Pioneer in suicide prevention
LOS ANGELES— Psychologist Norman Farberow never sought the limelight, but he didn’t shy away from it, either.
When asked by the Los Angeles city coroner in1962 to help determine whether the death of a 36-year-old actress from acute barbiturate poisoning was an accident, he agreed. Weeks later, he met with the media to announce that Marilyn Monroe’s death was “a probable suicide.”
Well-versed in the subtleties of the human mind in distress, Farberow cofounded the first suicide prevention centre in the country and opened up a field of psychology that had gone largely unnoticed.
Farberow died Sept. 10 at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, according to his daughter, Hilary Farberow-Stuart, who noted that it was World Suicide Prevention Day. He was 97.
“Farberow was a pioneer in helping to erase the stigma of suicide,” said psychologist Kita Curry, director of Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services in Culver City, Calif., which took on the suicide prevention centre after it was nearly closed in 1997. “He understood that when people were considering suicide they were in terrible pain.”
Working well before the pharmaceutical treatment of mental disorders, Farberow helped develop crisis intervention strategies that often began with a conversation.
Born in Pittsburgh on Feb. 12, 1918, Farberow arrived in Los Angeles after the Second World War at a time when southern California was swelling with soldiers just home from combat. Farberow served in the war as an Air Force captain.
The Veterans Administration Hospital treated patients who were having difficulty with their re-entry into civilian life, and as Farberow earned his doctorate from UCLA, he also spent time in a ward at the hospital reserved for suicidal patients. In their stories, he found his life’s work.
In the early 1950s, Farberow was named a deputy city coroner, which gave him access to the autopsy reports of the city’s dead. Poring over decades-old files, he and psychologist Edwin Shneidman began a careful analysis of suicide notes. Detecting ambivalence and doubt in the words that had been left behind, the two men began to consider how suicide might be prevented.
Together with Shneidman and psychiatrist Robert Litman, Farberow developed the psychological autopsy, a series of interviews with family and close friends that could unravel the hidden threads of distress.
Their inquiries drew connections between suicide and its social and cultural roots among groups marginalized in society: gay men, the obese, schizophrenics and the elderly. They believed suicide was a public health problem, and healing could come as much from a conversation as from a pill.
“He never stopped wanting to ease people’s pain and understand what brings people to the brink of such despair,” Curry said.