The Final Words of Some L.A. Stories

There are a million stories in any great city, and though you’d never know it, this is no less true in L.A. This city tends to forget its stories. They fall apart in the vastness. History dissipates. Still, this month brings a particularly interesting story--a story about stories, in a sense. It begins on a rainy, long-ago autumn day, in a basement full of coroner’s files.

In that basement is a young psychologist named Edwin Shneidman. He’s 31, and he’s doing a clerical chore for his employer, the Brentwood Veterans Administration Hospital. It’s 1949 and he’s been asked to draft letters of condolence to the widows of two patients who have killed themselves. The psychologist is looking for background. What he has found is a suicide note.

Now, suicide in postwar Southern California is not a commonplace topic. People consider the subject morbid, immoral, something that nice families don’t discuss. Academics, if they are ambitious, avoid suicide research; consequently, not even doctors know much about why people kill themselves. But Shneidman is offbeat. Curious, he starts leafing through the files until he finds another suicide. And another. Story after story, note upon note.

There are hundreds, dating back decades. Excited, he calls a colleague, Norman Farberow, and poses a question: What if there’s something scientific, some universal story, in those sheaves of heartbroken last words?

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I wish I had a nickel for every L.A. story that stars guys like Shneidman and Farberow. Something about this landscape seems to breed mavericks with niche passions--supply-siders, bongo-playing physicists. Must be the upside of weak conventions: fewer encumbrances.

Anyway, they hit pay dirt. Using their trove of 721 suicide notes--721 stories--they did a scientific study, comparing the real notes with simulated notes written by non-suicidal people from the same demographic groups. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that study and others that followed. Basically, the work these guys and their colleagues did here informs almost everything we know now about suicide.

For example, that old saw about how people who talk about killing themselves don’t do it? Shneidman and Farberow showed the opposite to be true. They also busted the myth that the suicidal were incurably crazy; for most, the problem turned out to be a kind of deep-but-treatable psychological pain.

They discovered that almost half the people who kill themselves do so within months of an emotional crisis, and at a time when they seem to be recovering. Their work revealed the ambivalence of the suicidal, whose perturbation makes them simultaneously yearn to live and murder themselves.

Eventually, with Robert Litman, then-head of the psychiatric unit at Cedars-Sinai, the two opened a center devoted to the study of suicide. Among other things, the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center featured the nation’s first hotline for the despondent.

Most people don’t know it, but this month is its 40th anniversary.

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Why don’t most people know it? This is a heckuva question, but then again, you’re asking it in L.A. This place habitually takes its best people and its best stories for granted. The Suicide Prevention Center hotline gets some 16,000 calls a year from suffering people desperate for someone, anyone, to just listen. About a dozen times a month, someone is rescued in mid-suicide.

If those stats represented thousands grappling with cancer or 13 swimmers a month being pulled out of riptides, we’d declare an epidemic, fence off the beach. The Suicide Prevention Center nearly went broke three years ago. It wouldn’t exist if the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center in Culver City hadn’t absorbed it and agreed to eat the costs that weren’t covered by donations and the center’s measly $126,000-a-year county grant.

The director, Jay Nagdimon, talks wistfully of how many more he and his battalion of volunteers could help if the hotline even had a listed 800 number which, at only $50,000 or so a year, remains beyond its means. This, for the only 24-hour nonprofit suicide counseling between Santa Barbara and the Mexican border. (The few toll-free suicide-prevention numbers now in the phone book mainly hook you up either to a church or pitchmen for private psychiatric hospitals.)

Which is too bad. From big public hospitals to modest havens of comfort, great cities are only as great as their compassion for those in need. Where are the high-rollers and ribbon-wearers when there is no limelight, only a cry in the darkness? Same old L.A. story. Just when you need ‘em, they’re history.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com