Suicide, UD likes to say, writes a new life story. By that she means that when someone kills him or herself, everyone who knew, or knew of, that person, tends to begin a retrospective reappraisal of personality, events, beliefs, in light of the event.
Some suicides are more or less expected, though fewer than you’d think. Even when people with rich depressive histories do it, we tend to be shocked. Suicide attempts surprise us, but the actual completion, “the smile of accomplishment,” as Sylvia Plath puts it, is almost always a stunner.
Few suicides are more stunning than university suicides, as UD has discovered by following, over the life of this blog, responses to such deaths when they occur among students and professors. The reasons are obvious. University suicides tend to be among young, beautiful, gifted, and favored people. They’re smart, they’re creative, they attend or teach at impressive schools, their environment is dynamic, experimental, reflective, collaborative.
Among the suicides of professors UD has covered are Petrus Schaesberg, an adjunct professor of art history at Columbia; Pomona’s David Foster Wallace; Winston Napier, Clark University; Jerry Wolff, from St. Cloud State; Hank Payne; Nicholas Hughes of the University of Alaska; George Mason’s William Lash; Berkeley’s Jorge Liderman; Denice Denton at UC Santa Cruz; Deborah Digges of Tufts; Rachel Wetzsteon of William Paterson University; Sarah Hannah, Emerson College; and now NYU’s Sam Roweis.
Durkheim cautions that
Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.
Boris Pasternak said something similar:
[W]e have no conception of the inner torture which precedes suicide. … The continuity of … inner life is broken… personality is at an end. … What is certain is that they all suffered beyond description, to the point where suffering had become a mental sickness. And, as we bow in homage to their gifts and to their bright memory, we should bow compassionately before their suffering.
David Foster Wallace elaborates on the pain in these two excerpts from Infinite Jest:
[I]t was as if a large billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not the slightest inkling was there. … It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. … I simply could not live with how it felt. … I understood the term hell as of that summer day and that night in the sophomore dormitory. I understood what people meant by hell.
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It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. … It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed….
These writers note the essential enigma, the mysterious particularity, of every suicide. Pasternak adds to this the moral imperative toward compassion; for while we can’t understand the specific nature of each suicide’s suffering (“the passage remains obscure,” writes Donald Justice), we can certainly see the depth of the suffering, and we should honor that.
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If I consider the list I’ve just given you, though, I still find myself trying to come to some tentative points of understanding.
Some of the people on the list seem to have been veteran depressives (Jorge Liderman, Jerry Wolff, Hank Payne, David Foster Wallace); others (Sam Roweis, Denice Denton, Winston Napier, William Lash) astounded people with the suddenness of their fall.
This difference corresponds to the distinction between premeditated and impulsive suicides about which psychologists have long talked. The veterans on the list tend to have orchestrated reasonably careful ends for themselves — Wolff, for instance, who killed himself in a remote section of a national park, wrote in his suicide note that he wanted to return his body and soul to nature. Impulsives on the list – Denton, Roweis – tend to have been jumpers.
University student suicides are mainly impulsive. Kay Jamison, in an interview, remarks that
People [under thirty] are more impulsive and they get slightly less impulsive as they get older and the impulsiveness interacting with the depression is particularly devastating and lethal, potentially lethal.
In an article about his brother’s suicide at the age of twenty-three, Anderson Cooper writes, “I used to think suicide was a conscious act. A plan made, then carried out. I know now it’s not always like that.” Cooper’s brother suddenly jumped from his mother’s apartment balcony.
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With the shocking suicide of NYU professor Sam Roweis in mind, I’d like to consider possible links between certain forms of intellectual/creative genius and a vulnerability to sudden self-destruction.
Building on various studies, Jamison has in some of her books argued for a continuity between dangerously manic mental states and profoundly generative mental states. One writer reviews her work, as well as that of other researchers:
[Albert Rothenberg, at Harvard, argues] that translogical types of thinking characterize both psychotics and highly creatives. Translogical thinking, he explains, is a type of conceptualizing in which the thinking processes transcend the common modes of ordinary logical thinking.
It involves what Rothenberg calls janusian and homospatial processes. Janusian thinking is a conscious process of combining paradoxical or antagonistic objects into a single entity. Homospatial process is the essence of good metaphor. It means to superimpose or bring together multiple, discrete objects.
Rothenberg states that janusian thinking tends to occur in the beginning stages of creative work when ideas are generated, and homospatial thinking characterizes the development of the creative ideas. He acknowledges that there are similarities between the primary process thinking of psychotics and translogical thinking, and that there are some subtle distinctions.
“There is thus a thin but definite borderline between the most advanced and healthy type of thinking – creative thinking – and the most impoverished and pathological types of thinking – psychotic processes.”
Other researchers have noted cognitive similarities. Drs. Andreasen, Stevens, and Powers (1975) investigated conceptual overinclusiveness (i.e. the tendency to combine things into categories that blur conceptual boundaries) in a sample of writers, manic depressives and schizophrenics.
They found that the conceptual styles of only the first two groups were similar, with a difference being that the writers had more control over their thought processes than did the manic-depressives.
Kay Jamison’s research (1989; 1993) also supports the idea that there is a cognitive link between creativity and madness. She notes that many of the cognitive changes that characterize mania and hypomania are also typical of creativity: restlessness, grandiosity, irritability, intensified sensory systems, quickening of thought processes, and intense feeling.
“Two aspects of thinking in particular are pronounced in both creative and hypomanic thought: fluency, rapidity, and flexibility of thought on the one hand, and the ability to combine ideas or categories of thought in order to form new and original connections on the other” (1993, p. 105).
This post’s getting awfully long. Let me pause for a moment and share with you this much.
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Okay, so where was I… I was contemplating Sam Roweis — an upbeat, sociable, brilliant, way-successful, creative computer scientist — who suddenly, in the midst of a loud argument last week with his wife (it was apparently about their premature twin babies, born with many problems), ran to the apartment’s balcony and jumped off.
I’ve been reading many loving, admiring descriptions of Roweis from colleagues and friends, and thinking about whether his way of thinking had anything in common with what Jamison and Rothenberg and others are describing. Certainly he exhibited the ability to combine disparate objects, to think with amazing rapidity, flexibility, confidence, and clarity, to blur conceptual boundaries… He had what sounds in some accounts like manic physical and mental energy…
Yet lots of brilliant and original thinkers share these traits…
Something else attracted my attention among the tributes:
My first night in London Sam met me by the Camden Locks and mapped The Optimized Strategy for me to use the next day on my search for a flat; he optimized it for the buses and trains I would need to take. In retrospect, this was no easy task as I only lasted two months in London without a car but to Sam, using Public Transport efficiently was [a] challenge that just needed to be solved.
If Roweis’s sudden jump made me think of Kafka’s bizarre story, The Judgment, this description of him made me think of John Stuart Mill’s account of his nervous breakdown in his Autobiography. Both men, let’s say, took the Optimized Strategy approach to life; both believed that things can be managed, controlled, rationalized, improved, even perfected.
“[T]he whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind,” complains Mill. This confident analytical progressivism had failed to acquaint him, however, with deeper-lying, recalcitrant human truths.
So maybe – and it’s rank speculation – the convergence of an almost superhuman capacity to solve problems, and the sudden presentation of a problem that simply could not be optimized, was enough, with other pressures (there were apparently financial issues) to create a kind of temporary insanity in Roweis.
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One more word, if I may.
I’m fascinated by our reactions to suicide. It was easy for me, earlier in the post, to talk about compassion, but it turns out to be much, much harder to grant it to people who take themselves away from us.
Sherwin Nuland, a doctor, writes in How We Die that
We seem to separate ourselves from the subject of self-murder in the same way that the suicide feels himself separated from the rest of us when he contemplates the fate he is about to choose. Alienated and alone, he is drawn to the grave because there seems no other place to go. For those left out and left behind, it is impossible to make sense of the thing.
Nuland describes his daughter’s reaction when he told her that a college classmate and friend of hers had killed herself. It was total rage.
[She] stared at us unbelievingly for a moment as the tears began overflowing onto her suddenly flushed cheeks. And then, in an uncontrolled paroxysm of rage and loss, she burst out, “That stupid kid! How could she do such a thing?” And that was, after all, the point. How could she do it to her friends and to her family and to the rest of those who needed her? How could such a smart kid commit such a dumb act and be lost to us? There is no place for this kind of thing in an ordered world…
A friend and university classmate of Sarah Hannah’s and Rachel Wetzsteon’s grapples with her rage by speaking directly to potential suicides:
… When a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community. One of the best predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide. That means that every suicide is also a delayed homicide. You have to stay. … [N]ext time you are seriously considering suicide you can dismiss it quickly and go play a video game (or something else meaningless and fun, it’s when we try for meaning that we go crashing into the existential wall – the universe is absurd, to get along with it, you should be too). … [I]f you are even a tiny bit staying alive for the sake of the community, as a favor to the rest of us, I need to make it clear to you that we are grateful that you stay. I am grateful that you stay alive.
Since I started thinking about this, when Sarah died, I started thinking about how if I’m grateful that you haven’t killed yourself (even though the fact of it only recently came into my mind), then you are also likely grateful that I haven’t killed myself (whether consciously yet or not). I have found that thinking about this can feel like a multitude of invisible arms linking to support me. I can fall back into faith in humanity… We have to carry each other, like Bono says.
The truth is I want you to live for your sake, not for ours. But the injunction is true and real. Anyway, some part of you doesn’t want to end it all, and I’m talking to her or him, to that part of you. I’m throwing you a rope, you don’t have to explain it to the monster in you, just tell the monster it can do whatever it wants, but not that. Later we’ll get rid of the monster, for now just hang on to the rope. I know that this means a struggle from one second to the next, let alone one day at a time. Know that the rest of us know that among the faces we have met there are some right now who can barely take another minute of the pain and uncertainty. And we are in the room with you, going from one moment to the next, in whatever condition you manage to do it. Sobbing and useless is great! Sobbing and useless is a million times better than dead. A billion times. Thank you for choosing sobbing and useless over dead.
There are poets and other artists, psychotherapists and average Joes, who are thinking of your struggle and appreciating what you have managed to put up with. We are grateful. Best of all, practicing tuning in to your gratitude for other’s staying alive also tones up your ability to feel the gratitude that people are extending to you too, you start to feel the support of it, the invisible arms. Don’t kill yourself. Suffer here with us instead. We need you with us, we have not forgotten you, you are our hero. Stay.
This is strange, moving writing, with the writer’s comic/serious pleading that her two friends’ suicides be the last among her friends. Yet one registers the futility, and even the confusion, of the gesture. Her arguments to would-be suicides aren’t very compelling — in killing herself, the suicide is killing other people, so she should hold her fire; the universe is absurd (Great! I won’t kill myself!)…
The other-people-care argument only works if it’s true, or felt by the suicidal person to be true. And then again, many depressions aren’t really about a conviction of the indifference of the world. Many can be understood as bad biochemical events which among other things tend to make the depressive not care much about other people… Or these events make the depressive care in an anxious, crazy, pointless, draining way about other people…
In any case, once we get over the initial rage and disbelief, we tend, at least at universities, to finger lack of community as a major culprit. Here’s a graduate student at NYU reflecting on the latest suicide there:
…We need to think about what we share, why caring for one another not only alleviates some of the anonymity that abets suicide, but creates a community held together by common beliefs and values.
… And while I respect President Sexton’s message to NYU last fall that “you belong in and are part of a community that cherishes your presence, you are loved,” the words ring false for anyone who ever has stood in a crowded line at the Silver Center, where most of the undergraduate courses are held, waiting for an elevator—a crowd of people who seems to have more or less nothing to say to one another.
We need something to talk about other than the latest suicide or administrative attempt to stave them off. NYU needs to work on constructing a community with a deeper sense of shared purpose—well before it needs to erect more Plexiglas barriers.
