America, the Suicidal

How a lust for life creates its own death wish.

Watching the celebratory fireworks this Independence Day, I thought about the thousands of personal explosions destroying families across the country. Every year, more Americans kill themselves than each other, death rates ever-increasing. What does that say about us as a society, and what can we do about it personally?

Don’t Kill Yourself Before Reading This

Our society is maniacally focused on winning. We judge ourselves and others through success. That makes celebrity suicides particularly distressing and disorienting. Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain? How is that even possible? Fame and fortune, going everywhere, doing everything and everyone, they had it all. We wanted to be like them and were jealous of them — until now, because they’re gone. Worse than losers, they did it to themselves. But why?

Confused, we psychoanalyze: “Who knows what’s privately going on in a public person’s life?” Disappointed, we wax poetic: “Yet again this shows that money can’t buy happiness...” Angry, we blame the victim: “How selfish to abandon the people who love you!” Envious, we seek hidden motives: “Bet he owed millions and couldn’t pay the vig…” Resigned, we philosophize: “When you’re famous everybody wants something from you, and you have no genuine friends…”

Truth is nobody knows why famous people do what they do, let alone perform an act as surprising and drastic as suicide. We mythologize celebrities while they’re alive, eulogize them when they die, and immortalize them after they’re gone. We spectate breathlessly from the side lines, waiting for the fiery car crash. Their rise is as mysterious as their fall, fulfilling our need for royalty, for transcendence, for superheroes. Suicide is their kryptonite.

Meanwhile, every five minutes a taxi driver, housewife, teacher, and other unknown American takes their own life. As Hemingway, another celebrity suicide, once said: “The only difference between rich people and poor people is the amount of money they have.” That begs the question as to whether or not these celebs would still be alive had they never made it big; it also hints at our addiction to greed and indulgence, our fascination with that final rush.

Bourdain himself offered clues, his sudden demise hidden in his equally surprising start. Overnight sensations are fictions, but people do get big breaks, and this brilliant New Yorker article put him on the map. Mix an epicure De Sade with a dollop of Nietzsche, and you get a tantalizing view of foodies as libertines who go Beyond Delicious & Atrocious: Pleasure and pain converging in a sadomasochistic frenzy of unabashed heroic hedonism.

Cruelty and decay, the science of pain: descriptors of Bourdainian gastronomy — and David Carradine, another indulgent celebrity who died by his own hand. A victim of accidental autoerotic asphyxiation, Kung Fu met Kill Bill at the end of a rope in a closet at the Swissotel in Bangkok. Presumably coming and going at the same time, Dave worshipped the deep connections between agony and ecstasy, killing himself to get the most from life. Inhale, exhale.

Our National Nightmare

Don’t get me wrong — in no way do I want to paint the picture of suicide as a celebrity indulgence, cheap thrill, or national pastime. Behind every avoidable death is a human being and their impacted family, friends, and community, those left behind forced to grapple with the scourge. My own mother committed suicide, over-dosing on her psychoactive medication. Nobody wants to die. Suicide goes against our most basic instincts.

So blaming anyone, celebrity or dishwasher or neighbor for committing suicide is like blaming someone for getting cancer, a piano falling on their head, or being hit by a bus. Unless you’re deep in the shit, you can’t imagine what it’s like. The excruciating mental and emotional claustrophobia blows the mind and wrecks the body. Ask anyone who’s been there; the emotion that dominates all others is loneliness. Just you, and nobody, nothing else.

The suicide epidemic isn’t unique to America, either: Sri Lanka, Lithuania, and Guyana top the list; Granada, Barbados, and Antigua at bottom. But as an American, I feel that the prevalence of suicide and our attitudes toward it not only capture our core challenges, but describe the essence of our faltering culture and values. What price do we actually pay for being the “Land of Opportunity”? Is that even reconcilable with “All men being created equal”?

Perhaps our crisis goes back to the origin of the phrase “American Dream,” coined by James Truslow Adams in 1931. Born in Brooklyn from Venezuelan descent, he cashed-in as an investment banker to become a freelance writer, winning a Pulitzer for his history of New England. But he’s best known for The Epic of America, conceived as a counter-point to the crass materialism of his day; James clarified the Dream as one of “quality and spiritual values.”

In our struggle to make a living, he wrote, we were neglecting to live. Progress had to be defined in humane and moral terms, not only material. Our heritage was priceless, and his American Dream was “of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone… in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable… regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

But here’s the rub: the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness come with no guarantees. The American experiment is where humanist values collide with market brutalities, Jean-Jacques Rousseau arm wrestling with Adam Smith, Charles Darwin the referee. World War II sealed the deal: America proved the biggest and best, our victory forged within the crucible of destruction. We’ve been all about winning or losing ever since.

America, the Suicidal

The pressure to succeed for the sake of success makes life a lonely place. Despite our enlightened ideals and relatively high standard of living, we remain a violent, unhappy nation, expressed in an average of 140 suicides per day. A recent CDC report cites how, despite the increase in mental health programs and prescription treatments, the national rate of suicide has gone up more than 25% in less than 20 years, some states worse than others:

Nearly twice as many people die each year from suicide as homicide, suggesting we hate ourselves even more than each other. Multiple factors drive these disturbing trends of our shamelessly rigged system: decimation of the middle and working classes, alienation of social media, epidemic of opioids, plummeting rate of marriages, countless chicken-and-egg factors correlating with the tsunami of anxiety and depression sweeping the nation.

Countless contradictions fuel our uniquely American paradox of Yankee Paradise meeting Gringo Hell: We sport the world’s most powerful military, yet 22 veterans commit suicide every day; we have the most expensive health care system yet we question its quality and millions are ineligible; we have an impressive per capita income yet millions still live in poverty; we incarcerate over a million yet continue to endure gun violence and crime; on and on.

Individually we cry out and kill ourselves with ever-increasing frequency, while collectively we polarize into irreconcilable political divides. In the worst way our two-party system fits comfortably into this winner-loser mindset, where issues succumb to partisanship, a disgraceful ideology of winner-take-all and ends-justifying-means. Of course populism reigns supreme, the presidency deservedly debauched; we really have grown tired of winning.

But all is not lost! The surprising outlier in all this is Nevada, the only state with a decreasing suicide rate — proving at long last that whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Hunter S. Thompson, yet another celebrity suicide, figured out why back in 1971, forty years after Mr. Adams gave us the American Dream, into whose heart Dr. Gonzo savagely journeyed with nothing but irreverence and a trunk full of extremely dangerous drugs.

His attorney, naked and tripping on LSD in a Vegas hotel room bathtub, demanded Hunter electrocute him with a plugged-in radio when Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” peaked. Instead, Hunter hurled an over-sized grapefruit into the frothing water, triggering convulsive death-throes at the exact moment of delirious joy. His lawyer got everything he wanted and survived; too bad decades later Hunter forgot about the grapefruit. Over, out.

We’re a country of competitiveness and indulgence, killing ourselves to live, suicide the tragic equalizer. But the stakes are only as high as we insist on making them. Maybe some self-reflection, hedonistic release, and whimsical humor can help us start talking to each other again. The antidote to loneliness is empathy, and empathy starts with being willing to listen.