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On the other hand, all suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand. Knowing this, with a morbid conscience whose source is much the same as that of the militant conscience of so-called self-contented persons, the majority of suicides are left to a protracted struggle against their temptation. They struggle as the kleptomaniac against his own vice. The Steppenwolf was not unfamiliar with this struggle. He had engaged in it with many a change of weapons. Finally, at the age of forty-seven or thereabouts, a happy and not unhumorous idea came to him from which he often derived some amusement. He appointed his fiftieth birthday as the day on which he might allow himself to take his own life. On this day, according to his mood, so he agreed with himself, it should be open to him to employ the emergency exit or not. Let happen to him what might, illness, poverty, suffering and bitterness, there was a time-limit. It could not extend beyond these few years, months, days whose number daily diminished. And in fact he bore much adversity, which previously would have cost him severer and longer tortures and shaken him perhaps to the roots of his being, very much more easily. When for any reason it went particularly badly with him, when peculiar pains and penalties were added to the desolateness and loneliness and savagery of his life, he could say to his tormentors: "Only wait, two years and I am your master." And with this he cherished the thought of the morning of his fiftieth birthday. Letters of congratulation would arrive, while he, relying on his razor, took leave of all his pains and closed the door behind him. Then gout in the joints, depression of spirits, and all pains of head and body could look for another victim.
Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”This is a pretty interesting and succinct piece about suicide prevention and the "triangle" of motivating factors: the wish to die, precipitating distress, and a suicidal plan. That would indicate to me that the presence of the first one is two big factors away from resulting in a suicide, and the piece notes that the wish to die "occurs in everyone and is no different than any other wish. It often co-exists with the wish to live. Time often helps people to change their minds about the wish to die."
Medical advances lead to longer and longer lives, but babies are still being born. As part of a philosophy of population control, a kind of ritualized suicide (complete with counseling and final requests) called "Going" is favored by people who feel they've done enough for one lifetime. They willingly depart, making room for the next generation. It's 2095, and composer Henry Stuant, at a well-preserved 136, suddenly decides it's time to Go. He's written his last string quartet, published his last commentary, traveled everywhere he ever wanted to go, done everything he could want to do. But when it comes down to it, why can't he let go?
The distorting effect of being on antidepressants was something that had long bothered him...There were other important reasons to get off Nardil. The drug could create problems with his blood pressure, an increasing worry as he moved into middle age. In the spring of 2007, when he went to the Persian restaurant and left with severe stomach pains, the doctor who told him that Nardil might have interacted badly with his meal added that there were better options now—Nardil was “a dirty drug.”I don't think the only way to see this is as the story of someone whose pain was too great for him to live. In many ways he wanted to live, and said so. I see it as a story about an illness, one with treatments that work for a lot of people but aren't effective in every single case, treatments that are still too blunt and poorly targeted, treatments that aren't consistently followed, doctors who are forced to test approaches because we still don't know enough. Everybody tried, and these treatments failed for a few reasons, not just one, and it's a bit hard to say whether the treatments actually failed or just didn't work quickly enough. I'm the first to say that psych meds are the contemporary equivalent of rusty saws and blunt knives, not what we would like but the best we currently have. They're far from perfect. But that failure of this case of treatment is not enough for me to state that treatments like this are never worth trying or that we shouldn't assume they can be successful when the right support favtors are put into place.
Wallace saw an opportunity. He told [his wife] Green that he wanted to try a different antidepressant. “You know what? I’m up for it,” she remembers answering. She knew that the decision was hard for him. “The person who would go off the medications that were possibly keeping him alive was not the person he liked,” she says. “He didn’t want to care about the writing as much as he did.”
Soon after, he stopped the drug. At first, he felt that the process was going well. “I feel a bit ‘peculiar,’ which is the only way to describe it,” he e-mailed Franzen in August. “All this is to be expected (22 years and all), and I am not unduly alarmed.” ..
...At one point after getting off Nardil, Wallace decided he should try to do without any antidepressant. Given his psychiatric history, Green was worried. Her husband, she remembers thinking, would need “a Jungian miracle.” In the fall, Wallace had to be hospitalized for severe depression.
When he came out, doctors prescribed other antidepressants. But, according to Green, he was now too panicked to give them time to work. He took over the job of keeping himself sane, second-guessing doctors and their prescriptions. If he tried a new drug, he would read that a possible side effect was anxiety, and that alone would make him too anxious to stay on the drug. He was in a hall of mirrors of fear.
...Not every day was bad. He taught. He e-mailed friends. He and Green tried to maintain their lives. Always self-critical, Wallace would rate good days as “B-plus” or “cautiously optimistic.” They joked about the unthinkable. Green warned him that if he killed himself she’d be “the Yoko Ono of the literary world, the woman with all the hair who domesticated you and look what happened.” They made a pact that he would not make her guess how he was doing.
During the spring of 2008, a new combination of antidepressants seemed to stabilize him...
about 10 days after... Wallace checked in to a motel about ten miles from his home and took an overdose of pills. When he woke up, he called Green, who had been searching for him all night. When she met him at the hospital, he told her that he was glad to be alive. He was sorry that he’d made her look for him. He switched doctors and agreed to try electroconvulsive therapy again. He was terrified at the prospect—in Urbana, it had temporarily taken away his short-term memory—but he underwent twelve sessions. They did not help.
Caring for Wallace was exhausting. For one nine-day period, Green never left their house. In August, her son suffered an athletic injury, and she wanted to be with him. Wallace’s parents came to look after David. “It’s like they’re throwing darts at a dartboard,” he complained to them about his doctors. They went with him to an appointment with his psychiatrist; when the doctor suggested a new drug combination, Wallace rolled his eyes. Eventually, Wallace asked to go back on Nardil. But Nardil can take weeks to stabilize a patient, and Green says that he was too agitated to give it time to work. Still, in early September, Nadell spoke with him and thought that he sounded a bit better.
Green believes that she knows when Wallace decided to try again to kill himself. She says of September 6th, “That Saturday was a really good day. Monday and Tuesday were not so good. He started lying to me that Wednesday.” He waited two days for an opportunity.
I find those responses to suicides in the thread upsetting as well.
It took me a while to realize that there is a huge swath of the human population that doesn't sort of continually have back-of-brain thoughts of suicide in their heads at all times (and you guys know me, I'm generally an incredibly happy and decently well-adjusted person, but I thought everyone was like that) and when I found out I was surprised. Maybe this sort of thing is so inconceivable that making jokes seems okay. I was pleased that most people weren't making jokes about suicide, so that's something.
posted by jessamyn at 8:36 PM on April 10 [47 favorites]