Suicide

About 4 pages (1,103 words)

Suicide Summary

Suicide

While actual reasons for suicide stem from complicated and often indeterminate causes, the public is left to sort out the implications of what Primo Levi calls this "noninstinctive, unnatural choice." In the early part of the twentieth century, suicide was a taboo subject. Popular opinion held that madness was the most plausible explanation for a person taking his or her own life. When suicides were mentioned in the 1910s and 1920s, they were characterized in terms of trends: Literary Digest once reported of "rashes" of childhood suicides, and again of college campus suicides. Suicide was seen as virtually a contagious disease.

The stock market crash of 1929 brought the first widespread acknowledgement of suicide in the twentieth century, with instantly legendary images of despondent former millionaires leaping to their deaths. As some news accounts of the time would have it, a person walking through New York City would have had difficulty navigating the bodies littered on Wall Street. Without question, the crash dideventually cause a number of suicides, but as John Kenneth Galbraith reported, statistics suggest that the "suicide wave" of 1929 was largely a myth: "For several years before 1929, the suicide rate had been gradually rising. It continued to increase in that year, with a further and much sharper increase in 1930, 1931, and 1932—years when there were many things besides the stock market to cause people to conclude that life was no longer worth living." This notwithstanding, the widely-reported millionaire suicides expanded America's understanding of the causes of suicide to include not only madness but also great financial loss. Capitalism itself became a credible contributing factor in suicides.

For decades, suicide receded into the shadows, until the 1962 death of movie star and legendary sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. Events surrounding Monroe's death became fodder for gossip columns and investigative reports throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Instead of repudiating her for committing suicide, the nation shared her tragedy. Her death helped spawn the growth of suicide hotlines, where people who felt suicidal were encouraged to discuss their feelings with counselors. Monroe's later well-publicized dependence on prescription drugs fueled the opinion that the pressures of celebrity became too much for her. With the acceptance that the public might have contributed to Monroe's final act, suicide moved from private blame into the arena of shared responsibility. Unfortunately, statistics subsequent to her suicide also lend credence to the theory that suicides can be "contagious"; according to Herbert Hendin, "Just after Marilyn Monroe's death, the notes of a number of suicides linked their own deaths to her presumed suicide … A sense of sharing the tragic death or suicide of someone famous … enables some people to feel that their death has a meaning it would otherwise lack."

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1990s the pressures celebrities experience were also linked to drug abuse and overdose, nowhere more than in the music industry. The deaths of rock stars Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Elvis Presley, all of whom accidentally overdosed, were received with a sense of tragedy similar to Monroe's death. Though these deaths were officially "accidental," fame had surely influenced self-destructive behavior. Other high-profile victims of the deadly combination of fame and drug abuse included comedian Freddie Prinze, who shot himself in 1977 at the age of 22, comedian John Belushi, who died of a drug overdose in 1982, and "grunge" music pioneer Kurt Cobain, with a history of treatment for a heroin addiction, who shot himself in 1994.

The connection between a creative personality and suicide has seemed particularly close among writers. The most prominent instances of the twentieth century were the deaths of Ernest Hemingway in 1961, Sylvia Plath in 1963, and Anne Sexton in 1974. While Hemingway's suicide was attributed to poor physical and mental health, it seemed in keeping with his gonzo personality. The deaths of Plath and Sexton, however, seemed more tragic because they were comparatively young and healthy. Their deaths were especially indicative of the troubled female artist. As A. Alvarez writes of Sylvia Plath, public perception perverted her death into "a myth of the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art." Her suicide intimated to the public that art had the power to destroy.

Religious fervor, long attributed as a cause for insanity and suicide, also showed its powers of destruction. When 914 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones committed mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, suicide became inextricably linked to religious cults. Jones was seen as a charismatic brainwasher who convinced his members that their deaths were, according to him, "an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhuman world." Subsequent cases confirmed the apocalyptic and suicidal nature of cults, most notably the Branch Davidians in Texas in 1993, and the 39 suicides of members of the Heaven's Gate cult in California in 1997.

The early 1990s saw rock musicians Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne of the group Black Sabbath defend their music in separate court cases which accused that their songs influenced teens to commit suicide. In both cases, the first amendment rights of the musicians were upheld. Still, Osbourne's song "Suicide Solution," as well as other songs such as "Goodbye Cruel World" by Pink Floyd, books such as Illusions by Richard Bach, and films such as Dead Poet's Society continued to draw criticism for what some saw as glorifying the act of suicide.

At the close of the twentieth century, physician-assisted suicide dominated the headlines, with purported "suicide doctor" Jack Kevorkian challenging laws across the country that made assisted suicide illegal. In 1998 he appeared on the news program 60 Minutes which aired a tape of him assisting a suicide. Kevorkian orchestrated the publicity stunt in an effort to force a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of a person's "right to die."

While suicide remained complex for most Americans, by the end of the twentieth century the topic had emerged from the shadows to be discussed in the light of the shared public arena.