Howard Burton - Sheathing the Bodkin: Combating Suicide: A Conversation with Jennifer Michael Hecht

When Prince Hamlet of Denmark famously muses over the prospect of taking his own life in order to avoid dealing with his treacherous, usurping uncle, naive mother and the generally degenerate, grasping, ruling coterie that surrounds him, we nod our heads knowingly about the raw power of literary devices to underscore the inescapable anguish of the human condition.

In the end, of course, Hamlet does not succumb to his suicidal impulse and eventually manages to avenge his fathers murder, but not before just about everything in Denmark collapses, including himself.

As one of the most celebrated tragic characters in history, its fair to say that Hamlet was going to suffer a bad end no matter what course of action he chose.

But for countless real individuals around the world who actively contemplate suicide each day, their fate is much more open-ended. Which naturally leads us all to ponder what we could, and should, be doing to help them through their crisis.

Jennifer Michael Hecht, poet, public intellectual, and holder of a doctorate in history from Columbia, has intensely experienced the trauma of suicide after two of her friends and fellow poets killed themselves in the span of two years. To sociologists, suicidal contagion is a well-established sociological phenomenon. To Jennifer, it was personal.

So she responded in the best way she knew how: by writing. First a poem, then a blog piece, then a newspaper article, and finally, a bestselling book, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It.

Her first reaction was simply a plea to the living: Dont kill yourself. By the time the book was finished three years later, this clarion emotional cry was buttressed by a wide range of compelling historico-philosophical arguments from Plato to Camus, together with an impressive array of sociological studies examining which community measures were most effective. But the message to all potential suicides was still the same: Stay.

Combining personal sentiments with intellectual history was hardly new for Jenniferindeed, it might even be considered a hallmark of her unique literary style. An avowed secularist, her anxiety about the growing power of Americas religious right prompted her to write Doubt: A History, comprehensively demonstrating how critical questioning and uncertainty were essential midwives to some of humanitys most impressive accomplishments.

Atheists and agnostics were unsurprisingly quick to embrace her arguments, but she hadnt expected such a tolerant reaction from those of a more overtly religious persuasion.

When I wrote Doubt: A History, which is a history of irreligion for which I thought Id get a lot of angry responses, I was surprised to discover that I got almost none. In fact, religious people generally liked the book because it takes the religious questions very seriously, even though it leans towards the secular answers to them. Its not, at all, a dismissal of religious ideas.

You might think that if Jennifer managed to engage religious believers with her history of irreligion, surely her mission to build greater community awareness to prevent suicides would yield an even greater consensus.

But youd be wrong.

I got more angry responses from this book than from anything else Ive ever done. I think the secular community was angry because its part of the secular dogma that you can kill yourself. The idea that somebody who has proven herself to be very dedicated to secular philosophy wouldnt necessarily subscribe to this dogma, thereby demonstrating that we can still think progressively about morality and change some of our views, well, that didnt go down well with many people.

Ruffling the feathers of those clinging so strongly to a secular dogma wasnt the only land mine Jennifer unwittingly stumbled into. She was also in the sights of those adhering to a more strictly biological view of mental illness, for whom her passionate entreaties to persevere sounded suspiciously like blaming the victim.

Ive been told by many people that I dont know what depression is, or that I dont know what these feelings are.

Telling someone that you disagree with her interpretation of a clinical definition is one thing. But telling her about her private feelings is quite another. Jennifer, unsurprisingly, found herself begrudgingly upping the ante in order to make her argument heard.

Ive said, in public that I have had suicidal thoughts. In the period that I lost my friends, I was struggling with my own darkness. I was depressed and ideational. Thats something that I did not want to come out with publicly, but I chose to because I wanted to get past peoples defenses and have them be willing to consider these ideas.

Ideas? Which ideas?

Well, for starters, that the threat of suicide is not simply limited to a few clinically labeled people. That it can, in principle, threaten us all. And that, with proper care and attention, we might be able to at least somewhat reduce the chances of it happening to many of us.

After all, they dont call it the human condition for nothing.

I dont see suicide, in general, as an inevitable endpoint of a biological disease. I think we really have to keep that in mind, that we have good statistics and a lot of observational material that show that a person who does not seem sick in bed, but has simply been humiliated is sometimes led to drastic acts like suicide. And people get humiliated in a variety of ways: getting yelled at at work, failing a test they thought they were going to pass, just not standing out the way they thought they were going to, and also just through being insulted. Someone breaking your heart or someone embarrassing you at work or school seems to often be enough of a trigger, if thats just happened and someone has the means to do it.

If you dont have means, you can ride it out. And thats why I call my book a sort of conceptual barrier, because I know that bridge barriers work, which is amazing. Everyone thought if you put up a barrier theyll just go to another bridge, but they dont. They go home.

On stage, the key question was, famously,