The Project
In order to earn his long-awaited wings, Clarence the angel convinced his suicidal charge, George Bailey, not to jump. Upon his return to the family, community, and problems he'd thought to leave behind, Bailey discovered that "It's a Wonderful Life", overflowing with love, compassion, and meaning. George mattered to the people around him and his life made sense. While some critics met the 1947 release of Frank Capra's eventual Christmas classic lamenting the sentimentality and facile optimism, later reviewers recognized a depth to the story. In 2008, New York Times readers found the movie characterized as "a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife."
These elements appear in countless suicide notes today: terrifying, suffocating, lost hope, unrealized dreams, bitterness, stagnation, isolation, being trapped, watching others moving ahead and away. Rage. One study of these notes proposed that the best predictor for whether or not the writer made an attempt or died was the extent to which they truly believed that the world and the other people in it would be better off without them. Far from selfish, the most deadly murders of the self were acts intended as love.
What rescues "It's a Wonderful Life" from existential nihilism is that George returns to find love, care, help. He realizes that his efforts and sacrifices have all been worthwhile. Whatever its problems or disappointments, George Bailey's life had meaning. He mattered. He had friends.
Serious suicidal individuals think carefully about what they are doing, often for years. By the time they say goodbye, most have determined that the world is no longer a hospitable environment. Imagine surviving a brutal suicide attempt then returning to that life. What if you look for meaning, look for care, and allow yourself to believe -- one more time -- that your life can have meaning...and it turns out that conditions are actually worse than you had thought before you tried to die? What if the wonderful life hadn't been there for George Bailey?
"Suicide Prevention" is a terribly trendy topic right now, right up there with bullying and transgender bathrooms. As a professor at a major -- and massive -- state research university, I teach a popular course on the history of madness, mental illness, and psychiatry. Topics pertaining to suicide were the most popular for group projects in both sections this year (with sociopaths running a close second). For years, we've been trained and conditioned to recognize the signs of suicidal ideation in our students and "intervene". Intervention typically meant supplying a form with information and phone numbers, then removing one's self from the actionable liability that the suicidal embody. I joined in avidly for candlelight vigils and discussions of suicide prevention. I'd often facetiously claimed that my first goal as a professor was to be sure that none of my students killed themselves. My perfect record holds! But it wasn't really a joke. My graduate school, Cornell, had taken to caging off it's bridges to prevent jumpers. Each year, we watch more young people die by their own hands on our own campus. As a wondered why our "prevention" strategies seemed so flat and ineffective -- we used some variations of forms with information for just about everything anybody ever did, forms were mundane -- instead of genuine and urgent, I finally saw the chilling truth: nobody actually cared about the people who were killing themselves, they only cared about the potential lawsuits and statistics that would be legacies.
I'd spent my life saying "it's not life or death" for most problems. Now, it's "life or death" and little about our bureaucracy seems to be responding. The attitude towards the student consumers, meanwhile, is practically compassionate in comparison to the complete silence that surrounds issues of faculty mental health crisis or suicide. To look through our websites would be to assume that the faculty were not truly human; their well-being immaterial. While teaching my class and living my life for the past few years, I've operated as a veritable embedded journalist with first hand access to the ways that suicide is discussed, ignored, "prevented" and encouraged here on campus. Nobody mentions the idea that an environment in which suicide becomes an increasingly attractive option for so many of our community members is the product of intentional choices and policies that isolate, demean, regulate, dehumanize, shame, and silence so many individuals. Where once one might look for friends in neighboring offices, now our colleagues represent little more than competition and, of course, potential law suits (sexual harassment, racism, sexism, etc.). For anyone who carries within a secret suicidal past or who risked sharing at work, this environment can be dark indeed.
As I became intrigued and increasingly concerned with this upsetting situation, I learned and I learned and I soon found that this pattern transcended Liberal Arts Colleges to shape life in medical schools, in hospitals, at non-profit fundraisers, and in other arenas where professionals imagined that they would do some good but found themselves mainly "filling out forms" and dodging litigious pitfalls. Usually, I feel better when I learn more. Education is "good". With this issue, I've felt each new truth like a blow to my heart. My heart has been physically weakened the past couple of years -- beating arhythmically and erratically, landing me in the hospital several times. After updating some of our senior administrators a few too many times -- assuring them that I was on the mend, no need to worry -- one concluded a meeting the day before the university closed for Christmas by telling me straight up that nobody really cared if I died. "Life or death". Nobody cares. I sobbed in my bed for three days. But then my world tilted just a bit. I had always been the one who did care, who made sure that students, colleagues, supervisors, deans, and administrators all felt valued and cherished for their unique, individual gifts. Even if I was suffering myself, my smile was convincing enough to compel students to attest that I'd changed their lives by modelling happiness, made them believe in themselves, or made them see meaning in what they were doing. Some colleagues called me a hero, an inspiration, or a force of nature. They liked having me "on their side" as I treated faculty senate like the real UN and cried at meetings over unfair promotion criteria. I could do for them what I failed to do for myself: inspire, cheer, validate. I often cried alone in my bed for three days. Nobody knew.
In this blog, I'd like to explore a topic whose time has come: All of the facets of suicide that "crisis hotlines" and "prevention" pass over. Faculty mental health is one issue. Conditioned to bureaucracy, my first instinct was to "create a committee" to address the lack of support for struggling faculty. Then I realized a committee would be the death of any good that might have come from that idea. "Support", like traditional understandings of love, needs to come freely given and detached from material gain, not demanded and regulated by bullet points on a form. Indeed, "mental illness" itself, as a concept, leaves a great deal to be desired in the ease with which spiritual, emotional, and distinctively personal issues are medicalized and transformed into diagnoses with "accommodations" and "best practices". Productive discussion would encompass the notion that some of the collections of personality traits and tendencies that we term "mental illnesses" may not even be "disabilities" at all. But genuine care and support, recognition of each individual's unique natures and talents, and authentic bonds among community members are topics that require subtle engagement; the very antithesis of anything that ever happens on a committee.
So this blog is my attempt to start the conversation. What does it mean to care? What does it mean to build a community around the life of the mind? Can't professionals also be friends and supportive companions? Must we treat each other as automatons? How can we support those working to understand the medical industries gross mishandling of all mental health issues if we don't even feel comfortable talking about most of the symptoms, suicide least of all? What do we do for those who wake up and find themselves right back in the nightmare they thought they'd never have to see again? Must it become ever worse as stigma, judgement, and paranoia augment the already stifling coldness, detachment, and inauthentic that shape life in all large bureaucratic work places?
The reports from my history students about suicide represent just the tip of a massive iceberg that suicide has chilled and submerged in my path recently. I must begin by tentatively surveying the surroundings before I can imagine excavating the iceberg in full. So much to say, so much to observe, so many new truths, so many new fears. The list of people who have broken their brains against the quest for meaning in life before me is long and they deserve a full analysis before my stories unfold. I'll begin with some mind-bendy finds from the web, of course; the "attention grabbers" all writing teachers promote. The next entry focuses on one of the smartest writers I've known, David Foster Wallace, and ponders what he might want us to do with the insights that seem so meaningful and matter so much to me, yet couldn't fortify their author with enough life to battle a tragic death. Physicians will be next. Lots are dying by their own hands. Why?
