His assisted suicide in Switzerland last year “had to appear premature,” he wrote in a final note to friends and family; after all, the point was to end his life before debility and suffering set in. At ninety years of age, an excellent, accomplished, and long run behind him, the time was right. A man whose entire work revolved around decisions, made his.
He’s only in the news today because he asked that his manner of death be kept quiet for awhile. The people who loved him obliged. It was only just revealed.
I discovered after making the decision that I am not afraid of not existing, and that I think of death as going to sleep and not waking up.
You can list the conditions likely to produce a lot of suicides, and you can then find places on earth which meet those conditions, and – ta-da – they’re going to have the world’s highest suicide rates. So let’s see:
deracination, alienation, cultural identity crises
alcoholism
guns
isolation
cold weather
macho autonomous stoic ethos
suspicion of outside, therapeutic, government entities
so many suicides that there’s a contagion effect
The more of these your location boasts, the more suicide we are likely to see.
And poor Greenland has them all. Here’s a long, thoughtful, piece about it.
“We do have significant mental health problems, there is no doubt about that. …We don’t have enough mental health providers, facilities, treatments. It’s the way that we have facilitated killing ourselves that leads to death with firearms, where we take this to the extreme.”
… where you can rent a handgun lickety-split and blow your head off no muss no fuss. In the last two years, two Purdue students have indeed applied the ballistics the range offers in order to solve their personal problems forever.
When students use exactly the same method/location like this, the poor school gets to worry about copycat suicides.
Shooting ranges are somewhat popular places nationwide to commit suicide – it happens enough that many have rules that no one can come in alone, everyone has to be assessed in various ways by staff, etc.
There have apparently been three student suicides at Purdue in the two-year span. (The third was more conventional: The student simply walked outside to a wooded location and used his own gun.) Yikes.
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PS:Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes: Editors at the University of Texas San Antonio newspaper should know that you can edit stuff out of what people say. You don’t, for instance, have to scrupulously retain every one of this student’s likes:
“It was kind of an eye awakener, there, for me a little bit. But there’s, like, people, like, go through this, like, on a daily basis, which is really sad,” she added.
That's life (that's life) That's what all the people say I'm ridin' high in April, shoot my brains out in May But I know I'm gonna change that tune When I'm up in heaven with the good Lord in June
I said that's life (that's life) And as funny as it may seem Some people get their kicks Turnin' gray matter into whipped cream Whipped cream with red chunks floatin' down What a treat for the wife and kids when found
I've been a dropout, a drunkard, depressive, divorcee, A self-hating thing I've been up and down and over and out And I know one thing Next time I find myself Losing the race I'll pick up my Glock and I'll shoot off my face
Yeah that's life I can't deny it I got a brain And I just wanna fry it Do you wanna watch me? Come this here July I'm gonna roll myself up In a big ball and die
Suicidal impulses can last only briefly, but easy access to a gun makes the urges more difficult to survive. In Montana, 67 percent of suicides in 2022 involved a gun, according to the Times analysis. Nationally, guns were used in about 55 percent of such deaths.
But in a place where guns are embedded in the rugged, frontier ethos, there is little political will to prevent people who are at risk of harming themselves from owning a gun.
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Montana. Increasingly known to demographers as Morticia. It is of course UD’s view that the accomplishment of apocalyptic state suicide rates indicates a death-wish – a romance with the brain-blaster world-enders that have been enigmatically smiling at you from your bedside and from the movies since you were a kid. Whenever you’re impatient with yourself because of your latest bad bout of boozing, whenever the America-is-complete-shit rants of your heroes Trump and Vance make you despair, thar she blows! With her come-hither gleam guaranteeing an end to your convoluted, entirely unsatisfying, world-conspiracies. They’re just not adding up. It’s just not making sense. You fear your neighbors; your wife doesn’t get you. You’re sleepwalking through life and it’s time to stop walking and just sleep. No one cares if you blow your head off because no one from the state legislature all the way down to your family and friends is doing anything about your personal armory even though it’s obvious you’re WAY fucked up. You’ve never forgotten the look of absolute peace in the eyes of the first doe you killed when you were eight. I’ll have what she’s having.
Gotta hand it to places like Natrona County WY, where they rustle up many more suicides a year than almost anyplace else in this country, but where the sacred word GUN never crosses their lips. “Our statistics in this county are worse than what you’ve heard,” says a commissioner and whoo boy that’s quite a number but Natronites have guns coming out their wazoo and the more guns the more suicide. Get it? Is this too difficult a concept? The Suicide Belt is about gun belts. The gunniest states have the suicidiest citizens. Reduce suicide by reducing or temporarily removing or properly locking up GUNS.
But no. In this latest pile of horseshit about it, you got politically correct weenies brought to the county to talk about how the words “commit” and “suicide” are no-nos and everything will be better when we all start saying kill himself instead. Weawy?
Here’s more pointless crap from a local pol:
“It’s very frustrating, and I don’t know where else to go with that. I want to continue to talk about it. There are people fighting, people working and it’s something that we are talking about in our field and it is a very, very difficult situation and it’s a crisis that we have. Anyway it’s just kind of on my heart right now.”
Blahblah. What’s on people’s hearts is the carbon steel barrel of a Glock, fella, and by the way you sound like a girl.
Yes, yes, booze and cowboyitis also play their part; but Wyoming keeps its First in the Nation suicide designation largely cuz of all them guns. You’re drunk and low and a little scraped up by life and… thar she blows! off your head.
Bloodsoaked bodies are still warm, but this will be a wholesome Mormon hoedown, promising “warm memories!” A maniac with a million guns in his house just up and slaughtered his wife with one of them. Let’s celebrate!
Wealthy, well-connected Olin had a big ol’ church to help him, plus a psychiatrist or two out in American Fork, Utah. Did he consult any of that as he descended into madness? Did anybody around him (he had six grown kids and tons of neighbors/business associates) wonder whether they should at least be a mite disturbed by the fact that Olin had turned his house into an armory? “Hey, Olin’s acting real weird. Shouldn’t we try taking his guns away?”
Ah fuck. As if anyone could imagine anyone in Utah – aka Suicide Central – saying something like that.
Sig Sauer: Chose this for his FB photo. Guess it was his favorite out of all of his guns.
[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….
Four student deaths at UW River Falls, in pretty quick succession – with all of them apparently serious depressives … That sounds very much like a cluster, one death inspiring another.
[Tania] Riske said [her daughter] Sabrina struggled with severe depression for many years. She had a team of counselors and doctors working with her in her hometown of Eau Claire. But Sabrina declined help from campus counselors, Riske said…
“A lot of people were asking me what [the university] could have done better. I don’t think it had anything to do with a shortcoming,” Riske said. “I think they are doing appropriate things. And I’m happy about that.”
As with this earlier post about campus suicide clusters, the problem is not necessarily a lack of school support, though obviously there’s always room for a school to monitor some students more closely, add therapists, etc. The problem is that in some cases of severe protracted depression there’s not much that love, pills, ketamine, teams of counselors and doctors, etc., can do. It’s a hellishly powerful drive, the drive to leave.
The mother of a suicide (her son’s name was Seth) talks about another recent suicide (John).
You could not have prevented it. Even if you think that you could have on that particular occasion, there is no guarantee that it would not have happened some other time. If you are wondering why you didn’t go with John or ask him to come over if he seemed out of sorts, don’t blame yourself. Seth’s roommate was in an adjoining room when he died. Having someone nearby made no difference at all.
If you’re trying to make rational sense of how something like this could happen to someone with such talent and such a bright future, you really can’t think about it rationally — there is no rational explanation. Normal people, those who are not sick in some way, do not kill themselves. Our most basic human instinct is for survival, so to cause one’s own demise subverts that in ways our healthy intellects can’t imagine.
If you’re thinking that John made a choice to end his life, I can’t agree. Whatever was tormenting him — depression, mental illness, some event that threw his mental wiring off kilter — that is what took him. As I said before, it isn’t a rational choice. Suicides are committed by people driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality. It isn’t really a choice.
Americans are practical, success-oriented, ingenious, optimistic, religious — it’s arguably particularly hard for Americans to come to grips with the deathward tenacity of some suicidal people.
I mean, maybe we can grasp this in a frail eighty-year old. A twenty year old college student?
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Forget slipped the surly bonds: We’re talking stripped the bonds off hard, with both hands. “I’m climbing up through the clouds and then just gonna head out outside of everything,” a 23 year old student pilot not long ago radioed a confused traffic controller before crashing his plane. He desperately wanted out of everything. His words have gone viral – there’s poetry in head out outside of everything – and we should pay attention to them. Some suicides are virtually punching their way out of the atmosphere. Hard to go up against such people.
Long article in the NYT on a subject of steady interest to this blog: University student suicides. The excerpt in my title goes to one of the many conundrums specific to this heartbreaking thing: You want to honor the student, but you’re rightly scared of contagion if you speak too loudly.
And that is for a really interesting reason: The vast majority of Wyomingites appear to be, looked at closely, pro-suicide.
I mean, think about it. You don’t get Wyoming’s astounding number of suicides year after year unless you’re practically advocating for it.
Here’s a local commentator:
Like most good ol’ boys, [Wyoming St. Sen.] Kolb hemmed and hawed and found an excuse to do nothing, even while kids in his community kill themselves… [Kolb says:] “As soon as we start dragging [suicide] down the emotional road, we’ve lost… ”
Kolb’s attitude about suicide — that we shouldn’t get emotional about it, that we don’t really need to take action — reflects the cold-hearted stubbornness that has kept Wyoming from dealing with [the state’s suicide] crisis in any real way… [A]s long as people running the state maintain the same harmful and lazy attitude that caused our state to become the worst in the nation for suicide in the first place, we won’t see anywhere near the progress we need against this issue that tears so many of Wyoming’s families and communities apart.
Don’t get all boohoo. Don’t take action. Guns are there to kill people, including yourself if you feel like it.
Cowboy nihilism is super-chic. The macho charisma of killing yourself with Marlboros, Wyoming Whiskey, and a Kahr CM9 Polymer 9mm.
Second highest rate of car crashes in America, even though no one lives there. Most guns per capita in the nation. One psychiatrist every whatever … every five thousand miles…
