Advice from the philosopher who tried to kill himself 10 times
I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect when I opened philosophy professor Clancy Martin’s new book, “How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind.”
I’d been meaning to read it ever since I heard his interview in April with Terry Gross on NPR’S “Fresh Air,” and found myself both shocked and captivated by his story. With Suicide Prevention Month drawing to a close, the time seemed right to dive into this bedeviling topic.
Martin has tried to kill himself at least 10 times, the first time at age 6, when he ran in front of a bus. He has awakened in a hospital three times after suicide attempts, been interrupted by police twice, and has tried to die by drowning or hanging.
“Suicide is harder than it looks,” he writes. “It seems easy until you try it.”
The reason he never succeeded, Martin notes, is that he never used a gun.
“How Not to Kill Yourself” is in part a memoir: It chronicles Martin’s addiction to alcohol, his three marriages, two divorces and his enduring quest to be a better father to his five children, along with his suicide attempts. But more than that, it’s a primer on literature about suicide, an investigation into whether there is such a thing as a “death drive” and a deeply empathetic advice book for people considering suicide and those who love them.
“If I have one crucially important piece of advice to offer in this book,” he writes, “it’s this: absolutely do not keep a gun in the house. If you have one, get rid of it immediately.”
Ambivalence has been his saving grace; you can want to live and die, too. “For the suicidally inclined person,” Martin says, “vacillation about whether one wants to live or die is the norm rather than the exception.”
He tells the story of Ken Baldwin, who survived a 1985 leap from the Golden Gate Bridge at age 28 and said afterwards, “I realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.” Baldwin was pulled from the water with bruises, a collapsed lung and the newfound conviction that life was very much worth living.
“Once you start looking,” Martin writes, “you find that an astonishing number of people have been improbably blown back up from leaps off cliffs and miraculously survived falls from terrific heights. The universe likes to play such jokes on suicidal people.”
In the same way that few lives have been untouched by addiction, I’d wager that few have been untouched by suicide, either directly or indirectly. Who, after all, was not moved or puzzled by the death of Robin Williams, or of Anthony Bourdain?
It is one of the existential mysteries: Why do people who seem to have it all decide to end their lives? Why did poetry’s Richard
When they compared an exhaustive list of measurements, a few stood out as being distinct features of long COVID. Among the strongest signal: Many people with long COVID had much lower levels of cortisol, which regulates our sense of alertness. In a healthy person, the stress hormone hits a nadir around midnight, then rises to a peak somewhere between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. That lack of cortisol could help explain the bone-crushing fatigue experienced by some people with long COVID.
The researchers are already working to understand the root cause of that hormone imbalance, work that ultimately should point to treatment strategies.
They also observed key differences in immune responses. People with long COVID showed signs of B-cell activation and T-cell exhaustion, indications that the body has been fighting something for a very long time, Putrino says.
That result lends credence to one theory about the cause of long COVID: Some people never fully clear the virus. Their immune system keeps reacting to what it perceives as a threat — for months on end. Researchers are now running clinical trials to see if treating people with longer courses of Pfizer’s antiviral Paxlovid could get rid of that lingering virus and help people feel better.
The last big finding was that in some people with long COVID, other latent viruses — things like Epstein Barr virus that go dormant, but don’t disappear — were reactivated. One theory is that the immune system, exhausted by COVID, starts losing its ability to keep those latent viruses at bay, too.
None of these signals should be taken as the arrival of a simple test for the chronic condition. But that doesn’t mean the findings aren’t good news for the millions of people struggling with long COVID. While not quite the comprehensive diagnostic toolkit many would like now, this short list still could be useful. Doctors can very easily run a full hormone panel to look for dysregulation and also test for evidence of latent virus reactivation, Putrino says.
And Putrino suggests more data will come soon. Moreover, this kind of research should become a template for studying other mysterious long-haul conditions, like ME/CFS, known more commonly as chronic fatigue syndrome, or long Lyme disease.
Finally, the work offers concrete, biological evidence that long COVID is real. That gives people with long COVID a helpful rejoinder to the skeptics who believe their condition is exaggerated or simply in their heads.
It’s important progress for the millions whose lives have been interrupted by chronic symptoms. And it’s a necessary step to finding cures.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.