Why We Are So Surprised by Suicide
Our Understanding of Cause and Effect Doesn’t Fit with This Kind of Death
Note: This article is about people’s reactions to suicide. It is not graphic. However, if it raises concerns or questions, talk with someone you trust, or find a mental health professional. Online references are at the end of the article.
This week I learned of the suicide of Stephen “tWitch” Boss, the hip hop dancer I first saw on “So You Think You Can Dance.” Later he became a “co-host of sorts” on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. My immediate reaction was one I caution colleagues and patients about all the time.
So much to live for
“But he was such a magic, energetic, sweetly, sincerely happy looking guy with everything going for him,” I thought to myself.
We scratch our heads; we try to reconstruct the path that led to his death. We blame — the lost one, ourselves, each other. We distrust our perceptions.
And perhaps for the rest of our lives, we will say, “Why? Why? Why?” and “What could have stopped him?”
And we mourn. We mourn for a man who, all alone, checked himself into a hotel with a pain, a plan, and a gun.
Suicide is a very complicated issue
Its likelihood is influenced by conditions and illnesses that have despair, depression, agitation, and trauma at their heart. Its incidence is influenced by gender and race, with frightening frequency in black males, younger and younger. Unchecked demons of the past, that have eluded the benefit of “help,” are sometimes evident, as are losses — of relationships, of security or status.
These are for another article. I am most focused on the reasons we are so surprised by suicide. What is this unquenchable, desperate search for a 3-sentence explanation that “satisfies” our distress? Will it assuage our shock and grief?
Some elements of our shock have to do with us as the ones who remain behind. We are also confused because of the very mixed messages given by people who are in intense pain and are thinking about, and planning to end their lives.
Beyond our understanding
Despite so much evidence to the contrary, most of us harbor a very simplistic view of “happiness.” My stomach lurches when I hear someone protest, “But he had so much to live for.” That should be ripped from the lexicon of responses to suicide.
Not only do I believe this as a clinical psychologist.
More painfully, I know this as someone who was so profoundly depressed at several points in my life that death, even at my own hands, felt like it would be a blessing, not a curse.
It was made even worse because I had one of “those lives.” I was happily married, with a jewel of a child. I was a professor, a writer, a therapist. I had all the friends I needed and a future that was golden.
I loved my parents and was well loved within a large, boisterous family. I loved to laugh and knew I had a blessed life. My future was shining. And I spent months upon months wanting to die.
Making sense
We live under the illusion that health and happiness are a direct result of “good things.” It’s either A or B. And we’re wrong.
There is no guarantee that our treasuring of things or people can erase feelings that are more troubling. Just take something simple, like having the flu with a fever of 103. In that state, very few of the good things in our lives have any meaning. We are wretchedly ill. That trumps everything.
Shame
We also have strong reactions to death. Particularly sudden death. Particularly sudden, self-inflicted death. We all recall that automatic, “cause of death” question with the reporting of anyone’s demise. We say that people “commit” suicide, like it belongs with serious crimes.
Most of us learned that God is the only legitimate giver and taker of life. Therefore, suicide is a terrible aberration. Codified in religious shame, it was seen as a reflection of despair. Despair was the ultimate sin against God, and the express route to Hell.
I still shiver to remember the controversy over whether my 25-year-old cousin who hanged herself, could be buried in the hallowed ground of the family plot.
Suicide scares us. How close have we ever been? What is the distance between the thought and the act?
Two reasons
Given the shame and the difficulty actually envisioning the act of suicide, it makes sense that we would struggle to have it “make sense.”
The only way it makes some sense is that most of the time, the lost one was caught in the snares of 2 things:
- excruciating, relentless pain, far more that most of us will ever know
- despair in which they see no end to the suffering, no hope, and have lost any belief that they can endure any longer. They are tormented by thoughts of dying, and of being the agents of their deaths.
Sometimes this suicidal “ideation” can actually calm them. If they feel they are at the mercy of a “life sentence” — they know that they can find release if it becomes unbearable.
Learning
Polite avoidance has no place when need to reach out to those who are drowning in pain. We can easily be rejected. We can be clumsy, but we must first try to get information. As distressed as we may feel, we can trust our instincts that something may be wrong.
Despite the fact that we cannot shrink from our concerns about possible suicidality in people, we can ask about the two things mentioned above
“It seems like you’re hurting/struggling/sadder than usual. I’ve noticed x, y and z.” “Can we talk? Is something going on?”
And then, “Hmmm, you know it seems like you’re really hurting. Sometimes when people feel that bad, they think about harming themselves… So they could just stop the hurt… Or they can't imagine it will ever end. Do you ever feel like that?” These are only baby steps in a journey of helping a sufferer get closer to help.
What it’s hard for us to know
There’s a certain line you cross when you seriously consider ending your life. It’s one that is hard to explain, even to the most willing listener.
When I read this quote from novelist David Foster Wallace, I wept. It returns to me when I feel the agony, the isolation, and infinite suffering that I fear is my future. It can help to reconcile the chasm that often exists between us and our endangered, or lost ones.
The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain indescribable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk looking up yelling, “Don't!” can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally felt the flames to really understand a fear beyond falling.
How suicidal sufferers confuse us
Some of us come to the darkness, stalked by horrors from the past. Others get smashed by a hurricane that pervades every inch of our being. A major culprit in suicide is some form of mood or anxiety disorder that has snowballed such that it negatively effects almost every aspect of functioning.
In the beginning we try to rationalize our speeding up or slowing down. Our thinking is cloudy and the ease with which we interact, even with people we love, is harder. We can’t even remember the meaning of the word “joy.” There is no future. Only the slicing, breath- stealing agony of making it to the next minute.
The thing is, as we lose ground, most of us can see it all unfolding in front of us. We are horrified. We work harder and harder to keep up. And for a surprisingly long time, many of us can. I hear it called “faking it,” and I want to slap the speakers.
It is the incalculable effort to keep real the most central aspects of ourselves intact, primarily for the people we love. It is not that we lose our personalities. Being witty or smart or kind or talented may be so hardwired that they fray, but don’t evaporate. It is confusing, because there are hints of our “essence,” even though they are harder to pin down.
Working so hard
I always think of the image of the “Wizard” in the Wizard of Oz. When the curtain is ripped away, it shows a guy sweating over wires and buttons of a machine. He went to great lengths to maintain an illusion. To give the people what they wanted. I often felt like the wizard. God, the energy it took.
Novelist William Styron, in his memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, described his clawing dread as he approached dinner with several very close friends, knowing how he would hard he would have to work just to follow the conversation and add a sentence or two.
I had a constant narrator that would say, “Smile, giggle, remember this part.” I don’t think I was fooling anyone, but I don’t think they had a clue how bad off I was.
Because when they have a clue, their concern is your torture. In your bones you don't believe they can possibly see that you are already dead.
Even the progression of these conditions varies and can confuse loved ones. For example, a sufferer who has struggled with horrible fatigue and sleeplessness may begin to show initial improvement as a result of treatment.
However, the return of calm or wellbeing returns at a slower rate. So now you have someone who still feels despair but has more energy and planning ability and is actually at greater risk than when they were flattened.
I have lost people who surprised the hell out of me. And others who haunted my dreams and my helplessness. Some had professional help. Some didn’t and needed it so badly.
What has brought me back
I needed the “works.” When psychotherapy didn’t change my status, there was experimentation with medicines, and when I was still in terrible trouble, I agreed to ECT (electroconvulsive therapy).
ECT is considered the “gold standard” anti-suicide intervention. It is not a long-term cure, but “broke the back” of my intense depression and agitation so that I could make use of other treatment.
I know…I will always know
I don’t know anything about tWitch except the magic I experienced of him through a tv screen. What I do know is that all of it is still true.
The way he lived is not negated by the way he died.
I do not presume to pontificate about the “ways” and “hows” and “shoulds.” The more “experience” I have, the less absolute certainty I claim. But I do know how both sides of suffering can frighten, immobilize, confuse, and shock us.
tWitch had joy in him. And love. And he was filled with the dance. What I know now that there was also a pain in him that pressed hard…too hard…for release. And that he will be missed.
Resources:
988lifelines.org/ Dial 988 — Suicide prevention hotline
National Depressive and Manic Depressive Alliance www.ndmda.org
National Alliance for Mental Illness www.NAMI.org
