CHAPTER 11
The Depths of His Despair
These days, when I introduce myself at a conference, I say, “My son died by suicide.” Then I say, “He was one of the shooters in the Columbine tragedy.”
I’m accustomed by now to the jaw drop. Almost invariably, the person says, “I never thought about it that way, but I guess it was a suicide, wasn’t it?”
It never surprises me that people have this reaction. Of course they do; I was Dylan’s mother, and that was my reaction, too. Both the realization that Dylan had died by suicide and the implications of that understanding came in increments, but the import of the realization continues to be felt.
As you’ve probably gathered by now, I have long since given up hoping for a single puzzle piece that will drop into place and finally reveal why Dylan and Eric did what they did. I wish the vectors propelling the boys toward catastrophe had been unambiguous. I am also wary of the many pat explanations that sprang up in the wake of the tragedy. Did school culture and bullying “cause” Columbine? Violent video games? Negligent parenting? The paramilitarization of American popular culture? These are pieces in the greater puzzle, to be sure. But none of them, even in a combination amplifying their individual effects, has ever been enough for me to explain away the kind of hatred and violence the boys displayed.
I am even wary of talking about “the boys” in this way, as if their motivations were necessarily shared. Dylan and Eric planned the massacre together, and they acted together, but I believe—as most of the investigators who examined the evidence do—that they were two different people, who participated for very different reasons.
So while there is likely not a single answer, there is one piece of the puzzle that reveals more for me of the overall picture than any other: that Dylan was experiencing depression or another brain health crisis that contributed to his desire to die by suicide, and his desire to die played an intrinsic role in his participation in the massacre.
I realize this is a controversial statement. I certainly do not mean to imply that Dylan’s brain health issues made him capable of the atrocities he would eventually enact. To do so would be to insult the hundreds of millions of people around the world living with depression and other mood disorders. Stigma and ignorance mean that many people who are struggling do not pursue the help they desperately need. The shame attached to getting help for a crisis in brain health is not only tragic but deadly, and I have no desire whatsoever to contribute to it.
Nor do I believe a crisis in brain health is necessarily an explanation for what Dylan did. The automatic conflation of violence and “craziness” is not only painful for people who are suffering, it is incorrect. According to Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, who has spent his career studying the intersection between mental illness and violence, serious mental illness by itself is a risk factor for violence in just 4 percent of incidents. It is only when mental illness appears in combination with other risk factors—primarily drug and alcohol abuse—that the numbers increase. (Dylan was drinking at the end of his life, something Tom and I did not know.)
Most people living with mood disorders are not dangerous to others at all. As Swanson also points out, though, there is some overlap between mental disorders and violence, and I cannot believe it’s productive for anyone when we take the conversation off the table.
There is, in particular, an overlap between brain health issues and mass shootings. In 1999, prompted by the shootings at Columbine High School, the US Secret Service and the Department of Education launched the Safe School Initiative, an examination of thirty-seven school attacks, in the hopes of preventing others in the future. The researchers found that “most attackers showed some history of suicidal attempts or thoughts, or a history of feeling extreme depression or desperation.” Access to brain health screening and treatment, then, is critical in preventing violence—as well as suicide, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, and a host of other dangers threatening teens. Better access to these resources may not be “the” answer, but it’s pretty close to one.
You will notice that I use the terms “brain illness” and “brain health” throughout this book, as opposed to the more commonly used “mental illness” and “mental health.” That decision was the result of a conversation I had with Dr. Jeremy Richman, a neuroscientist whose daughter, Avielle Rose Richman, was one of the children murdered by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Dr. Richman and his wife, Jennifer Hensel, a scientist and medical writer, founded the Avielle Foundation in their daughter’s honor, hoping to remove the stigma for people seeking help, to develop the concept of a “brain health checkup,” and to identify behavioral and biochemical diagnostics to detect those at risk of violent behaviors.
In our conversation, Dr. Richman explained: “ ‘Mental’ is invisible. It comes with all the fear, trepidation, and stigma of things we don’t understand. But we know there are real, physical manifestations within the brain that can be imaged, measured, quantified, and understood. We need to move our understanding to the visible world of brain health and brain disease, which is tangible.”
The emphasis I place in this chapter on Dylan’s suicide may sound insensitive, as if I believe his death was more important than the deaths he caused—which is not the way I feel at all. I simply mean that coming to understand Dylan’s death as a suicide opened the door to a new way of thinking for me about everything he had done. I truly believe Dylan lost access to the tools allowing him to make rational decisions, and I hope in this chapter to discuss some of the reasons with thoughtfulness and sensitivity. I am endlessly grateful to the world-class experts who made themselves available in order to help me understand.
Were there signs I missed that Dylan was going to commit a crime, especially one of such devastating magnitude? No. Even now, I do not believe there were. Both boys did “leak” their plan by making disclosures of varying accuracy and specificity to their friends. But they did not leak to us.
That doesn’t mean I was powerless, however, because there were signs that year that Dylan was depressed. I now believe that if Tom and I had been equipped then to recognize those signs, and been able to intervene as far as his depression was concerned, we would at least have had a fighting chance to prevent what came next.
Understanding Dylan’s death as a suicide came almost as an afterthought for me. But for Dylan, the desire to die by suicide was where it all began.
• • •
One afternoon, a few months after the tragedy, I was leafing through a journal over a cup of tea in the break room. Our office received a number of higher-education journals, and looking through them helped me feel connected to a larger world not devastated by my son. I had stopped reading mainstream newspapers and magazines, lest I run into a quote about our family from a “trusted friend” I’d never met, or a scathing editorial about our overindulgence of Dylan, or our family’s lack of moral values. Whatever news about the investigation or the lawsuits or the victims I needed to know came through our lawyer, or from friends and family members.
I came across an article on youth suicide prevention. In the first paragraph, the author said something like, “There is a temptation to look to outside influences like violent video games and lax gun control laws for an explanation of the tragedy at Columbine. But among all the other deaths and injuries, two boys died by suicide that day.”
Those words stopped me in my tracks. Because I had been so single-mindedly focused on the murders he had committed, I had strangely not considered the significance of Dylan’s death by suicide.
Intellectually, of course, I knew Dylan had died by his own hand: the autopsy report had said so. I had taken another short step toward conceptualizing Dylan’s death as a suicide in the wake of a short-lived but popular conspiracy theory in the aftermath of the shootings: that Eric had killed Dylan. (It’s alive and well online.) Whenever anyone raised the issue with me, I told them it didn’t matter. Whether Dylan had pulled the tri
gger or had been killed by Eric (or by a cop, per another conspiracy theory floating around in those days), Dylan was responsible for his own death.
And yet, until I saw that journal article, I was sure his suicide had been an impulsive act, a response to this “prank gone awry”—not part of any long-standing plan.
After reading the article, I wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t quite an “aha” moment—the situation was far too complex, and I was far too horrified and confused. Still, something in me shifted. That random journal article created an aperture in me, an opening to an understanding I had not allowed myself to have: whatever else he had intended, Dylan had gone to the school to die.
• • •
My former boss and close friend Sharon, a suicide loss survivor, had treated Dylan’s death as a suicide right from the start. Since I couldn’t join a support group, she brought me stacks of books. For her, Dylan’s intent to die by suicide was a given, and she saw, long before I did, that it was an important piece in the overall puzzle.
Sharon’s presence and conversation were a solace, but the pile of books and pamphlets about suicide she brought me sat unread for months. Even if I could have concentrated long enough to read more than a sentence or two, I couldn’t yet focus on Dylan’s intention to hurt himself, but only why and how he had gone to the school to hurt others. My ignorance was huge, and so I could not imagine that Dylan had been depressed, or suicidal. Those words had nothing to do with us, or with our situation. Devon had told me that after dancing with her at the prom, Dylan had dropped a kiss on the top of her head. Was that the behavior of a depressed person?
After seeing the article in the break room, I started into the stack of books that Sharon had brought me, and what I found there surprised me a great deal. I believed myself to be an educated person, and a sensitive one. But, like many people, I had unthinkingly bought into many of the most prevalent (and damaging) myths about suicide. Opening those books was the first step in a lifetime’s work of educating myself and others—and of coming to terms, in a real way, with what had gone wrong in our own home and family.
Survivors often comment about how remote suicide seemed to them before they lost a loved one to it; the real question is why we persist in believing it’s rare, when it is really anything but. Someone in America dies by suicide every thirteen minutes—40,000 people a year. That is anything but insignificant.
According to the CDC, suicide is the third leading cause of death among people aged 10–14, and the second among people aged 15–34. So, besides accidents and homicide, nothing kills more young people in this country than suicide—not cancer, not sexually transmitted disease. A 2013 study looked at almost 6,500 teens. One in eight had contemplated suicide, and one in twenty-five had attempted it, yet only half of them were in treatment.
More than a million people in the United States attempt suicide each year—which means three attempts every minute. Many of them do so without raising any red flags, an indication that our standard assessment practices may be of limited use.
Even after more than ten years as a suicide prevention activist, I still find those numbers—and the general public’s ignorance about them—staggering. I taught Dylan, as I had taught his brother before him, to protect himself from lightning strikes, snakebites, and hypothermia. I taught him to floss, to wear sunscreen, and the importance of checking his blind spot twice. As he became a teenager, I talked as openly as I could about the dangers of drinking and drug use, and I educated him about safe and ethical sexual behavior. It never crossed my mind that the gravest danger Dylan faced would not come from an external source at all, but from within himself.
In my deepest self, I believed that those close to me were inoculated against suicide because I loved them, or because we had a good relationship, or because I was an astute, sensitive, caring person who could keep them safe. I was not alone in believing that suicide could only happen in other families, but I was wrong.
Almost everything I knew about suicide was wrong. I thought I knew what kinds of people tried to kill themselves, and why—they were selfish or too cowardly to face their problems, or captive to a passing impulse. I had bought into the cultural cliché that people who died by suicide were quitters—either too weak to handle the challenges of life, or attention-seeking, or trying to punish the people around them. These, I learned, are myths that are born out of thinking about suicide without really trying to inhabit the suicidal mind.
Suicidal thought is a symptom of illness, of something else gone wrong. Most suicides are not impulsive, spur-of-the-moment decisions at all. Instead, most of these deaths are the result of a person losing a long and painful battle against their own impaired thinking. A suicidal person is someone who is unable to tolerate their suffering any longer. Even if she does not really want to die, she knows death will end that suffering once and for all.
We know there is an incontrovertible correlation between suicide and brain illness. Studies from all over the world suggest that the overwhelming majority—from 90 to 95 percent—of people who die by suicide have a serious mental health disorder, most often depression or bipolar illness.
Many of the researchers I have talked to believe that (barring chronic illness–related end-of-life decisions), suicidality is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy mind. Dr. Victoria Arango is a clinical neurobiologist at Columbia who has dedicated her career to studying the biology of suicide. Her work has led her to believe that there exists a biological (and possibly genetic) vulnerability to suicide, without which a person is unlikely to make an attempt. She is currently working toward identifying specific changes in the brains of people who have died by suicide. “Suicide is a brain disease,” she told me.
Dr. Thomas Joiner, whose books are both meticulously researched as well as beautifully compassionate and personal, writes as both a psychologist and a survivor of his father’s suicide. His theory of suicide, a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles, has redefined the field.
He proposes that the desire to die by suicide arises when people live with two psychological states simultaneously over a period of time: thwarted belongingness (“I am alone”) and perceived burdensomeness (“The world would be better off without me”). Those people are at imminent risk when they take steps to override their own instinct for self-preservation, and therefore become capable of suicide (“I am not afraid to die”).
The desire for suicide, then, comes from the first two. The ability to go through with it comes from the third. Over the years, this insight would prove important to me.
• • •
I finally started to read some of his journal pages. He was expressing depressed and suicidal thoughts a full 2 years before his death. I couldn’t believe it. We had all that time to help him and didn’t. I read his writings and cried and cried. This was like the suicide note we never got. A sad, heart-wrenching day.
—Journal entry, June 2001
From the day the tragedy occurred, we had been desperate for information about Dylan’s state of mind when he died. He had purposely left nothing behind, and law enforcement had emptied his room of anything of relevance, so there was little to study. After nearly two years, we had come to accept we would never know what he had experienced during the last months of his life. Then, in 2001, Kate Battan’s office called. The sheriff’s department had pages of Dylan’s writing in their possession, and offered to share copies with us.
These writings are always referred to as “journals,” but really these were scattered pages, compiled by the investigators after the fact. Most of them were taken from Dylan’s school notebooks, although some of the bits and pieces of paper he wrote on were old advertising flyers or other scraps, which he then tucked into various binders and books. The stack of photocopied pages was about half an inch thick. Some entries were a sentence long, while others went on for pages.
What I found in Dylan’s writing was a revelation. I had not known he had expressed his thoughts and feelings in writing
at all, as I did, and it made me feel close to him. The entries themselves broke my heart. I know how deceptive self-recording can be. I often spill pages and pages when I am sad or scared or angry, whereas better times rate only a breezy line or two. I also know that people can say things in their diaries they don’t have any real plans to act on: I swear, I’m going to kill Joe if he doesn’t return my weed whacker. Even with that caveat, Dylan’s anguish—his depression, perceived isolation, longing, and desperation—jumps off the page.
He talks about cutting himself, a sign of severe distress. He writes about suicide in the very earliest pages: “Thinking of suicide gives me hope that i’ll be in my place wherever i go after this life—that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe—my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE—me—my soul (existence)” and often afterward: “oooh god I want to die sooo bad…such a sad desolate lonely unsalvageable I feel I am…not fair, NOT FAIR!!! Let’s sum up my life…the most miserable existence in the history of time.” He talks about dying by suicide for the first time a full two years before Columbine, and many more times after that.
There is despair and anger but little violence, especially in the pages before January 1999. Besides sadness, the most common emotion expressed throughout Dylan’s journals—and by far the most prevalent word—is “love.” There are pages covered in huge, hand-drawn hearts. He writes, heartbreakingly and sometimes eloquently, about his unfulfilled, excruciating desire for romantic love and understanding. “A dark time, infinite sadness,” he wrote. “I want to find love.” He fills pages with details of a passionate, painful infatuation with a girl who does not even know he exists.
The two psychological states Joiner points to as components in the desire to die—thwarted belongingness (“I am alone”) and perceived burdensomeness (“I am a burden”)—are painfully apparent, although he kept both his hurt and his infatuation closely guarded. I pushed back for years against the public perception of Dylan as an outcast, because he had close friends (not only in Eric, but also in Zack and Nate), and because he participated in a wider circle of boys and girls. But—and it is vital for every survivor of suicide loss to understand this about the person who has died—the journals revealed a vast chasm between our perception of his reality and Dylan’s own perception of it.
Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769) Page 18