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Speeding Up to Slow Down

Sometime in the early 1980s, while researching a play, I spent an afternoon talking with a Nebraska State Trooper about the border between local law enforcement and the state patrol. We covered jurisdiction, drugs, homicide, and how causes of death get decided in a county with more cattle than people. By then he had worked those highways for twenty years. He was a careful man with a careful voice, and when the talk turned to death on the road, he lowered it. When you read about a one-car crash that kills the driver on a Nebraska highway in the middle of the night, he said, you are usually reading about a suicide. The car alone, the road empty, the bridge or the embankment at full cruise.

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What the Lemmings Could Not Do: On Suicide, Cognition, and the Mortal Imagination

Of all the acts a human being can perform, suicide is the strangest. It requires the actor to picture a world without itself, judge that world preferable, and execute a plan whose author will not survive to see the result. No other behavior in the human repertoire so cleanly inverts the survival logic that built every body and every brain. The question of whether other animals do the same thing is a question about cognition. The behavior is downstream of cognition, and beneath cognition runs the question of meaning. To kill oneself one must first have the kind of self that can be killed by its owner.

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The Silence Camus Refused to Domesticate: Hazel Barnes, The Myth of Sisyphus, and the Cost of a Sympathetic Misreading

Hazel Barnes was one of the most careful American readers of French existentialism in the twentieth century. She translated Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1956, a labor that shaped how generations of American students encountered Continental thought. When she turns to Camus, though, something interesting happens on the page. Her summary of The Myth of Sisyphus is partly accurate and partly an act of quiet translation in the other direction, pulling Camus toward a Sartrean humanism that Camus himself spent the last decade of his life resisting.

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When Suicide is Not Enough: Killing by Economic Deficit

We have been taught since childhood that self-harm and suicide are inappropriate and never the solution to any problem.  Yet, every year, many of us still decide to end our lives by our own hand.

Why?

Do we kill ourselves because of a lack of coping skills?  Do we raise our hand against our minds because we feel helpless and lost?  Does turning on the “Off Button” somehow lead to the easing of an inexpressible pain?

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Did Tyler Clementi Leap to His Death, or Was He Pushed?

The recent, leaping, suicide death of 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi from the edge of the George Washington Bridge reads like “Lori Drew: Part II” in so many sad ways.  Two Rutgers students are charged with “invasion of privacy” because they secretly streamed live internet video of Tyler making out with a guy in his dorm room.

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A Thousand Pounds of Public Suicide

Donna Simpson is making headlines the world over as she expresses her death wish. She wants to eat her way to 1,000 pounds and she wants you to watch her online — for a fee — as she kills herself in public.

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Imagination and Suicide

I was watching a documentary the other day and an inspired thought was brought forth by a person being interviewed.  He claimed the leading cause of suicide in small towns is due to a lack of imagination.

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