Why are people killing themselves? D.H. Tabor 12 April – 3 May 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68782177 That brief moment between the release of the seer, before the hammer strikes the firing pin, which plunges into the primer causing a tiny explosion that sets off a larger explosion, causing 8 grams of copper and lead to achieve 1200 feet per second for the six inches of travel to its immediate destination. All this takes place in less than 0.01 seconds. That moment is unrecoverable and cannot be stopped. It is the action of a highly engineered and precise mechanism in a sophisticated machine designed for this one task. Firing bullets. The mechanism does not have any intuitive capacity. It doesn’t matter where the bullet goes. It only executes a series of events it was designed to perform. The only way to stop the inevitable outcome is to interrupt the decision-making process that led someone to pull the trigger. Why are people killing themselves? Where does that decision process start? People don’t wake up in the morning with the idea of ending their own lives as a plan on the ‘to-do list’ for the day. This process is rarely spontaneous. Killing yourself, for whatever reason, requires a bit of planning. Some people are very good at making sure their suicide attempts result in their being discovered before they die. Sylvia Plath was well known for this. One day her plan failed because someone showed up late. Not all plans are perfect. Some people don’t want to ‘leave a mess,’ or be found by their families. The plan almost always requires a level of forethought, logistics, and most importantly, good reason. The first two are easier to figure out. How do they want to die? Everyone would rather die in the least pain and discomfort possible. Methodology is determined by cost. Strangulation by hanging was once popular but is often the method of last resort, for it is slow and painful. High places usually signify financial loss resulting in poverty, but its messy unless you are on a high bridge over water. The other issue is the time to impact allows people to think about what they have done, and they can’t change their minds. Time from initiation to termination is a factor. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Warm baths with a knife are slow. Still messy. Drug overdoses are less messy. This is often the choice of women for it is both neat and painless, but still slow, time enough to change your mind. This often leads people to guns. Why did I explain all of this? Because men are the most likely to kill themselves, and most often with a gun. A vast majority of suicides are committed this way. It’s messy, but it is fast. Very fast. The decision to pull the trigger is deliberate, a statement, which is left for the rest of us. Many suicide notes have been written, but few have been read to the public. Why? Are we afraid to hear that we, and not they, are the problem? Guns end the discussion in a fraction of a second. It can take several lifetimes before people figure out why because the information remains locked away. “It’s personal.” Mental health remains stigmatized out of people’s necessity to not address the issues at hand. What are those issues? What defines our basic needs that are not those issues? People need food, shelter, clothing. In our society it requires a job to accomplish those things. Gainful employment, even a job we don’t like, is a steppingstone to a brighter future. Well, it used to be. As our economy slowly crushes people out of a real livable income and into a growing sense of job insecurity as wages do not keep up with inflation year over year, men find themselves in the unenviable position of being irrelevant in the workforce. This leads to decreased earnings potential over time. While having work is important there remains another aspect of earning potential I will discuss later. Beyond food, shelter, clothing, is the need to be secure in oneself. Whether this is expressed in monetary, spiritual, educational, or leadership terms is up to the individual. How we envision ourselves as individuals often determines our career path, but most are driven by their own internal engine. A man may run a business well, but his passion is teaching basketball to high school kids in the park on Saturdays. Who we believe ourselves to be determines our well-being in relation to who we are and whether we are happy with what we do. Sadly, bad parenting can destroy this in a child, leaving them lost as to their own sense of self. A sense of self helps us to define who we are and what we do with our lives. What happens when this is taken away? The third item people need is community, more specifically, a partner. While many go through life with only one or two real friends, some go through life with none. A vast majority of men only need one person in their lives. A partner they can trust. Someone for whom they have their back, and that person has theirs. Someone they can be intimate with. Someone willing to carry their end of the log. In short, people often need only three things in life. A place to live that isn’t threatened, with clothes and food. A reason to go out and do their job every morning, where they can earn their place in society. A partner they can trust. Take away any one of these things and life gets harder. Take away two of these things and life gets desperate. When you have lost 66% of your reason for living you have lost more than half of who you are as a person unless someone comes in and helps. The burden becomes too much and when they put that burden down, they realize they will never be able to lift it themselves again. Without that burden, which is the essence of our lives, there remains nothing left to live for. They walk away from that burden, let it sink into the mud under its own weight, and look for something lighter, like a handgun. Eight grams of copper and lead are so much easier to carry. Why are people killing themselves? For most people they find themselves alone. They can deal with a crappy job, cheap clothes, an empty church to attend. They can’t deal with loneliness. So why are people so alone? Ask women. From a gender perspective, roughly 80% of suicides are men. Why are they so lonely? The answer is usually obvious. Many women feel they don’t need men. The standard has become untenable. Men are required and expected to be making incredible amounts of money, provide everything possible, and not expect much in return. I mentioned the ability to earn income before. Men need to meet earning potential criteria. Men are required to meet high physical criteria as well as being supportive beyond reason. Not only do they have to carry the log, but their partners baggage too. Since 80% of most men do not even come within striking distance of this criteria they opt out, condemned to be being lonely, as they face constant rejection. This represents a heavily weighted third of primary things people need as part of their personhood. The side effect from this has been the number of women in their late thirties and early forties who now want children and men refuse to go out with them. These men who were passed over no longer want to be part of someone’s support package. This has resulted in an increase of drug and alcohol use by women in this age bracket. Instead of choosing a partner when they were younger, which would then have reduced the number of lonely and isolated men who later go on to commit suicide, these women face the same dilemma but continue to maintain requirements that men who have aged out of over time find even harder to meet. Thus, the suicide rate among older women is also increasing. Not having a partner is one leg of this issue. Without a partner their sense of internal self is compromised. While many men base their sense of self on their work it is also based on who they are working for, and this is not referring to their employer. Some have a strong sense of self, and work at what they are intrinsically, but many work to support their partner. People who have a strong sense of self generally don’t kill themselves as their work defines their sense of self even though they are without a partner. There are exceptions to every rule, but the trend remains logical. This leads to the third aspect, which represents the lower rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Compromise a person’s food, shelter, and clothing and they will fall faster into the well of despair that leads to suicide. Combine either of these and the probability increases. Take away all three and the last restrictor, besides personal religious belief, or an incredible sense of will to survive, will be the only thing that saves them. What I have described here are events that can span a lifetime of a person’s experience. Each of these events remains a stand-alone entity or can be coupled to other events. What isn’t described here is the environment those events occur in. Each person brings their own unique set of environmental variables to the larger issues. Some come from broken homes, or homes where violence was the norm. Dysfunctional parents or no parents at all. The volume of undiagnosed mental disorders (autism, bipolar, PTSD, BPD, attachment disorder, etc.) which may exist underneath everything they experience could lead to long term chronic depression or a myriad other disorder. And none of this includes members of the military or law enforcement communities for which their role in society isolates them further. Socioeconomics also plays a role in this. People who have spent their lives fighting their way out of poverty may be less inclined to fall back into that hole where the struggle for every dollar earned can become an existential crisis. On the other end of this are people who have accomplished so much they feel there is nothing left to achieve, though this is by far the lesser sample set. When the money finally runs out some people may be faced with homelessness or turning to criminal activity, each being a dangerous and socially isolated place. Divorce and rejection, over a long enough timeline can be the final box in a long decision tree that leads to suicide. Generational patterns of divorce and rejection can be enough to cause anyone to question the value of their own self-worth. If they feel valueless to themselves, regardless of gender, the slide through isolation, loneliness, and feelings of being rejected and abandoned, as they slide down the slope of depression and despair, may become an unstoppable avalanche leading to their own destruction. In the end the explanation is simple: “Suicide becomes probable when the pain of living exceeds the pain of dying.” The anchors that prevent this slide are: 1 Access to Food, Shelter, Clothing. (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) 2 A solid sense of self, based on monetary, spiritual, educational, or leadership terms 3 A Partner / Friend. Someone to help carry the burdens of life. Lose any two of these anchors and life becomes very difficult indeed. It may also be a result of speed to impact, how fast they are falling, which can trigger the final event. Break too many things at once and the results may be the same. While the first two are usually things people are capable of building for themselves, it is sometimes difficult to manage the third, simply because it involves depending on other people. People. We never meet their expectations, fall short of what we promise and resent what we may never have. Accumulated over time, our inability to believe in people is undermined and the person who desperately needs someone in their lives may be forever condemned to being alone. Simply because that person could never meet the standards and had been rejected. What is to be done about this? How do we fix it? You can’t. The problem is societal. People must accept other people as they are. They must be open to examining their motivations in relation to their goals. A woman wants a husband who wants to support them. Men want a wife who will be a partner. A balance must be struck. The idea that any relationship can be built on a one-sided model is ridiculous, yet this is what plays out every day, resulting in exceptionally high divorce rates, broken homes where children grow up depressed and later in life are found dead from suicide. It isn’t something that can be fixed in a generation. All you can do is attempt to reverse the trend. This is started with identification, prevention, and treatment. Identification can be profiled. Single people, people going through divorce or other extensive life changing events, people who identify as being helpless, hopeless, or depressed. People who live in poverty with any or all these situations. People who cannot find or identify a part of themselves that provides them with purpose. Almost all these people will come from backgrounds where the same situations and behaviors exist. Prevention happens when someone chooses to step in and help. That help can be in any form, from a referral to a mental health clinician to taking the gun from someone’s hand. Whether it is the right thing to do or not, the important thing is to do something. Inaction is a declaration to the person teetering on the edge of oblivion. It tells a man with a gun to his head they do not matter to anyone. The one thing they crave the most is to matter to someone, anyone. Our society is often shameful in the level of superficial caring we offer people. Getting people to professionals is ideal, but caring in the moment is more valuable. Treatment helps bring someone back from the edge. Treatment is often referred to as a climb out of a hole. Like rock climbing, it is hard work moving upward to a place where new anchors can be safely installed, new ropes (methods) of dealing with life can be implemented along with different techniques climb out and build the necessary resilience for surviving in this society, especially when one of the primary parts of anyone’s mental psyche is missing or destroyed. I state again… people need only three things in life. A place to live that isn’t threatened, with clothes and food. A reason to go out and do their job every morning, where they can earn their place in society. A partner they can trust. Find which of these is broken, support the broken places, even if you can only support one of these, and point them to better resources. It isn’t your job to save people. It’s our responsibility, when opportunity presents itself, to help people save themselves. That is how you reduce the rate of suicide in this country. Why doesn’t this happen when it seems like an obvious solution to a problem? This is the part often written in suicide notes but is often never read. At least not to the public, for fear it might encourage someone to not only identify with someone but to act on it. Similarly, the answer here is also obvious. They reached out for help, and no one came. Sometimes people are looking for unrealistic answers, but I suspect often they are looking for someone to simply provide a solution. Our society of instant gratification does not allow for the long-term solution, along winding muddy paths, that lead us back to the light. We want the answer, and we want it now! People are also very resistant to change, even to saving themselves. It always seems easier to quit. What reaching out accomplishes is the simple act of giving. The person in desperate need of help is giving people a chance to make a difference, though the answer they get may not be the one they wanted. They are giving someone a chance to show them there is another way. People who are depressed and suicidal often have trouble finding new or different options to the path they have set themselves on. A nurse who loses her job and career, having never known any other one, may find themselves unable to see how they can change. Moreover, that change will take time. Restarting in a different career can be painful, financially difficult, and lower your own sense of self-worth. Not everyone has the will to do this, let alone do this on their own. Running their path until they are trapped, the compulsion to just pull the dirt down over themselves is enticing. They reach out because they cannot or refuse to see another option. Giving them another option means they haven’t exhausted all their options. Pointing this out to someone comes with a caveat. People don’t want to grow when they have worked so hard to get themselves mentally ready to be planted in the ground. Accepting there might be another path, that more energy must be expended before they can convince anyone they should just go away and let them die can be a real struggle. When you have reached what you believe is rock bottom, however illogical it may seem at the time, people would rather lay down and die than face a new challenge. This new challenge is an opportunity to help save their lives by giving them a new path. This gift can take many shapes and forms. Counseling should be the first, but this isn’t always what happens. It may be necessary to explain there are other options to be explored and they would be remiss if they didn’t. There will be cases made as to how such plans will invariably fail and serve no purpose. By arguing them out, each plan gets forged into a possible plan of action. It becomes a process of discovery and may take days or weeks to work out completely. That means the person helping must be consistent. This is where everything usually fails. People are difficult at best, horrible at worst. Signing on to help someone through what will be the most difficult time of their lives, with the very real possibility of it ending badly, requires a certain level of commitment that isn’t always so easily found. This is why professional mental health services are so important. Individuals can help but the amount of empathy and caring involved is sometimes quite beyond the average person’s resources, without the proper training in the tools and techniques of the role. Mental health counselors are trained in these things and know how to use them to their best effect, though sometimes it may take several tries to find a counselor that can reach into a torn psyche and help repair it. That’s why they are the professionals they are. If you were at the bottom of a hole and the walls were smooth as glass, how would you get out? You should ask for help, but most people do not. They exhaust themselves trying to do it on their own and end up even worse with the falls they have taken. Sometimes they ask for help, but no one hears them or wants to get involved, being too wrapped up in their own problems. Some may even drop some tools down and hope you figure it out on your own. A bad counselor may come down with a rescue rope and hook you up and lift you out. Having learned nothing about self-rescue it is just a matter of time before you fall back down the same hole. It may be even longer before someone comes by the next time. If you have lived so far out on the fringe of society there may simply be no one there to help at all. Then there are the people who take advantage of the situation and leave you with even less. Some come by to fill the hole in. Their callousness hurts and there seems to be nothing you can do about it. You’re trapped and no one is coming to help you and some who are only hurt you more. This is exemplified when it is family who come by to fill in the hole, pushing you further into your belief that all is lost. The last iteration of this analogy is when you scrape the walls trying to bring the world down on yourself. Self-destructive behaviors, such as drugs, alcohol, self-harm, or suicide attempts, where every day a little more of you dies. But then a mental health counselor works differently. A mental health counselor lowers themselves calmly and slowly into your world, this world you have created for yourself, and stops just out of reach of you. They do this for two reasons. One, so they don’t get pulled into your world and can’t get out, and second, so they can hand you tools and then be close enough to explain them so you can use them effectively. Once at a point that you can start climbing out of the hole the counselor winches themselves up, always staying just a little ahead of you but never so far out of reach you cannot access them for instructions. They won’t pull you out of the hole but teach you how to get out of the hole on your own. You may fall back at times, everyone does, but they remain there with the advice and encouragement you need to reach the surface. The journey doesn’t end at the surface, the flat plain you find yourself on. The world may have changed in the time you have been in the hole. Discovering that world is up to you, but they can show you how to deal with all the other holes you may find around you. As well as some of the newly created obstacles society likes to build. Like a guide who helps you climb a mountain because they know the paths, see how the lay of the land is, the tools to navigate it and rescue yourself from it. But the first step is yours. You have to ask for help, reach out that hand and say, “I don’t want to die.” And that may be the hardest thing you face in the whole trip.