THE SUICIDE DEATHS OF KATE SPADE AND ANTHONY BOURDAIN, CELEBRITIES WITH SEEMINGLY EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD TO LIVE FOR, HAVE SOME ASKING, ‘WHAT HOPE IS THERE FOR THE REST OF US?’
DEATHS HIGHLIGHT MENTAL ILLNESS
According to his mother, Anthony Bourdain had everything to live for. “He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamt would do something like this,” Gladys Bourdain told the New York Times.
Kate Spade sounded happy the night before her body was found in her New York City apartment Tuesday morning. “There was no indication and no warning she would do this,” her husband Andy Spade said in a heart-wrenching statement published in the Times.
For more than four decades Antoon Leenaars has tried to construct a theory to explain why people kill themselves. Among his findings: that those who commit suicide are often tragically gifted at concealing their true intentions, even from themselves.
“We find it in the suicide notes and in the psychological autopsies,” said Leenaars, a Windsor psychologist whose archive of more than 2,000 suicide notes is believed to be the largest collection of its kind in the world. “There’s both a conscious and unconscious intent to be deceptive, to hide, to mask,” he said.
“People don’t want to have a mental disorder.”
The sudden deaths mere days apart of Spade, the iconic and quirky fashion designer, and Bourdain, the legendary, self-deprecating chef and storyteller, highlight the reality that mental illness isn’t discriminating, and when someone is in the grip of severe depression and unbearable mental anguish, suicide can almost seem like a logical decision, some experts said.
The recent deaths come amid new reports showing suicide is getting worse. In the U.S., rates are creeping ever higher in virtually every state, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday, jumping 30 per cent or more in half of all states since 1999, with the largest rates, like Canada, occurring among the middle aged. And while men have traditionally used more immediately fatal methods, like asphyxiation and firearms, the gender gap is narrowing, experts say. Women are beginning to use more lethal means, like hanging. According to The Associated Press, Spade was found with a red scarf around her neck attached to a doorknob in her Manhattan bedroom. L’Wren Scott, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend and fashion designer, killed herself in a similar way in 2014.
Both Spade, 55, and Bourdain, 61, reportedly suffered from depression and, in Spade’s case at least, crippling anxiety. Spade had been under the care of doctors. Bourdain once spoke of his battle with depression during an episode of his show, Parts Unknown, confessing to a therapist how an airport hamburger could send him into a spiral of depression for days.
It’s impossible to know whether Spade’s death had any influence on Bourdain, or the suicide of Queen Maxima of Holland’s youngest sister, who was found dead Wednesday, one day after Spade. Some experts are nervously worrying about a “copy cat” effect. Suicides jumped 12 per cent following the death of comedian Robin Williams in 2014. But Leenaars said two celebrity suicides and the death of the Dutch queen’s sister don’t necessarily make a contagion or cluster. “We need to look at this over time,” he said.
Media coverage of celebrity deaths may pull at those already feeling vulnerable, said University of Toronto professor of psychiatry Dr. Sidney Kennedy. “We obviously have to be more sensitive in how we report people’s deaths and be aware of the effect it can have.” That can be especially challenging in an era of social media, in which news is shared and spread relentlessly, most of it seriously unfiltered, the Centre for Suicide Prevention has warned.
But there’s no one path to suicide, Kennedy said. “There’s no brain region that is going to be the area that triggers the act.” While it may be hard to wrap our minds around why people who seemingly “have it all” would commit suicide, “that’s the real essence of the point,” Kennedy said. “The reality is extremely different from the way the person perceives it.”
The risk of suicide can come in brief and sudden bursts, during moments when someone becomes psychotic, “where the person is out of touch with reality for days or weeks, but then when they’re stable they’re extremely functional,” Kennedy explained. They’re not remotely suicidal and can be hugely productive until another bad moment hits.
With bipolar disorder, people can swing from profound depression to manic states, or they can be in mixed states “where they’re full of ideas, their thoughts are racing, but with these dysphoric, depressive thoughts at the same time: ‘I’m no good. I’ve failed at this. This is my fault,’ ” Kennedy said. The two states can collide, with disastrous consequences.
In a 2016 study comparing suicide notes written by men and women, Leenaars and his co-author found notes written by women had a higher percentage of negation words like “never” (“I’ve never been more alone than now”) and a sense of hopelessness. “Women tend to be much more absolute in this kind of mental constriction,” he said, meaning a kind of all-or-nothing thinking. And it can be deadly.
Spade left a suicide note, reportedly addressed to her 13-year-old daughter. Kennedy said some people need to ease the guilt or selfblame of a family member. Sometimes they want it to be clearly known their intent was to die by suicide, that it wasn’t an accident. “Sometimes people bear a lot of anger,” he said, “and a note can be a way of getting back at somebody.”
“We may never know what all was in Kate’s mind,” Leenaars added. “But I’m sure the note would give us some deep insight into her struggling mind, what she couldn’t cope with, what never was going to change … What could we have done to stop Kate Spade’s suicide? What would have helped her? What did she need?”
Spade and her husband had been living apart for the last 10 months. But no one who is mentally well kills herself because of divorce, said Dr. Valerie Taylor, chief of psychiatry at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. Psychologically healthy people don’t respond that way, she said. “Lots of people get divorced and don’t commit suicide.”
Depression, however, can cause suicide. “Mental illness causes suicide,” Taylor said. “Had she (Spade) not been experiencing depression she would have rode through a divorce without difficulty. She was unwell.”
Some people who do attempt suicide might not necessarily have intended to kill themselves, especially if combined with drugs or alcohol, which lowers inhibitions and seriously skews how rationally people see things. “And certainly we’re seeing a rise in the use of alcohol in women,” said Taylor, who pushes home to her patients with depression the need to decrease their alcohol consumption.
“And again, they’re sick,” Taylor said. Spade and Bourdain’s deaths, if nothing else, underscore “that mental illnesses are serious illnesses and we need to start to understand the seriousness.”
People shouldn’t be afraid to bring up suicide with a loved one or friend who seems to be struggling because they’re worried about putting the idea in their heads. “That never happens,” Taylor said.
“Instead, what may happen is that you may actually give somebody an opportunity to have a conversation with you about something they’re probably pretty scared about. Because for a lot of people, when they start having these thoughts, they’re scared.
“Suddenly your brain starts to make you think about these things, and it seems very out of character for you.”
Feel like you need help and want to speak with someone? Call the Canada Suicide Prevention Service (toll-free 1-833-456-4566), or contact a local crisis centre or the Kids Help Phone at 1-800-668-6868.