Suicide’s a funny thing. When a healthy 28 year old dies out of nowhere it could be something else (undetected heart condition, epileptic seizure, sudden bacterial sepsis, murder…), but it’s probably suicide. And eventually news coverage will straightforwardly include the S-word; but there’s often a slow walk, as it were, to the scaffold.

This Daily Princeton article about a brilliant cutting-edge engineering postdoc, for instance, notes that no cause of death has been given, but also says in its last sentence:

[Haoran] Li’s death is at least the eighth of a current or recent student at Princeton in the last four years, including four determined to be suicides.

And the word “suicides” will get the article’s last word. Nuff said.

Guns pop up here and there in the piece, but never as a crucial part of the explanation. Isolation, alcohol, yadda yadda, but zillions of places have these characteristics. What they don’t have is a zillion guns on a bedside table ogling you.

… is UD‘s word for the placement of your body at a site of great meaning as you commit suicide. Offhand, UD can think of many examples of these – nature lovers who walk deep into national parks and lie down, athletes who end themselves on playing fields and running tracks, and, most recently, a young Finnish politician who killed himself in the parliament building (he had apparently gotten dire health news).

Of course most suicides do the deed at home, or, if it’s outside the home, the motive is simply to spare family members trauma. But many want to make a statement about what made them feel fully alive.

Horribly, some locations are chosen to express worthlessness and nihilism.

In 2016, Ohio State football player Kosta Karageorge – covering up concussions that were becoming symptomatic, having easy access to a gun, crushed by a fight with a girlfriend, and with a history of depression – placed himself, before pulling the trigger, inside a dumpster.

‘At various points, Harry instructed Sophie on light exposure, hydration, movement, mindfulness and meditation, nutrient-rich foods, gratitude lists and journaling to cope with her anxiety. Harry, who has neither nostrils nor opposable thumbs, spent a fair amount of time describing the particulars of alternate nostril breathing.‘

The mother of a young woman who killed herself discovers, posthumously, that she confided only in ChatGPT (“Harry”) as she declined.

With the understanding that we can never assert anything with real confidence about any particular suicide, UD will nonetheless speculate that the death of a mad child-massacrist’s mother on August 1 had something to do with this emotion.

Her motive might have been a simpler one – she feared going to jail for whatever she might have contributed to her daughter’s notorious crime – but I don’t think she was likely to have been indicted. Her ex-husband, with whom the killer lived (he gave her the guns she used), is currently on trial.

But this woman – at various points in her life an addict, married to the killer’s father three times in a turbulent union clearly destructive to the killer’s mental health, and the mother of one of America’s most hideous shooters – might well have decided she’d had enough of the mess. She might have decided she didn’t want to testify in her ex-husband’s trial. She might have decided she hated herself too much to go on.

So begins the coverage of a suicide on the 13th best grounds – a man with a handgun, of course; and of course we are instructed to call it a tragedy long before we know the circumstances.

In America, all suicides are automatically granted tragedy (“an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe”) status; but this increasingly common event, well on its way to becoming a banality in places like Wyoming, seems to UD to be running out out of gas, tragedy-wise.

Certainly – as UD can attest – when someone near/dear to you does the deed, it’s staggering; but qua daily American newsfeed, qua ye olde quotidian, it’s as impossible to tragedify tens of thousands of bummed guys with guns as it is to get worked up about tens of thousands of bummed guys pointing guns at others.

For guidance on this, UD goes to OK State Sen. Nathan Dahm, who, asked about his state’s astounding suicide rate, said “Everyone dies. That’s life.” When everyone’s got – let’s stick with 13 – guns around the house, including one right there on the nightstand for your convenience during a dark night of the soul (we all get ’em), what do you expect? Eventually the coverage of suicides (if coverage there be) will focus more on the rankings of the golf courses where some of them take place and less on the so-called tragedy of the event.

The suicide itself, in other words, ain’t much of a hook anymore; you’re going to have find another angle.

To: All editors and writers

Subject: Letter approval policy

Someone approved publication of this letter to the editor which appeared in yesterday’s edition. We need to find out who did this, and we need to remind staff of Daily Cowboy policies. Hence the meeting.

The letter breaks a variety of editorial rules, prominent among them restrictions on content linking firearms and suicide. But it goes well beyond this, lecturing our readers (from the writer’s perch at the Bloomstein School of Health in New York City) on red flags, storage, and other matters in which this state and this paper take no interest.

I look forward to seeing all of you at the meeting.

Managing Editor

Wow! Talk about cultural dominance!

… let me live it as a Putin flunky…

GUNS.

Read this pathetic editorial up down over and out and you’ll never ever encounter even one mild parenthetical reference to all them guns.

Some 86 percent of police officers are male, a group already at higher risk for suicide, and officers have ready access to firearms, which departments are loath to take away for fear of further discouraging cops from seeking help. In many suicides, officers use their own service weapons. Research has shown that proximity to suicide is in itself a risk factor, causing a potential contagion effect.

Police officers have higher rates of depression than other American workers. Shift work, which disrupts sleep, and alcohol use, long the profession’s culturally accepted method of blowing off steam and managing stress, further compound health issues. 

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:

1. deracination, alienation, cultural identity crises
2. alcoholism
3. guns
4. isolation
5. cold weather
6. macho autonomous stoic ethos
7. suspicion of outside, therapeutic, government entities
8. 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.

*********************

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.