They’re all over the news, and they’re of two kinds:
- The reasonably explicable variety, which features people unable to sustain high levels of isolation and rigor, as in the recent rash of suicides on a navy ship. The numbers got so high that the navy evacuated the ship. These suicides share traits with prisoner suicide.
- The more mysterious phenomenon of highly successful people destroying themselves at the height of their power and influence. Here we might think of the 2019 death of Alan Krueger; more recently, several young women athletes, all of whom had just won tournaments and awards, killed themselves. A highly promising young tv star just killed herself. On the verge of her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Naomi Judd killed herself.
The cases of Judd and Krueger seem to involve a kind of existential exhaustion after years-long struggles with clinical depression. The powerful drugs, the endless therapy sessions, the setbacks – everything takes a toll on someone already fatigued and undermined. OTOH, although many young suicides have already exhibited some signs of being troubled, there’s nonetheless an impulsive – almost panicked – feel to some of these deaths. Bizarrely, their fate doesn’t seem gradual, but rather the outcome of a sudden access of horror at the thought of existing for one more second. Their end resembles a psychotic break featuring an insupportable hatred of being.
After four suicides of young people in a short period of time, it’s an empty Vessel.
Four and no more, at least for the moment; they’ve closed down the shiny new suicide-attractor, the folly that is in fact a folly.
For most people, it’s a fun place to crawl along stairways with a spectacular New York City view; for a few, it’s a beacon of hopelessness. And given the ways of contagion, the site was wired for more and more Werthers.
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Now, gazing at its Eschery silence, people think not of the inventive fun, the silly sightseeing, its creator had in mind, but of the absolute opposite of silliness. The Vessel’s manic sprite summons the depressive specter. It is Lear’s Fool, madcap and bitterly melancholy.
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Yes, New York City is all ledges to tumble or jump from; no, adding inches to chest-high railings won’t stop suicides (ten years ago, Yale undergraduate Cameron Dabaghi “got a running start and scrambled over a ten-foot-high spiked fence before leaping off” the Empire State Building). But the symbolic power of certain structures (Golden Gate Bridge, NYU’s Bobst Library, Cornell’s bridges, the Vessel) happens, and once it happens it’s all about backtracking, retrofitting, barring, netting, even sometimes closing. Four and done.
… it staggers us, it makes the papers, it’s a big deal.
Sometimes, as in the 2016 case of Ohio State football player Kosta Karageorge, it’s not a mystery: Macho, covering up concussions that are starting to produce symptoms, easy access to a gun, a fight with a girlfriend, a history of depression. What one remembers of Karageorge is not the mystery; it is the unbearable pathos of his having placed himself inside of a dumpster before pulling the trigger.
More typically, the suicides of intense and gifted student athletes – like, most recently, Washington State University quarterback Tyler Hilinski – are indeed mysterious. Most exhibit few to no overt signs of serious mental disturbance; up until the moment of death, they seem genial, social, active in their sport. Indeed, intensely active – and this is something Karageorge shares with many more enigmatic student athlete suicides: All of these people seem too intense about training and winning.
“He was really hard on himself,” a Yale friend said of Cameron Dabaghi, who jumped off the Empire State Building eight years ago. “If he lost a tennis match, it wasn’t because of a blister or a bad line call … He believed in fairness, he believed he had to be better.”
“Madison [Holleran] was beautiful, talented, successful — very nearly the epitome of what every young girl is supposed to hope she becomes. But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly,” writes Kate Fagan about a University of Pennsylvania runner who jumped off a parking garage. Another woman, an intensely competitive track star at Wesleyan, set herself on fire on one of the school’s playing fields.
Hilinski took (without telling him) a friend’s AR-15-style rifle – a much more physically destructive form of suicide than the pistol Karageorge used. Certainly any discussion of young, often impulsive, student suicides needs to note the wide availability of profoundly destructive firepower in the United States.
Hilsinki’s predecessor as WSU quarterback tells Yahoo Sports:
“I feel like at times we feel like we can’t express our emotions because we’re in a masculine sport and him being a quarterback, people look up to you as a leader. He felt like he really probably couldn’t talk to anybody. We’ve got to change some of that stuff. We have to have resources and not have a stigma of people going to that.”
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A former Clemson player:
“Especially a male athlete, and a football player in such a physical rough sport, you never want to be the guy that’s having to admit that something’s wrong. You get that mindset of always pushing through. Nothing’s wrong. I’m good to go.”
Jayandran Palaniappan, a young man from India, worked in bioengineering research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Funding for this position was about to run out; he’d been fired, because of the bad economy, from some private industry positions before this.
Like Jerry Wolff, a biology professor at St. Cloud State, and like a number of other students and professors UD has covered on this blog, Palaniappan meticulously planned his suicide.
[P]olice have been able to determine that Palaniappan took a shuttle to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, flew to Buffalo, N.Y., and took a shuttle to a Comfort Inn not far from Niagara Falls, all on May 11.
“He apparently walked into the water and went over the falls,” [a policeman] said.
Palaniappan was a runner (Googling his name produces many races in which he took part). Like Wolff, a serious outdoorsman who traveled to and killed himself in a national park (to “return my body and soul to nature,” he wrote in a suicide note), and like Cameron Dabaghi, a Yale athlete who took a train from New Haven to the Empire State Building and, with a running start, cleared a barrier at its top, Palaniappan seems to have chosen his form of suicide with great care, to reflect in some way his philosophy of life. All three men journeyed to iconic locations and then, in a last burst of physical vigor, ran off the face of the earth.
…”got a running start and cleared a barrier on the observation deck, on the 86th floor” of the Empire State Building in order to commit suicide, was a Yale undergrad.
Berkeley College junior Cameron Dabaghi ’11, an East Asian studies major from Austin, Texas, took his life in New York City on Tuesday, Yale College Dean Mary Miller said in an e-mail to the College community Wednesday morning.
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UD thanks David for the link.
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Update: Some details —
A Yale University junior left a suicide note in his dorm room before heading to New York, where he apparently plunged to his death by jumping from the Empire State Building, police said Wednesday.
Cameron Dabaghi, 21, from Austin, Texas, jumped from the 86th floor observation deck Tuesday during evening rush hour. His note said he was sorry and he would be jumping from either the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River in upper Manhattan, or the Empire State building, police said.
There were seven other people on the observation deck at the same time, and one person tried to talk to the jumper as he climbed over the barrier, but was unsuccessful…
Not sure if this can be right – the part about “climbed.” He seems to have jumped over the barrier.