We’re asking the wrong questions about suicide
A new unauthorized biography has many people talking again about the suicide of Anthony Bourdain in June 2018. As is often the case with people who die by suicide, much of the chatter includes questions such as: How did they do it? Who was the last person they talked to? What was different about that day? What was the precipitating event? We want to understand, and sometimes, we look for someone to blame.
Even Albert Camus, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” falls prey to this way of thinking, writing: “What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often speak of ‘personal sorrows’ or of ‘incurable illness.’ These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one.”
But this way of thinking cheapens the death and struggles of anyone who has died by suicide or attempted it. Suicide, for most people, is a process. Sometimes that process starts at a very young age. The writer David M. Perry talks about his own suicidal ideation beginning at age 9. I have a former student who first attempted suicide by riding his tricycle through a window as a toddler. My own desire to kill myself is among my first memories.
Suicidal ideation can also be a regular part of a person’s life. The Australian podcaster Honor Eastly describes herself as thinking about suicide every day, sometimes dozens of times a day. Writers Margo Jefferson and Donald Antrim talk about what Jefferson refers to as suicide exercises. For Jefferson this meant putting her head in an oven for increasingly longer periods; for Antrim it meant laying out tarps on the floor of his apartment and lying there with a knife to slash his wrists or his throat. These experiences are not extreme for many suicidal people; they are typical. Anna Borges recently wrote about what we call “passive suicidal ideation”: not actively planning to kill herself, but fantasizing about it constantly, sometimes all day long.
Some of these people, like Jefferson, never make an attempt; some, like Antrim, make one attempt, survive and hopefully never try again. Others, like me, make multiple attempts, perhaps knowing that with every attempt one’s likelihood of dying by suicide significantly increases. There are those like David Foster Wallace, who make multiple attempts while also writing about and fighting the desire for death, who eventually do perish at their own hand. And there are the people like Bourdain who make only one attempt —