In a Week of Grand Exits, a Quest for Understanding

It has been, it would seem, a big week for grand exits. Ambiguous prayers from the cockpit of a plummeting jetliner. Hollywood agents in mourning for a troubled Ovitz protege found hanged in his Westside bathroom. This Saturday, the worldly remains of the Heaven’s Gate sect will be quietly auctioned. “Closure,” one cult member’s grieving mother has termed it, as if such cases ever truly feel closed.

They trigger a certain formulaic response, though, that gives an illusion of an ending: a big story, followed by the stricken reaction, followed by much pious hand-wringing about how “No one really knows why. . . .” Of course, everyone knows why. Suicide--in or out of the headlines--is nothing new, and neither is the psychological suffering that, in 90% to 95% of cases, prompts it. People go crazy, and sometimes that craziness culminates with self-inflicted murder. The vast, vast majority of suicides are about mental illness, whether they happen in airplanes or to glamorous cocaine addicts or amid fairy tales about the Hale-Bopp comet and “earthly containers” or in anonymous isolation. People don’t say so because such matters are deeply uncomfortable. What can be said that doesn’t amplify the shame?

Ironically, this would also seem to be a big week for that rhetorical question. On Saturday, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention will convene at UCLA’s Moore Hall. (In one of the more uncomfortable coincidences for those who prefer grand exits to last-act stories, the foundation’s first-ever nationwide confab will begin just as the Heaven’s Gate lots--bunk beds, computer desks, rugs, etc.--go on the block in a San Diego County warehouse.) The UCLA event, which starts at 9 a.m. and is free all day to the public, will be linked by video conference to suicide prevention panels in 13 cities and will touch on such sides of the suicide “question” as biology, ethnicity, therapy, religion and surviving the self-inflicted death of a loved one. It’s probably safe to bet that it will garner fewer headlines than the folks down in San Diego, whistling past the graveyard.

But the conference--earnest and academic as it is likely to be--ought to be watched, if only for what it says about coming trends. Once so stigmatized that people lied about it on death certificates, suicide has become increasingly open for discussion. This is, in itself, a sort of news event.

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The organizers of Saturday’s coast-to-coast conference see it as a milestone, and it is, on several levels. As advocates go, the suicide prevention people here have tended to be somewhat marginalized. Their events--dutifully proffered to the media, and just as dutifully ignored on most occasions--have featured the same handful of stalwarts, and so have the audiences, partly because suicide is a morbid subject. There are good reasons why most people would rather whistle past the graveyard.

But this conference brings in the views of church people, medical people, psychologists, experts on cultural differences and others--an approach that reflects a broadening of interest in suicide nationally. This year, for example, the U.S. surgeon general for the first time called for suicide prevention, noting an annual death toll of more than 30,000 nationwide. In the past two decades, he noted, the number of reported suicides among children has doubled; whether this is due to more accurate reporting or other causes, no one can yet say.

In the book world, professor of psychiatry Kay Redfield Jamison, whose best-selling memoir of manic depression has been optioned for the movies, recently published a new book for mainstream audiences, “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide” (Knopf). One of the attempts she details is her own: “No amount of love from or for other people--and there was a lot--could help,” she writes movingly. “No advantage of a caring family and fabulous job was enough to overcome the pain and hopelessness I felt. . . .”

Even the gun control battle has homed in on the topic. The most recent government statistics show that, as crime rates have fallen, gun-related homicides are now outnumbered by gun-related suicides. A study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the suicide rate among gun buyers was double that of the general population, and 57 times higher during the first week after the purchase of the firearm.

This broadening makes the need for suicide prevention more relevant to more people. Still, this week’s headlines underscore what too often still goes unsaid: Suicide isn’t some mystery pulled from a Hollywood fast-lane morality play or the X-Files; no age or gender or culture corners the market on its anguish. Like so much that makes headlines, it’s a cry for broader, more competent mental health care. The true “closure” is in realizing that.