Years ago one sunny morning, a messenger in my office came back from a delivery. He looked dazed and moved slowly to sit down. When asked what was wrong he replied that a man had landed with an explosive sound on the sidewalk in front of him on 34th Street. He had just jumped from the upper level of the Empire State Building. The man’s heart burst from his body and landed 10 feet from where our messenger was unchaining his bike. I asked one of our supervisors to take him home.
Too often successful and attempted suicides are unnecessarily violent. The fact that other people are affected by someone’s suicide is compounded when they are particularly brutal. And, too often many suicides are gruesome because they have no way out other than ending their life violently.
Ownership is big in modern society. But we are not freeholders of our own bodies. Society does not permit us to have permanent and absolute tenure of our bodies with the freedom to use or dispose of it as we see fit.
On the other hand, society and its laws are not inhibited from claiming ownership over us, where laws are more interested in protecting us from ourselves than they are allowing freedom of choice.
Apparently, only “society” has the right to end our lives, which society often does with wild abandoned. We are expendable at their pleasure, not of our own.
When Robin Williams made a personal choice to end his life he likely had the good sense not to discuss it with another American. In concluding that he no longer wanted to live the poor sod used a somewhat horrid method – a belt to hang himself.
In the American overbearing Christianized culture of death where the greater concern is for a person’s soul and their life after death, you’d think that suicide would fit right in. After all, we callously send our boys to die for God and Country ready enough. We cannot have a thriving media unless it provides a daily diet of conflicts and resolutions that sells death in every entertaining manner possible. We constitutionally protect firearm ownership where nearly 90 people are killed each and every day from gun violence. We have a militarized police presence where, in too many cases, it is not shy about killing as deemed necessary – and too often with impunity. Equally shameful is that every year roughly 150 law enforcement officers are killed by firearms in the line of duty and every year, nearly 1,500 children die from guns. Moreover, corporate America peddles wholesale slow burning suicidal deaths in the largest conglomerate of drug dealers in the world – the cigarette industry.
So what’s a little thing like suicide?
There is nothing civilized about jumping from a building. But even that falls within freedom of choice (except when it could be dangerous for unsuspecting pedestrians). It’s when people are forced by a lack of nonviolent options that makes legally coerced intervention all wrong.
Assisted suicide is legal in the states of Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Vermont. Doctors cannot administer the means of suicide but they can give the patient the means to end their own life. But the restrictive nature of the laws do not address the issue of suicide as a moral, philosophical and sound right-to-die personal choice for all humans without government intervention.
Intervention should largely be a matter between the friends, family, medical and psychological care-givers, if and only if, the right-to-die person “seeks or accepts” help, not have it forced upon them.
In an usual exception to the norm, according to a recent paper published in the Law, Ethics and Medicine journal, people from other countries are traveling to Switzerland for the “sole purpose of committing suicide.” They have become known as “suicide tourist.” There are six right-to-die organizations in Zurich that assists in approximately 600 cases of suicide each year, most are from Switzerland and up to 200 are from other countries. The study authors noted that the suicide tourists were from 31 countries, but most were from the United Kingdom and Germany.
In typical deadpan UK humor, no pun intended, the Brits euphemistically refer to the end-of-life “vacation” as “Going to Switzerland.”
Popular Methods
The leading methods of suicide in this country are firearms and hanging (more common in men), and self poisoning (more common in women). These are followed by much smaller percentages for: jumping, cutting, and drowning. In one source the top three methods where described as the “three particularly popular methods of successful suicide.”
Popular?
Suicidal Tools - Hare Today Gone Tomorrow
Wickedly funny and ingenious and surreal ideas for all the little fluffy rabbits in this world who just don’t want to live anymore, from Andy Riley’s sketchbook.
Each cartoon shows one or more white rabbits in their creative attempts to end their lives using a variety of items. Revolving doors, a toaster, a cricket ball, a boomerang, a hand-grenade, the shining sun, a magnifying glass, smoking of several cigarettes, bowling balls and any combination of these are all featured as suicidal tools.
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Book_of_Bunny_Suicides.html?id=d801AgAAQBAJ
“Aren’t people just awful?”
Human views toward suicide are as bizarre, as much else of their thinking. There’s nothing wrong with suicide, so much as there is something wrong with the people who force them into unnecessary violent, brutal deaths.
As Caligula is quoted saying, “Aren’t people just awful?”
Unspeakable Truths
Another angle on this from a recent exhibit, inspired by Artaud’s essay: Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society.
From the curator’s notes:
“Artaud was incensed by Beer’s clinical portrayal of the painter’s madness and challenged this analysis, accusing society as a whole of driving Van Gogh to suicide by its indifference or in order to “prevent him from uttering unspeakable truths. Van Gogh therefore committed suicide because the collective consciousness as a whole could no longer tolerate him”.
From the essay:
Here’s a longer snippet from the essay…
A heads up: Artaud is not a thinker/writer/artist for the delicate of mind..
Interesting link
I particularly noted:
“ insistence on an entire order based on the fulfillment of a primitive injustice, in short, of organized crime”
Sounds a lot like what we’ve got here and now
“…crime, love, war, or madness…”
Artaud, who died at 51 from colorectal cancer in 1948, had not lived long enough to really survive the downdraft effects of psychiatric clinics where he spent too much of his life and where some of his intentional gibberish was formed.
Too many modern human minds dwell too much of the endorsement of poetic and theatrical madness and “clinical” depression at the expense of ‘sensual logic’ and order.
Humans constantly seek answers through their anthropomorphic lens, yet rarely find a valid definition of life itself, too busy wallowing in “…crime, love, war, or madness…”
Wallowing Towards Bethlehem
I found an interesting review of the Van Gogh/Artaud exhibit, which does a nice job untangling some of the inevitable knots that come with presenting such controversial figures.
http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/van-gogh-artaud-the-man-suicided-by-society
This all evokes an idea I once read in Goethe, that the great and towering figures of any age can only be understood in the light of their contexts and contemporaries. Goethe was asked how he got to be so prolific and influential, and said, “look not so much to Everest itself, but see the Himalayas.” When giants of the era of Surrealism, or Impressionism, or post modernism strut across the stage, it’s helpful to pull back and look at the fruits of their labors in the light of the time in which they lived.
This approach offers no answers, but it provides a vantage on that which aspires to transcendence.
Variously described from the eye of the beholder
I might add, I think understanding these past historical “figures” lean on their contemporaries (the Himalayas) as much or more than in personal context (Everest).
And, “in the light of the time in which they lived” it’s often like many “eye-witness accounts,” inadequate, unreliable and variously described from the eye of the beholder (contemporary).
Taken as a whole, though, it does indeed provide a “vantage on that which aspires to transcendence” albeit, slightly muddled by bias, misunderstanding and ignorance.
Van Gogh, along with Socrates (and others I’m sure), fascinates us by their suicides; entertains, enlightens and draws us by our own visionary and interpretive bonds to their life’s work.
Goethe
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
Swiss Getaways
Goethe’s first novel set off a wave of copycat suicides- young men mostly, replicating his protagonist, an anguished lover juked by fate who shoots himself. It came to be know as the Werther Effect
That event introduces into society the idea of suicide contagion, which has been studied in a variety of forms. Vidda spins a benign angle to the phenomena, a twist of Hemlock, where choice is pursued out of dignity rather than desperation.
At Masada, a mass decision to go discorporate preceded Goethe’s Sturm und Drang drama. That’d be suicide fever too, but the Romantic Era outbreak kicks off the factor of media frenzy juicing the phenomena.
“…Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”
-from the Holy Longing, Goethe
Personal opinion vs. observatory opinion
This is a good time to interject my “personal” opinion rather than my “observatory” opinion.
I place no spin on why people commit suicide.
Neither do I endorse, nor oppose suicide. Suicide opinions (by me) can be neither be seen as benign, worthy of deed or dark matter. Each to his own merits or demerits of their own lives as understood by each of us. To do so would place me in the awkward position of trying to read too many minds where I would forever stumble over all the various pros and cons within each of us.
Therefore I only endorse ‘freedom of choice – without government interference or persons with oversight,’ unless, as I stipulated earlier, that the suicidal “seeks or accepts” intervention.
I cannot emphasize the importance of “seeks or accepts” intervention.
Otherwise it is ‘hands off.’
It is okay for friends, family and care-givers to intervene, but the final decision lies with, and only with, the suicidal person, not outside interested parties.
In the final analysis, issues like “dignity rather than desperation” are solely in the purview of the suicidal.
The suicidal’s reasons why are none of my business, and not the business of society.
Suicide, in fact, is one of the most intensive personal decisions a human may ever make.
Just ask Robin Williams. As outspoken as he was, he’d likely tell all of you out there to mind your goddamned business. I don’t think he’d appreciate being thought of as insane or incapable of sound judgment in so far as it applied to his moment in time.
Even Goethe had some dichotomous thinking that is, at times, woefully inadequate.
“you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth…” Well, there is no such thing as a dark earth. Our planet, in fact, is multihued – within and without, neither dark nor light – but that and all the shades of grey in between.
Gloryland
I was just listening to a preacher on local radio.
He was talking about a place where all the “good guys” go.
(At least I think that’s what he meant – He called it “Gloryland)
Anyhoo, in G-land, everybody lives in a mansion.
Everybody has a garden where they grow their own food.
Nobody eats anything that “has a face”. (He actually used those words).
There is no “darkness”. It’s always daytime.
Wow! My kind of place.
I had to leave before he told us how to get there. I think he was saying something about “Ecclesiastes”.
I guess my question is, do you have to go to Switzerland first?
Sodium Pentobarbital Vapors
Yes yes, you must go to Switzerland first if you want to live in a mansion (or a castle) after death. There is amountain spa where vials of sodium pentobarbital ‘vapors’ await everyone who “has a face,” unless they have a particular last wish craving for injectables.
Cigarette smokers go to the front of the line, no sense in waiting for those silly suicidal slow burning cancer sticks to kick-in.
But don’t you go too soon. You have to stick around here and be happy and miserable (in turns) like the rest of us (except cigarette smokers, of course— — — –).
life
If one does decide to “go to Switzerland” even if it is legal, will a life insurance company still pay benefits to your surviving heirs?
Without the fine print handy
Without the fine print handy, I thought most insurance companies have a clause that if you committ suicide before the first 2 years of your policy no one collects.
Of course, I woouldn’ttrust insurance so people with the wherewithal to go to Switzerland might want to run it by their attorney.
A Short Stay in Switzerland - "A weariness of life"
According to DIGNITAS, a Swiss right-to-die organization that was involved in most of the identified cases, 21% of people receiving assisted suicide do not have a terminal or progressive illness, but rather “weariness of life.”
In all but four cases, the assisted suicides of patients with various chronic or terminal illnesses were done using sodium pentobarbital.
In a few cases in 2008, Dignitas used breathing “helium gas” as a suicide method instead of a pentobarbital overdose. This avoids the need for medical supervision and prescription controlled drugs, and is therefore cheaper.
In general, Dignitas uses the following protocol to assist suicides: an oral dose of an antiemetic drug (stops vomiting and nausea), followed approximately 1 hour later by a lethal overdose of powdered pentobarbital dissolved in a glass of water or fruit juice. If necessary, the drugs can be ingested via a drinking straw. The pentobarbital overdose depresses the central nervous system, causing the person to become drowsy and fall asleep within 5 minutes of drinking it. Anaesthesia progresses to coma as the person’s breathing becomes more shallow, followed by respiratory arrest and death, which occurs within 30 minutes of ingesting the pentobarbital.
In a referendum on 15 May 2011, voters in the Canton of Zurich overwhelmingly rejected calls to ban assisted suicide or to outlaw the practice for non-residents. Out of more than 278,000 ballots cast, the initiative to ban assisted suicide was rejected by 85 per cent of voters and the initiative to outlaw it for foreigners was turned down by 78 per cent
`Wikipedia and other sources