Content note: We were bound to get here eventually. This is a newsletter about mental illness. This is a conversation about suicide and suicidal ideation. Be kind to yourself.
Like every other millennial woman in the world, I enjoy the true crime genre. Though I try to be selective and avoid the truly lurid and low-quality (i.e. I am not a ~murderino~, that show is bad), there’s always a bit of an ick factor around entertainment built on the most tragic moment of someone’s life. But there’s also so much to be learned - about policing and crime and certainly mental health, but also about storytelling and cognitive dissonance and the ways we tell ourselves we’re safe.
One story that people seem to tell themselves all the time is that the people around them could never - would never - die by suicide.
When a person goes missing - just completely evaporates - there’s always the potential that they have disappeared themselves. In the hours and days that follow a disappearance, police nearly always ask family members if it’s possible that the person themselves may be responsible. And unequivocally, grieving family members in softly-lit rooms will state their absolute, concrete refusal that suicide might have been a possibility.
“She wouldn’t do that to us.”
“She loved life.”
“He would have told me.”
Do they really believe this? Do most people believe this? Do members of the general (read: mentally healthy) population sincerely believe you can just…know? When someone is in The Dark Place?
Because like…no. That’s not how it works. And it never has been.
Revisiting the black bile
I don’t know where so many people got the idea that depression - especially the kind of deep depression which renders people catatonic, bedridden, and perpetually unwashed - is somehow visible to others. That people who are very, very low must be unwilling or unable to mask their pain. But people really believe this! Especially now when, in spite literally every indication to the contrary, a lot of folks perceive a perky life on Instagram as enough evidence to indicate true content.
Historically, depression has gone by many names and hidden under many disguises.
“The earliest written accounts of what is now known as depression appeared in the second millennium B.C.E. in Mesopotamia,” writes Nancy Schimelpfening. “In these writings, depression was discussed as a spiritual rather than a physical condition. Like other mental illnesses, it was believed to be caused by demonic possession. As such, it was dealt with by priests rather than physicians.”
Depression has, over the span of human existence, been viewed as a moral failing, a sign of demonic possession, or just outright laziness and inability to cope. It has been attributed to artistic proclivities, to teenage rebellion, and to heartbreak.
We (most of us, anyway) know now that major depression (which impacts about ~7% of the population) can be triggered by a lot of factors but is mostly the result of our brains having a hard time sending and receiving signals. Which means that while, in some instances, you may be able to trace a loved one’s depressive episode toward something you’re privy to - grief, loss, financial issues - there are also a lot of people who are depressed because they’re depressed. That’s the whole reason. And you would likely have no way of knowing that unless they told you or showed clear signs, which they may or may not.
Which is to say, sometimes people are just sad. Sometimes they’re just fucking sad. And they may still ~ love life ~ over margs at Applebee’s after work. And they may still pick up their kids from school on time. And they may still be able to teach Sunday school or whatever other metrics of happiness the people around them might utilize. But that doesn’t mean they’re ok. And it doesn’t mean they particularly feel like doing it all again tomorrow.
"Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die."
There are a great many poems written about depression in general, but probably one of the best poems ever written about suicide, specifically, is Dorothy Parker’s Resumé.
Something about the line “gas smells awful” just wrecks me every time. Because in some ways, it trivializes an action that many people think of as The Ultimate Bad Thing Which Must Never Be Trivialized. Plus, I kind of love the idea that the only reason to bother staying alive is because the alternative is just annoying. Rivers? Damp! Nooses? Unreliable! So just keep doing the drudgery.
This poem always reminds me of the scene in the Depressed Girl’s Holy Bible The Bell Jar, where Ester is “walking about with the silk cord dangling from my neck like a yellow cat's tail and finding no place to fasten it,” lamenting that the house has the “wrong kind of ceilings” to hang herself. It’s sad, of course, (she calls her depression “incurable,” which is such an absolute bummer) but it’s also the kind of weirdly comedic moment that can come from the simple-and-not-simple task.
I can’t speak to how it feels to never have wanted to die. I don’t know what it’s like to view life as like, mandatory. I often think about how PJ Vogt described it in an episode of Reply All. From the transcript:
For most of my twenties, I thought about killing myself. Often. Had I told anybody, they would have told me that that symptom of depression. But I never made that connection. I was hunting this thing that had taken my friend away, Depression, and I was wondering what it looked like, how I could understand it, completely unaware that it was in me.
For all that time I just thought that everyone’s brain was like that. The same way I genuinely can’t imagine that anyone doesn’t always kinda want to be eating potato chips, I also just thought that anybody’s brain, faced with a sufficiently difficult problem, would suggest that one easy solution would be just dying. I just figured people learned to ignore that voice, no matter how insistent it got, no matter how loud.
And then a friend of mine gently suggested that this was actually unusual, and I got a therapist, and I got medication, and now that does seem unusual. It seems hard to imagine. Which is really nice.
This, to me, is one of the most relatable ways suicidal ideation has ever been explained. It’s not an active impulse, it’s just…there. As though I am literally this meme.
What was interesting to me when I heard this segment was that this is the exact kind of latent thought pattern that (I imagine) neurotypical/ish people just…don’t have. And as a result, when someone they know either dies by suicide or attempts to, they are shocked. Because in the absence of huge, visible, cartoonish signs of depression, it seems completely out of left field.
You know, the way you felt the first time you read JD Sallinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and you got to the end and you were like wait…wait, what??
Published in 1948 in The New Yorker, this story is an iconic depiction of suicide because the suicide comes out of nowhere. The entire story occurs without a hint and then like, there it is.
Would the Glass family have told Keith Morrison that they were just shocked? That Seymour would never have done that? That he was so happy, so in love? That they should investigate it like a murder?
Honestly, doubtful. I get the sense - especially as I went back and looked for outrage from New Yorker readers and found very little - that the idea of suicide as a part of life was less shocking then, or maybe just less surprising, especially when a person or a fictional character was a war veteran. The idea that someone might conceal such a deep depression without getting help, without letting on, and without inviting their family into the personal struggle seemed, to me anyway, to be more acceptable. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we can all see into people’s lives now? Or think we can?
I consider the betrayal in Anne Sexton’s poem about Sylvia Plath’s death, wherein she’s mostly upset that Sylvia went without her.
I think one of the other reasons that people like to believe they could have predicted a suicide - that they could have somehow intuited what someone someone feeling and thinking in advance - is because it makes it a lot easier to feel like you could have done something. Especially in These Modern Times when mental healthcare is so far out of reach, when the Kirkbridge Asylum is a thing of the way, way past, and when people are pretty much only supported by the people around them. People who are, by the way, not at all qualified.
This is like when people say they don’t need therapy because they have friends. But like, friends are not therapists, my dude. You still need therapy.
But anyway, whenever I see families in true crime docs convinced that their disappeared son or daughter or family member or spouse or friend could not possibly have done so of their own accord, I see people who desperately want to believe that if there was something they could have done, they would have done it, but there wasn’t. A kidnapping, a completely random attack, or even an alien abduction is preferable to the idea that someone just drove their truck into the lake one night when they were too tired to do it one more time.
Because that is explainable and also it doesn’t leave anyone else at fault except The Bad Guy, whoever that may be. Because people blame themselves when someone dies by suicide. Even though they shouldn’t because, regardless of what you see during times of crisis on Twitter, sometimes there is no amount of ~ reaching out ~ that can help someone.
It’s not your fault if someone dies. It doesn’t reflect poorly on you. And sometimes, you really do not see it coming because you really do not know what someone else is going through.
Which is why it’s a pretty good rule to just act like everyone is going through something all the time. Because they probably are, whether you were expecting it at the beginning of the story or not.
A final note: Hi, don’t die. There’s a lot of things I would have missed if I’d died, and a lot of people I wouldn’t have met. I highly, highly encourage you to continue to be alive, if only because you really never know what might happen tomorrow or next week or next year that you might want to be around for. I love you.