About a Mountain by John D'Agata

Author:John D'Agata [D'Agata, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Anthropology, Cultural, Social Science
ISBN: 9780393076691
Google: eQkZ-VMgQaIC
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-02-07T21:15:56+00:00

WHY

It’s estimated that only 40 percent of suicides are the result of chemical imbalance, while the remaining 60 percent are caused by “undetermined” factors.

We know that people are ten times more likely to kill themselves in a city than other kinds of environments.

We also know, however, that rural can be bad.

As are the hours between noon and six.

Or May.

Or winter.

Or if you don’t drink coffee your chances of suicide are three times higher than if you did.

Ditto if you are a woman who uses the pill instead of a diaphragm, are a man with tattoos on his neck or lower arms, are a child with green eyes, have any silver fillings.

If you were born under the signs of Aries, Gemini, or Leo: that is bad.

You are more likely to want to kill yourself during a new moon than a full one. More if you don’t have pets, more if you own a gun, more if you earn between $32,000 and $58,000 a year.

More if you’re male.

More if you’re white.

More if you’re over sixty-five.

It helps if you live anywhere in the United States other than Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, or Montana, although the experts so far can’t figure out why.

Nor have they figured out why Native Americans once tended to kill themselves more often than any other group, but then, fifteen years ago, stopped killing themselves significantly.

They do not know why, generally speaking, white suicide victims tend to shoot themselves, while black suicide victims tend to poison themselves, Hispanics tend to hang themselves, and teens to cut themselves.

Recently, Dr. John Fildes of the University of Nevada’s College of Medicine received $1.5 million from the federal government in order to study the issue of suicide in Las Vegas, which is why, after the death of that boy at the Stratosphere Hotel, his office was the first I called for information about local suicides.

By the time I finally met Dr. Fildes in person, however, our appointment had been rescheduled four times in eight months, his federal grant had long expired, and all that we had learned about this problem in Las Vegas is that it still is a very big problem.

It was to Sergeant Tirso Dominguez, therefore, an officer at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Office of Public Information, that I turned for information about Las Vegas suicides. But “I don’t want to be a part of anything like that,” was how Sergeant Dominguez responded to my request for information.

It was from Reporting on Suicide: Recommendations for the Media and Public Officials, a pamphlet of guidelines developed by the Centers for Disease Control, that I learned that “‘no comment’ is not a productive response to media requests for information about local suicides.”

It was Eric Darensburg, assignments editor at KLAS Channel 8 in Las Vegas, who told me that his station had a policy against recording footage of suicide scenes when I asked to see the footage that his station had recorded of the scene outside the Stratosphere on the evening that boy died.

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