A former Temple University student killed himself the other day, shot himself in the head, in the busiest part of campus. Plenty of students saw it happen, or saw the immediate aftermath.
UD readers might remember Mitchell Heisman, who shot himself in the head in the middle of Harvard Yard a few years ago, on a busy morning. Or Nora Miller, who, on another busy morning, immolated herself on the Wesleyan University running field where she (a track star) practiced.
Most suicides are private; UD remembers a GW woman going across the river to a hotel room in Virginia to kill herself. The main character in Doris Lessing’s famous story, “To Room Nineteen,” similarly chooses an anonymous hotel room for her death. Many suicides are committed in hotel rooms.
Public suicides literally want to make a spectacle of themselves. It seems important to their conception of their deaths that they be seen, that people be riveted to and disturbed by their charred or bloodied bodies in the public square. Heisman distributed, just before his death, a long manuscript about the meaninglessness of life. His public gesture seems to have been the endpoint of an elaborate argument to which we were meant to pay attention.
Private suicides seem a reckoning with private demons; public suicides often feel like an angry message.
February 7th, 2012 at 3:26PM
Perhaps. There are so many confounders and situational factors involved that I don’t think your notions are largely generalizable.
The degree to which someone is impulsive plays a part. In the cases you mentioned, it is possible that they chose the spaces they did in order to minimize/avoid harm to others. If one lives in a dorm with paper-thin walls or a lack of firewalls, then the person planning the suicide may well think to avoid using communal living/social spaces and instead choose less populated ones, even though the visibility is higher.
The perception of thwarted belongingness is overwhelming – and it has occurred for highly and chronically distressed people in the immediate physical presence of others. Ergo, there may well be no notion that their actions will be perceived by others as having salience – because they have not perceived themselves to have salience.
Thomas Joiner’s research found that the majority of people making suicide attempts were not doing so as a result of exacting revenge or exhibiting a display of anger so much as they were attempting to quickly and permanently end unbearable psychache.
Given that, I’d guess that there are also outliers and exceptions, and that the examples you offer may be just those.
February 7th, 2012 at 7:30PM
UD, you might be interested in this study which among other things analyzes the use of words in poems and finds some differences between suicides and non-suicides.
http://hbr.org/2011/12/your-use-of-pronouns-reveals-your-personality/ar/1?cm_sp=most_widget-_-hbr_articles-_-Your%20Use%20of%20Pronouns%20Reveals%20Your%20Personality
February 7th, 2012 at 8:03PM
desperation is hard to pin down