Cliffs of Despair by Tom Hunt

Author:Tom Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307430816
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

7

A Range of Reasons

To explain why so few suicidal people actually kill themselves, psychiatrist Robert Litman invokes the metaphor of a slot machine. “You can win a million dollars on a slot machine in Las Vegas,” he says, “but to do that, six sevens have to line up on your machine. That happens once in a million times. In a sense it’s the same with suicide. In order to commit suicide, a lot of things have to fall together at once, and a lot of other things have to not happen at once.”

Ever since Conrad died, I wanted to know all the numbers on the slot machine—all the biological and existential variables that, when lined up just so for any one person, compel his or her self-destruction. By my second visit to Beachy Head, my interest in suicide has become an obsession. I spend evening after evening plowing through a duffel bag filled with suicide books. A few days after my visit to the morgue, I return to Mick Davey’s office to read another year’s worth of sudden-death reports, this time bringing a notebook and pen. The next day I travel thirty miles north of Eastbourne to the county seat of Lewes, where, in a quiet public records office situated between a castle and a medieval battleground, I read the brittle and faded sudden-death reports of Beachy Head victims who died during World War I. I read of minds racked by mental illness and bodies wasted by disease and age; of reputations destroyed and love and labor lost; of grief and loneliness, self-hatred and disillusionment, alcoholism and drug addiction. “No one,” wrote Italian writer Cesare Pavese, “ever lacks a good reason for suicide.”

MENTAL ILLNESS IS, predictably, a common theme running through the sudden-death reports. I read of one fifty-three-year-old psychiatric patient who had attempted suicide at Beachy Head once before and was so distressed by her ritualistic hand-washing and other compulsive behaviors that she expressed a wish to try again. A twenty-seven-year-old psychiatric patient had suffered from depression since the age of fifteen, cut himself off from his family, and, according to his social worker, “struggled with his internal world of anger and hate, yet wanting love.” A twenty-seven-year-old auxiliary nurse had developed psychiatric problems three years before her death; during the year before her suicide, she’d taken some fifteen drug overdoses, one of them culminating in the death of an unborn child.

It’s estimated that 90 to 95 percent of people who kill themselves have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder. Eastbourne pathologist and Beachy Head researcher Dr. John Surtees studied 115 Beachy Head suicides between 1965 and 1979 and found that 80 percent of the victims had a history of mental illness.

Of all the variations on this dismal theme—bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality, to name a few—depression is the most common and, at its most virulent, the strongest predictor of suicide. Sufferers of severe depression are twenty times more likely to kill themselves than the general population; 15 percent of them actually do.

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