George Howe Colt - November of the Soul: The Enigma of Suicide

George Howe Colts authoritative volume bears witness to the modern suicide pandemic, a crisis from which we tend too readily to avert our eyes. Rigorous, wide-ranging, informed, and humane, this book details with shocking lucidity the peril that is all around us. It can offer no real solutions, but does provide much sorely needed wisdom; it will not arrest the contagion, but it could save some lives.

Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

Remarkable... A great and moving triumph... The reportage is stunning in its breadth and detail.... What finally makes this book so impressive are the scrupulously documented, intimate narratives that Colt reconstructs that in a sense bring back to life a half dozen suicide victims and allow us to see how their worlds closed in on them.... Colt is at his finestwhich is very fine indeedwhen telling us how ordinary people can find themselves in despair. And he doesnt do this in a sentimental fashion, in a manner that suggests easy solutions or follows party lines.... Not only is this a masterly piece of journalism, it is also, strangely enough, a profoundly life-affirming study.

L.A. Times

Monumental... The most comprehensive, illuminating look at suicide to date.

Publishers Weekly

The text includes eye-opening case histories that give the narrative the suspenseful appeal of an investigatory saga... a truly comprehensive and thoroughgoing discussionone of the first of its kind.

Booklist

Imagine a book about a forbidden subject at once so matter-of-fact and thorough that it could be the perfect catalog and as sure-footed and moving as a good novel. This is what George Howe Colt has given us.

Boston Globe

[Colts] own aching sensitivity to the subject suffuses every page of his encyclopedic work, The Enigma of Suicide, an utterly fascinating, admirably well-written and sad book.... The literature on the subjectand the survivorsare greatly enriched by his evocative treatment of it.

Dava Sobel, New York Times Book Review

Colts histories are superior to many psychiatric case studies because they include the devastating effects which suicide has on parents, teachers, schoolmates and others who knew the adolescent... [A] thoughtful, excellent book. It touches the lives of all of us and deserves the widest possible readership.

Washington Post

A fascinating history and account of what suicide is and how suicide prevention is actually practiced. It is the best, easy-to-read, comprehensive book written by a layperson for the lay reader with which to enter the world of suicidology.

Edwin S. Shneidman, professor of thanatology emeritus,

University of California, and author of The Suicidal Mind

A LSO BY G EORGE H OWE C OLT

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For Anne

Then, now, always

DURING THE MONTHS that followed September 11, 2001, I could not help noticing what pains the op-ed pages of Americas newspapers took to make clear that the terrorists who steered jets into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon were not real suicides. The implication was that these men had nothing in common with the troubled souls we think ofand feel compassion towardwhen we hear the profoundly unsettling word suicide.

It is understandable that we would be reluctant to find any commonality between unhappy people who deserve our sympathy and mass murderersand, to be sure, there are great differences. And yet the terrorists were suicides, albeit of a particular but hardly unique strand in the history of self-destructive behavior. Indeed, the post-9/11 editorialists seemed unaware that for much of recorded history, suicide has been seen primarily not as a private act of desperation but as a public statement with a larger social meaning. Suicides have often been depicted not as miserable, helpless victims but as rational masters of their own fates, sacrificing themselves in the name of protest, idealism, or subversion by committing what the French sociologist mile Durkheim called altruistic suicide (a difficult label to apply to the events of 9/11, but, from its executors skewed perspective, an accurate one). These terrorists were nothing newexcept, perhaps, in the magnitude of their destruction.

To find an analogue, one need look back only fifty years to the kamikaze, the Japanese pilots who flew their fighter planes into American aircraft carriers in the South Pacific during the waning months of World War II. One could, of course, look much further back, to the early Christian martyrs, who believed that by killing themselves they would receive posthumous glory and enter the kingdom of heaven in a state of blissful sinlessness. (Indeed, so many Christians killed themselves in the first few centuries AD that the church was forced to redefine suicide as a mortal sin.) By contrast, the contemporary terrorist earns cultural veneration for killing others, and his suicide is merely a lethal side effect. By the standards of antiquity, the September 11 hijackers could well have seen themselves as modern versions of Samson, who knew that when he pulled down the Philistine temple, he, too, would die.

At the same time, theyalong with the Palestinian, Iraqi, and Tamil suicide bombers who populate our front pagesmay not be as different as we might think from the despondent, often psychiatrically distressed people we consider to be typical suicides (as if there were such a thing). As time has passed, a more complex picture has emerged in which such terrorists appear to be neither selfless martyrs nor (as the 9/11 editorialists would have it) vindictive cowards but troubled young men and, occasionally, women who, finding little meaning in their lives, are psychologically and culturally primed to be swept away by a cause, especially one whose apparent largeness of purpose might lend them dignity. They are less akin, perhaps, to clear-eyed Cato and the other so-called rational suicides of antiquity than to those cultists who swallowed poisoned Kool-Aid and followed Jim Jones to their deaths in the Guyana jungle, or to the harried zealots in Waco, Texas, who, at the behest of a charismatic leader named David Koresh, fired on federal agents until they were themselves killed. In their confusion, rage, and feelings of powerlessness, they had something in common with the boys who turned their guns on their schoolmates at Columbine High School before turning them on themselves. In some ways, in fact, they may not be that far removed from any despairing person who looks, often in the wrong places, for something that will lend his life meaning and ends up finding death.

Though their motivations may differ, people who kill themselves, whether they are suicide bombers or depressed teenagers, believemistakenlythat there are no alternative paths. Indeed, in the months after 9/11, my mind kept returning to those men and women on the upper floors of the World Trade Center who, with fire behind them, jumped to their deaths. This seemed to me the literal expression of the psychological experience faced by most suicidal people: they feel they have no choice.

I raise these points as a way of suggesting that when it comes to suicide, there is very little new under the sun. Suicide has likely been with us as long as life and death have been with us. In the fifteen years since the original version of this book was published, the essentials havent changed. People are killing themselves at about the same frequency, in about the same ways, and for about the same reasons as in 1991. At the same time, there have been a number of developments in the intervening years that make updating and revising this book not only worthwhile but necessary.