stories About Murder and Suicide,” Science 201 (1978): 748–50.)
90 numerous other studies: For a review of the literature, see Gould, “Suicide and the Media.”
90 yearlong CDC survey: N. D. Brener et al., “Effect of the Incident at Columbine on Students’ Violence- and Suicide-Related Behaviors,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 22 (3) (2002): 146–50.
90 extends to television news coverage: Examining the effect of thirty-eight nationally televised news or feature stories about suicide from 1973 to 1979, Phillips and a colleague found a significant increase (7 percent) in teenage suicides during the week following the broadcasts. The more networks carrying the story, the bigger the increase. Girls were more susceptible to the influence than boys. They did not find a significant increase in adult suicides following the programs. (D. P. Phillips and L. L. Carstensen, “Clustering of Teenage Suicides After Television News Stories About Suicide,” New England Journal of Medicine 315 (11) (1986): 685–89.)
90 fictional television suicides: In one study, Madelyn Gould and David Shaffer researched the effect of four made-for-TV movies about teenage suicide broadcast in late 1984 and early 1985. Teenage suicide rates in the metropolitan New York area rose in the two weeks after broadcast for three of the four movies; six more teenagers than would have been expected took their lives. Shaffer suggested that the fourth film, Silence of the Heart, did not trigger suicides because it portrayed suicide in a less sensational fashion. In addition, educational materials and training guides were distributed to schools beforehand, suicide prevention hotline numbers were displayed during the broadcast, and a panel discussion on suicide prevention was aired immediately following the movie. (Gould and Shaffer, “Impact of Suicide in Television Movies.”) The study was challenged by the television networks, which pointed out that there was no way of knowing whether the teenagers who killed themselves actually saw the movies. Phillips himself contradicted Gould and Shaffer’s findings. Looking at the effect of the same movies on teenage suicide in California and Pennsylvania, he found no rise in the rate. (D. P. Phillips and D. J. Paight, “The Impact of Televised Movies About Suicide: A Replicative Study,” New England Journal of Medicine 317 (13) (1987): 809–11.) Psychologist Alan Berman also questioned the results of the Gould-Shaffer study. Collecting data from 189 medical examiners across the country, representing 20 percent of the U.S. population, he found no increase in youth suicides in the two weeks following three of the TV movies; in some areas there was a decrease. (Berman examined two of the films used in the Gould-Shaffer study, and a third film broadcast after their study had been completed.) He did find evidence that one of the broadcasts may have influenced the choice of methods. (A. Berman, paper presented at a joint meeting of the American Association of Suicidology and the International Association for Suicide Prevention, San Francisco, May 25–30, 1987.)
90 A 1999 English survey: K. S. Hawton et al., “Effects of a Drug Overdose in a Television Drama on Presentations to Hospital for Self Poisoning: Times Series and Questionnaire Study,” British Medical Journal 318 (1999): 972–77.
90 films from 1917 to 1997: Gould et al., “Media Contagion and Suicide.”
91 asks whether cyberspace: K. Becker et al., “Parasuicide Online: Can Suicide Websites Trigger Suicidal Behaviour in Predisposed Adolescents?” Nordic Journal of Psychiatry 58 (2) (2004): 111–14.
91 he opposes censorship: From time to time newspapers have been persuaded or pressured into suppressing stories about suicide. In the 1930s, for instance, Mussolini prohibited all reports of suicide in the Italian press; his vision of the modern fascist state did not include the possibility of suicide.
91 fell more than 80 percent: E. Etzersdorfer et al., “Newspaper Reports and Suicide,” New England Journal of Medicine 327 (1992): 502–3; and E. Etzersdorfer and G. Sonneck, “Preventing Suicide by Influencing Mass-Media Reporting: The Viennese Experience, 1980–1996,” Archives of Suicide Research 4 (1998): 67–74.
91 issued recommendations: P. W. O’Carroll and L. B. Potter, “Suicide Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide: Recommendations from a National Workshop,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 43, RR-6 (1994): 9–18. (See Web site at www.nimh.nih.gov/research/suicidemedia.) In 2001, the CDC and several other groups, including the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the American Association of Suicidology, issued media recommendations for reporting on suicide. These can be found in an appendix to Gould et al., “Media Contagion.”
91 Annenberg Public Policy Center: K. H. Jamieson, “Can Suicide Coverage Lead to Copycats?” American Editor, June 14, 2002. See Web site at www.asne.org.
92 Cobain’s death had no effect: D. A. Jobes et al., “The Kurt Cobain Suicide Crisis: Perspectives from Research, Public Health, and the News Media,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 26 (1996): 260–71.
Chapter V Dana
95 125,000 visits: “Suicide and Attempted Suicide,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 53 (22) (2004): 471.
95 “Although depression is more common”: Jamison, Night Falls Fast, 46.
96 “Most people who commit”: Stengel, Suicide and Attempted Sucide, 87.
96 “The man up there is saying”: Time, November 25, 1966, 49.
96 “a desperate version”: Giffin and Felsenthal, Cry for Help, 14.
96 thirteen-year-old Illinois girl: Ibid., 19.
96 Michigan youth hospitalized: A. Wrobleski, Afterwords, October 1984, 1. For more on attitudes of hospital staff toward attempters, see T. C. Welu, “Psychological Reactions of Emergency Room Staff to Suicide Attempters,” Omega 3 (2) (1972): 103–9. Completed suicide also provokes complex reactions in medical personnel. “Something about acute self-destruction is so puzzling to the vibrant mind of a man or woman whose life is devoted to fighting disease that it tends to diminish or even obliterate empathy,” writes the surgeon Sherwin Nuland. “Medical bystanders, whether bewildered and frustrated by such an act, or angered by its futility, seem not to be much grieved at the corpse of a suicide.” (Nuland, How We Die, 151.)
96 chronic psychiatric problems: A. J. Elliott et al., “A Profile of Medically Serious Suicide Attempts,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 57 (1996): 567–71.
97 slashed her wrists lightly: Klagsbrun, Too Young to Die, 33–34.
97 lonely sixteen-year-old: Giffin and Felsenthal, Cry for Help, 30–31.
Chapter VI “Use the Enclosed Order Form to Act Immediately. You Could Save a Life”
114 a 1969 article: Cited in C. P. Ross, “Teaching Children the Facts of Life and Death: Suicide Prevention in the Schools,” in Peck, Farberow, and Litman, Youth Suicide, 153.
116 “Our goal is to help”: D. Breskin, “Dear Mom and Dad,” 35.
116 “Children with a clearer understanding”: G. R. Bernhardt and S. G. Praeger, “Preventing Child Suicide: The Elementary School Death Education Puppet Show” (unpublished paper), 6.
117 “Any school administrator”: Quoted in a letter sent by Donna-Marie Buckley, whose son had hanged himself, to President Reagan, June 1984.
118 Shaffer studied the effects: Paper pre
sented at the twenty-first annual meeting of the American Association of Sucidology, Washington, D.C., April 13–17, 1988. See Shaffer et al., “Adolescent Suicide Attempters.” See also Shaffer’s more general discussion of youth suicide prevention, Shaffer et al., “Preventing Teenage Suicide.”
119 115 school-based programs: A. Garland et al., “A National Survey of School-Based, Adolescent Suicide Prevention Programs,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 28 (1989): 931–34.
119 “By deemphasizing”: A. F. Garland and E. Zigler, “Adolescent Suicide Prevention: Current Research and Social Policy Implications,” American Psychologist 48 (1993): 169–82.
119 A 1994 CDC summary: P. W. O’Carroll et al., “Programs for the Prevention of Suicide Among Adolescents and Young Adults,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 43, RR-6 (1994), 1–7.
119 “no justification”: Metha et al., “Youth Suicide Prevention.”
119 study of twenty-one hundred students: R. H. Aseltine, “An Evaluation of a School Based Suicide Prevention Program,” Adolescent and Family Health 3 (2003): 81–88. See also R. H. Aseltine and R. DeMartino, “An Outcome Evaluation of the SOS Suicide Prevention Program,” American Journal of Public Health 94 (2004): 446–51.
120 significant reductions: J. Kalafat, “School Approaches to Youth Suicide Prevention,” American Behavioral Scientist 46 (9) (2003): 1211–23.
120 Yellow Ribbon Suicide Prevention Program: See Web site at www.yellowribbon.org.
PART 2 History
Chapter I Primitive Roots: The Rock of the Forefathers
129 Among the books that describe the history of suicide, from which many of the examples in my discussion are drawn, I owe a special debt to Biathanatos by John Donne; A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide by Charles Moore; The Anatomy of Suicide by Forbes Winslow; Suicide by Émile Durkheim; Suicide by Henry Romilly Fedden; To Be or Not To Be by Louis Dublin and Betty Bunzel; and The Savage God by A. Alvarez.
129 “Lo, my name reeks”: J. H. Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), 163–69.
131 “The Baganda were very superstitious”: J. Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of Their Native Customs and Beliefs (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), 20–21.
132 Primitive fear of the suicide’s ghost: Examples of primitive attitudes toward suicide are found in Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 229–64; Durkheim, Suicide, 217–25; Dublin and Bunzel, To Be or Not To Be, 137–53.
133 For many years India: For examples of revenge suicide in southern India, see Fedden, Suicide, 45–46.
134 “They are a nation lavish”: Durkheim, Suicide, 218.
134 “They dwell on the red blaze”: Dublin and Bunzel, To Be or Not To Be, 145.
135 “There is another world”: Alvarez, Savage God, 53.
135 a king was buried: Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. de Selincourt. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1988), 294.
135 “keen competition”: Ibid., 342.
136 “Should he outrage”: A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa (The Netherlands: Anthropological Publications, 1970), 287.
136 the village of Deorala: Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1987, part I, p. 1.
136 “The government of Madhya Pradesh”: “Indian Police Arrest Sons After Woman Commits Suttee,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 8, 2002, www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/07.
137 Yet in Japan: My discussion of suicide in Japan owes much to Iga, Thorn in the Chrysanthemum; M. Iga and K. Tatai, “Characteristics of Suicides and Attitudes Toward Suicide in Japan,” in Farberow, Suicide in Different Cultures, 255–80; J. Seward, Hara-Kiri: Japanese Ritual Suicide (Rutland, Vt., and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1968).
137 “The Japanese calendar”: W. E. Griffis, The Religions of Japan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895), 112.
138 variety of circumstances: Durkheim noted that “a strange sort of duel is even reported there, in which the effort is not to attack one another but to excel in dexterity in opening one’s own stomach.” Durkheim, Suicide, 222.
138 “The Japanese are an obstinate”: Moore, Full Inquiry, 140. In 1932, Henry Morton Robinson observed, “If the Samurai code existed in America today, Tammany Hall would be a catacomb of self-slain heroes.” (North American Review 234 [4] [1932]: 304.)
138 “the very shrine”: G. Kennan, “The Death of General Nogi,” Outlook, October 5, 1912, 258.
139 almost 250 recorded cases: O. D. Russell, “Suicide in Japan,” American Mercury, July 1930, 341–44.
139 “He mingles with the gods”: Newsweek, September 24, 1945, 58.
140 “My daughters and myself”: Time, March 1, 1976, 31. In The Thorn in the Chrysanthemum, Mamoru Iga wrote, “The mother who commits suicide without taking her child with her is blamed as an oni no y na hito (demonlike person)” (p. 18). In the United States the opposite is true. In 1985 in Los Angeles, a thirty-two-year-old Japanese immigrant whose husband had been unfaithful walked into the Pacific Ocean carrying her infant daughter and four-year-old son. Although passersby managed to pull her from the surf, her children drowned. Charged with voluntary manslaughter, the woman told police that she had killed her children because she loved them dearly. She was sentenced to eleven years in prison, but after intervention by local Japanese groups, her sentence was reduced to three years’ probation. She eventually returned to her husband.
140 the suicide of Yukio Mishima: My description of Mishima’s suicide is drawn from newspaper accounts and from Iga and Tatai, “Characteristics of Suicides.” For further discussion of Mishima’s suicide see Lifton, Broken Connection, 262–80.
141 “a sadomasochistic homosexual”: New York Times, November 9, 1974.
142 “the readiness of the Japanese”: Durkheim, Suicide, 222.
143 “People didn’t know they were suffering”: Most of the details in this paragraph are taken from a fascinating article by Kathryn Shulz, “Did Depressants Depress Japan?” (New York Times Magazine, August 22, 2004, 39–41.)
143 blend of traditional and contemporary: The historical gulf between primitive and Eastern acceptance of suicide and its condemnation by the West are illustrated in a perhaps apocryphal story told by psychiatrist Joost Meerloo. A sociologist and a psychiatrist who flew to the Orient to attend a conference on alienation and self-destruction were out for a stroll one night when they saw a man hanging from a tree. They rushed to the spot, quickly cut him down, and tried to restore him to consciousness. As they worked feverishly over his prostrate body, a crowd gathered and began to murmur ominously. The air grew thick with tension. Although they had saved the life of the stranger, the sociologist and the psychiatrist were starting to fear for their own lives when a policeman appeared just in time to rescue them from a probable lynching. Relieved at being saved from the mob, these Good Samaritans were shocked when the policeman hauled them off to court, where the judge informed them that they had committed an outrageous offense—they had interfered with the plans of a holy man who wished to join his ancestors. They were ordered to pay a stiff fine, and since the holy man had given away all his earthly possessions in preparation for his suicide, the sociologist and psychiatrist were ordered to assume full responsibility for his material needs for the rest of his life. Meerloo, Suicide and Mass Suicide, 93–94.
143 “One single suicide”: K. Huus, “Japan’s Chilling Internet Suicide Pacts,” MSNBC News, www.msnbc.msn.com.
Chapter II The Classical World: “He Is at Liberty to Die Who Does Not Wish to Live”
144 “steep down from a high rafter”: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. R. Fitzgerald (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1963), 194.
145 “thrusting into their throats”: Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, in R. M. Hutchins, ed., Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 6: 459.
145 “went quite mad”: Herodotus, Histories, 414.
/> 145 “to depart from their guard”: Dublin and Bunzel, To Be or Not To Be, 184.
146 “If one of your own possessions”: Plato, Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, ed. J. D. Kaplan (New York: Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 1951), 74.
146 “in a spirit of slothful”: Plato, The Laws, trans. T. J. Saunders (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975), 391.
146 “To kill oneself to escape”: Aristotle, Ethics, rev. ed. trans. J. A. K. Thompson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1976), 130.
146 “The many at one moment”: Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” in W. J. Oates, ed., The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Random House, 1940), 31.
147 “to weigh carefully”: Lecky, History of European Morals, 1: 226.
147 “If one day”: Fedden, Suicide, 81.
147 “as he had advanced”: Ibid., 80.
147 “Such a discussion”: Moore, Full Inquiry, 1: 238.
148 the death of Marcus Porcius Cato: For the story of Cato and his suicide, see Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. J. Dryden (New York: Modern Library, 1932), 918–60.
149 “when God himself” and “a noble lesson”: Dublin and Bunzel, To Be or Not To Be, 186–87.
149 “Jupiter himself”: Choron, Suicide, 22.
149 “A resolution this”: Pliny, Letters, trans. W. Melmoth (London: William Heinemann, 1915), 1: 81–82.
149 “Foolish man”: Fedden, Suicide, 79.
149 “Where had their philosophy gone”: For the description of Seneca’s death, see Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. M. Grant (London: Penguin, 1989), 376.
151 sheer exhibitionism: The suicide of Peregrinus is described in Fedden, Suicide, 66–67. For a more cynical account see The Works of Lucian of Samosata, trans. H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 4: 79–95.
151 Frazer reported that in Rome: Fedden, Suicide, 84.
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