They’re all over the news, and they’re of two kinds:

1. 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.
2. 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.

… but the death of a very young, championship, Stanford University athlete in her dorm room has everyone thinking it.

Thinking too of how shocking we always find these sorts of deaths – sudden deaths of brilliant, beautiful, vivacious winners seemingly at the top of their form. Soccer team captain, “fiercely competitive,” Katie Meyer was a senior at one of America’s great universities who had taken on a challenging major: International Relations with a minor in history. She could have done pretty much anything.

If it was suicide, and not some unforeseen sudden health crisis (heart failure, for instance), we will probably hear that Meyer in fact suffered from depression; we might hear that her underlying problem escalated as she pondered her imminent transition to post-university life. Or she might have been fragile enough to have been sent reeling by a romantic breakup…

In any case, it’s notoriously true that super-elite athletes may be more prone to depression, for all kinds of reasons.

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Update: Self-inflicted.

More depressed drunk dudes with forty guns in their house blast their heads off in Wyoming than in any other American state, and the state aims to keep it that way. A pathetic suicide hotline, virtually no psychiatrists, guns up the wazoo, stoic lonely cowboy culture, no interest even in talking about it – Wyoming has refined the suicide brew to the point where its national blasted-head dominance is unquestioned. Rates in the US are around 13 suicides per 100,000 people; it’s not unusual to find counties in Wyoming where rates are over 50 per 100,000.

So here’s a typical (rare) article about suicide in Wyoming. The graphic shows the one demographic least likely to do the deed – a white woman. The article itself fails to put guns front and center, even though it’s clear to the densest idiot that suicide rates are way higher in states where gun ownership is highest, and lowest where ownership is lowest.

But of course Wyoming doesn’t want to go there; it doesn’t want to say anything negative about our bestest bud Mr Beretta.

UD’s been compiling, during this Suicide Prevention Month, the many forms of writing out of Wyoming about that state’s appalling suicide rate that never mention guns.

Though firearms are the third-most common method for attempting suicide, they are responsible for the largest share of suicide deaths because they are so lethal. Nationally, nearly two-thirds of all deaths by firearm are due to suicide, and Wyoming has had the highest rate of suicide by firearm of any state over the last 15 years. Studies have linked higher rates of gun ownership with increased risk of suicide death, but in Wyoming, which also has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the country, this is an unpopular topic. As Tom Morton of the Casper Star-Tribune put it in a series of articles about Wyoming’s suicide epidemic, guns and suicide are the “third rail of Wyoming culture.”

So for instance a University of Wyoming news page yesterday touted the work on Wyoming suicides of one of their psychology professors. Let’s take a look.

‘[Carolyn] Pepper’s research team at UW’s Stress and Mood Lab is using nationally collected health data to understand what factors are specific to the Mountain West’s suicide rate. The stoic, individualistic Western mindset is one possible explanation… The Stress and Mood Lab initially studied demographic factors such as age, race, urbanization level and gender. Although all of these were elevated factors in the Mountain West, they did not explain why suicide rates are so high. The research team is now shifting focus to the cultural factors of living in a state with a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality.’

Hm yes that bootstraps thing… You see it in ‘Deer Hunter’ states like Pennsylvania too, but they have strikingly fewer guns and less suicide than Wyoming…

‘“I kept thinking someday I should study suicide, but I was sure that someone was already doing this research,” Pepper says. “I waited and waited, but no psychologist was looking at suicide in Wyoming.”’

She was sure cuz… you know… when they’re dropping like flies in your state… when some counties in your state – like Platte – are just stupendously suicidal… you figure the best social scientists around are hard at work on it. But that third rail! Why bother? Just keep ignoring the Uberti in the room and you won’t piss off anyone.

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Let’s pile on. When you add to all of this Wyoming’s insanely low covid vaccination rate, with the sort of death rate that goes along with that, you have to conclude that the whole state’s got a death wish.

Here’s a typical article, and believe me UD has read many of them. Not a word about taking guns away from troubled friends and relatives, or at least securing them more responsibly, or something… State by state, suicide rates track closely with gun ownership, and Wyoming also leads the nation (at the moment it trails Montana – also Suicide Central – by a bit) in gun ownership… So you’d think experts and commentators there would have what to say about all those instant death appliances lying around the house, beckoning…

But the state of Wyoming seems to consider it rude to mention that guns in that state are FAR more about suicide than self-protection or homicide. Just bad form.

… take note of the awful drumbeat coming from the January 6 police.

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Police have among the highest suicide rates in the country. They’ve got guns and know how to use them; they witness and take part in traumatizing events all the time; they may medicate stress and despair and anger with alcohol, which may get out of control; and they have a strong “buddy” ethos (this last one goes to the contagion effect).

He was burned to a crisp by a Jewish space laser.

Ask yourself why a rich successful guy, facing very minor charges (unlawful entry; curfew violation) stemming from his effort to overthrow the government, came home to Georgia and apparently blew his brains out. “There’s blood everywhere,” his wife told 911, and there certainly would be if he used one of his SKS-45s to do the deed.

Judging by his house, the dude could have afforded excellent lawyers who would almost certainly arrange things so that he’d have to pay some eminently affordable penalty or something… So what the hell?

Let us speculate.

One possibility is that he was so devastated by his failure to destroy America that he saw no further reason to live. The event itself was heady stuff; he felt part of a righteous revolution. But within hours Nancy Pelosi – who should by rights have been dead by the end of the day – was not only alive but still presiding over the house. The anguish that settled upon him on his return to intolerable normalcy overcame him.

Another possibility is simply that this man, like his idol, is mentally ill. His violent extremism held off the inevitable violent suicide for awhile (there are several effective ways to off yourself; ask yourself why this man chose the absolute bloodiest, visiting piercing trauma upon his family as they discovered what he did to his head) by establishing a cult within which he could “normalize”and play out his fantasies. The failure of the cult’s attack on democracy shattered this man’s tenuous hold.

Another possibility goes the other way: shame. When the party’s over, and you see precisely the damage you’ve done to yourself and the people you love — hey, maybe even the country you love — you feel overpowering shame.

I wrote about it here.

Even so, he has gone back to work, writing up articles of impeachment, suffering with members of his family through the violent takeover of the Capitol, and now describing with heartbreaking eloquence and restraint what he went through on January 6.

I’ll tell you what was truly terrifying for me. I was okay. My son, whom we lost a week ago, was very politically engaged, and I felt him with me the whole time, so I knew I was exactly where I needed to be. But my youngest daughter asked me not to go in. I told her I had to because the stakes were so huge, and I invited her to come with me. So she was with me on the Hill Wednesday, as was my son-in-law, who is married to my other daughter. They were at the Capitol for seven harrowing hours and spent at least an hour hiding under a desk in Steny Hoyer’s office with my chief of staff while I was on the floor and this violent, rampaging mob was banging on doors and trying to get in and take over that office the way they took over and trashed Nancy Pelosi’s office. Offices were being stormed and people were being killed. While Donald Trump and his family threw a party to support this violent, seditious mob, my kids were hiding under a desk.

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And on the matter of Fuckface’s removal from office:

We have a president who is egging on violent, armed insurrection against the Congress of the United States in order to block the peaceful transfer of power. This president is either unable or unwilling to faithfully execute the laws and to uphold the Constitution. Therefore he cannot successfully discharge the powers and duties of office for the next 12 days. The public has no confidence, but more importantly here, the Congress, which is charged with making sure we are secure, has no confidence that this president can do it. Those Trump die-hard sycophants still out there will say this is some kind of partisan thing, but there is broad bipartisan consensus now that Donald Trump is a lethal danger to our republic. The only person who gets new power out of this is Vice President Pence, with whom I disagree about pretty much everything. But I do think that he is a sane person and has that basic respect for the Constitution.

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So proud I voted for this man. So proud he represents me.

No one blames her family for taking weeks to announce it; when it happens (as UD knows from her own family), you just want to be alone with it, want to protect the privacy of a beloved, vulnerable, tormented soul.

Yes, Utah is one of those big manly gunned-up states (also Montana, Wyoming, Alaska…) where you better not mess with me cuz I wanna mess with me. Suicide, ho!

UD firmly believes that a lot of men buy guns with their own eventual suicides in mind. The suicide option may not be at the forefront of their thinking as they amass scads of weapons; but you know that implicit in the wide-open-spaces nihilist’s life (drinking, driving pointlessly about at high speed, divorcing like crazy, alienating everyone around you) is a clear endpoint, an obvious moment somewhere in your late fifties, early sixties, when you lose your bad boy bounce, you’re all alone, and the winters are long.

‘Don Jr Urges his Dad to “Fight to the Death”‘

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Will Melania be as obliging as Eva? Color me skeptical.

And this distinction has stood us in good stead! We trail only New Mexico for the state with the most suicides, and we’re always in the top five. When sad ol’ Cowboy Jack doffs his Stetson and draws his Glock 17, tears of uncertainty beading his eyes, you wouldn’t want him to be able to be talked out of it.

Wow. Encountering these statistics – shared in their broad outlines with many other states – UD suddenly perceives the NRA in a new way: Not as the steely-eyed advocate of hunters and hearth-defenders, but as a kindly Kevorkian, provisioning all households with reliable, easy-exit, appliances.

Not defending the right to bear arms, but defending the right to find life unbearable.

Given this country’s massive, and quickly growing, suicide market, we can eventually expect an NRA public relations campaign with a tag line like If you’re going to do it, do it right.

… is a nascent movement born of the latest attack on gun rights – the rollback of open carry while grocery shopping. Studies show that absent regular visual and physical access, inside and outside the home, to AR-15s, Alaskans’ impulse to detonate their heads will be significantly mitigated.

As famed for red pulp as Florida is for orange, we Alaskans have stood at the top of America’s suicide rate until recently, when we were very slightly overtaken by Montana. As local legislators keep an anxious eye on that slippage, POSR joins ranks with the Alaskan Independence Party to militate for nationhood, and the self-determination that accompanies it.

Meanwhile, join with us in singing our anthem:

TO HIS COY PULPER

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s aim and that gun’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I reach for thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
       For thy sweet barrel finger’d such pulping brings
       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.