The Suicide Paradox (Rebroadcast)

[0] There won't be a word for college or professor, but I can say, Che al -Qasai, pao -a -si, chikapigakakai, Bai.

[1] And that just means my name is Pao -A -Ci.

[2] That's my Pita -Ha name.

[3] And I make a lot of marks on paper.

[4] Dan Everett is a college professor, a linguist.

[5] Off and on, for the past 30 years, he's lived with a tribe in the Amazon called the Piedaha.

[6] I originally went to the Piedaha as a missionary to translate the Biber, into their language, but over the course of many years, they wound up converting me, and I became a scientist instead and studied their culture and its effects on their language.

[7] The Piedaha live in huts, sleep on the ground, hunt with bows and arrows.

[8] But what really caught Everett's attention is that they are relentlessly happy, really happy.

[9] This happiness and this contentment is really had a lot to do with me, abandoning my religious goals and my religion altogether because they seem to have it a lot more together than most religious people I knew.

[10] But this isn't just another story about some faraway tribe that's really happy even though they don't have all the stuff that we have.

[11] It's a story about something that happened during Everett's early days with the tribe.

[12] He and his wife and their three young kids had just finished dinner.

[13] Everett gathered about 30 pita ha in his hut to preach to them.

[14] I was still a very fervent Christian missionary, and I wanted to tell them how God had changed my life.

[15] So I told them a story about my stepmother and how she had committed suicide because she was so depressed and so lost.

[16] For the word depressed, I used the word sad.

[17] So she was very sad.

[18] She was crying.

[19] She felt lost, and she shot herself in the head, and she died.

[20] And this had a large spiritual impact on me. And I later became a missionary and came to the Pita Ha because of all of this experience triggered by her suicide.

[21] And I told this story as tenderly as I could and tried to communicate that it had a huge impact on me. And when I was finished, everyone burst out laughing.

[22] From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio.

[23] Today, the suicide paradox.

[24] Here's your host, Stephen Dovner.

[25] All right, so Dan Everett was sharing this sad, intimate story about his stepmother's suicide with the Piedaha.

[26] When I asked them, you know, why are you laughing?

[27] They said, she killed herself.

[28] That's really funny to us.

[29] We don't kill ourselves.

[30] You mean you people, you white people, shoot yourselves in the head?

[31] We shoot animals.

[32] We kill animals.

[33] We don't kill ourselves.

[34] They just found it absolutely inexplicable and without precedent in their own experience that someone would kill themselves.

[35] In the 30 years that Everett has been studying the Pieda ha, there have been zero suicides.

[36] Now, it's not that suicide doesn't happen in the Amazon?

[37] For other tribes, it's a problem.

[38] And as I've told this story, people have suggested that, well, it's because they don't have the stresses of modern life.

[39] But that's just not true.

[40] There's almost 100 % endemic malaria among the people.

[41] They're sick a lot.

[42] Their children die at probably 75%, 75 % of the children die in before they reach the age of 5 or 6.

[43] These are astounding pressures.

[44] A group of people that laughs at suicide?

[45] It doesn't sound much like the U .S., does it?

[46] It brings on many changes, and I can take or leave it if I please.

[47] Suicide's not a laughing matter here, and it's not so rare either.

[48] Now, compared to the rest of the world, our suicide rate puts us right about in the middle.

[49] But here's what's interesting.

[50] The U .S. is famous for a relatively high murder rate.

[51] It's double, triple, even five times higher than most other developed countries.

[52] So if I said to you, what's more common in the U .S.?

[53] Homicide or suicide?

[54] What would you say?

[55] Listen to Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co -author, an economist at the University of Chicago.

[56] He's been studying crime for years.

[57] Homicides per 100 ,000 have fallen from something like 10 to something like five over the 15 years that fit a crime.

[58] So essentially, homicide has fallen in half.

[59] Wow.

[60] So let's say it's roughly five per 100 ,000 people now.

[61] Do you have any idea what the suicide rate is about now?

[62] That's about twice as high.

[63] It's surprised you because it doesn't usually make the newspaper when someone commits suicide, but it always makes the newspaper when someone commits a homicide.

[64] But twice as many suicides as homicide.

[65] It is surprising, isn't it?

[66] The preliminary numbers for 2009, the most recent year for which we have data, show there were roughly 36 ,500 suicides in the U .S. and roughly 16 ,500 homicides.

[67] That's well over twice as many suicides.

[68] So why don't we hear more about it?

[69] Partly because, as Levitt says, most suicides don't make the news, whereas murders do.

[70] Breaking news tonight out of Jackson where police are on the scene of an apparent murder and apparent double homicide.

[71] This latest murder, charged with murder.

[72] The attempted murder.

[73] First degree murder.

[74] But also, they're different types of tragedy.

[75] Murder represents a fractured promise within our social contract, and it's got an obvious villain.

[76] Suicide represents, well, what does it represent?

[77] It's hard to say.

[78] Carries such a strong taboo that most of us just don't discuss it much.

[79] The result is that there are far more questions about suicide than answers.

[80] Like, do we do enough to prevent it?

[81] How do you prevent it?

[82] And the biggest question of all, why do people commit suicide?

[83] Steve Levitt has one more question.

[84] I always think to myself, why don't more people commit suicide?

[85] If you think about the poorest people in the world, surviving on less than a dollar a day, having to walk three miles to get water and carry 70 -pound packs of water back just to survive, and those people do everything they can to stay alive.

[86] Whereas I think if I were in that situation, wouldn't I just kill myself?

[87] And what does that say to you about human nature that people in situations way, way, way, way, way worse off than you don't kill themselves in large number?

[88] My guess is that evolution has built into us an unbelievable desire to stay alive, which looked at from a modern perspective doesn't actually.

[89] actually make that much sense.

[90] So how should we make sense of suicide?

[91] If you personally have been affected by suicide, if you've lost a friend or a family member, it may be hard to even think about making sense of it.

[92] But at the risk of shining a light into a darkness that's usually left undisturbed, let's give it a try.

[93] The first thing we need is a virgil of some sort to guide us, someone who's been thinking about suicide and death for a long, long time.

[94] I was born in 1942.

[95] I lived in London for 22 years of my life.

[96] And for the first three years of my life, my mother told me we slept in an air raid shelter every night.

[97] David Lester is a professor of psychology at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, about 20 minutes from Atlantic City.

[98] The classic bomb that came over was called a buzz bomb, as long as it was buzzing that meant the engine was going.

[99] Once it stopped buzzing, it meant it would drop.

[100] and maybe hit your house.

[101] My mother says that even as a toddler, I was very concerned about them.

[102] And actually she said that I would hear them before the air raid warnings went off.

[103] And I would warn everybody, a buzz bomb, and I would rush into the air raid shelter.

[104] Ten years ago, I remembered this picture of this little toddler who's very worried about buzz bombs and hiding from them, probably without a mature concept of death, but obviously perhaps laying the seeds of some interest that manifested itself later in life.

[105] I've become a thanatologist in general and a suicidologist in particular.

[106] Lester is president -elect of the American Association of Suicidology and the eminence grieves of suicide studies.

[107] He's also alarmingly prolific.

[108] He's written more than 2 ,500 papers, notes, and books, about half of which are on suicide.

[109] So people expect him to know things that he says are not yet known.

[110] First of all, I'm expected to know the answers to questions, such as why people kill themselves.

[111] And myself and my friends, we often, when we're relaxing, admit that we really don't have a good idea of why people kill themselves.

[112] So what do we know about suicide?

[113] As you drill down into the numbers, one thing that strikes you are the massive disparities, the difference in suicide rates by gender, by race and age, by location.

[114] by method and many other variables.

[115] In the U .S., for instance, men are about four times as likely to kill themselves as women.

[116] Yes, about three to four, yes.

[117] About 56 % of men use a gun compared to just 30 % of women.

[118] Yes, men tend to use what we would call more active methods.

[119] That helps explain the gender gap since suicide by gun is usually successful.

[120] The primary method for women is technically called poisoning, usually some kind of overdose.

[121] The easy access to medications these days makes medications an important method.

[122] For men and women, being unmarried, widowed, or divorced increases the risk.

[123] The most typical American suicide is a man, 75 or older.

[124] But in that age bracket where a lot of people are dying from a lot of things, suicide isn't even a top 10 cause of death.

[125] For people from ages 25 to 34, suicide is the second leading.

[126] cause of death.

[127] And it's in the top five for all Americans from ages 15 to 54.

[128] In terms of timing, suicide peaks on Mondays.

[129] There is a blue Monday effect.

[130] But not, as many people suspect, around Christmas and New years.

[131] People do not kill themselves more on national holidays.

[132] There is a seasonal spike, but it's not in the long, dark days of winter.

[133] In fact, suicide rates peak in the spring.

[134] In fact, suicide rates peak in the spring.

[135] in most countries.

[136] It's as if you expect things are going to be better and when they turn out not to be better, you're more likely to be depressed in a suicidal way.

[137] David Lester is willing to entertain any theory to examine any pattern.

[138] Interestingly, he's found that suicide and homicide are often perfectly out of sync with each other.

[139] Homicide spikes not on Mondays, but on the weekends and on national holidays, and during the summer and winter.

[140] Homicide is also much more common in cities than in rural areas.

[141] For suicide, it's the opposite.

[142] The American suicide belt is comprised of about 10 western states.

[143] It's a sort of wide longitudinal swath running from Idaho and Montana down to Arizona and New Mexico.

[144] That's Matt Ray, a sociologist at Temple who studies, well, here, I want him to say it, not me. To sum up what I do in a word would be to say that I study losers.

[145] and I am interested in those who lose out on societal gains and out on opportunities.

[146] And it's another way of saying I'm interested in inequalities and stratification.

[147] Ray found what he is taken to calling the suicide belt.

[148] So, yes, the Intermountain West is a place that is disproportionately populated by middle -aged and aging white men, single, unattached, often unemployed, with access to guns.

[149] This may turn out to be a very powerful explanation and explain a lot of the variants that we observe.

[150] It's backed up by the fact that the one state that is on par with what we see in the suicide belt is Alaska.

[151] All right.

[152] So now you can get a picture of the American who's most likely to kill himself.

[153] An older white male who owns a gun, probably unmarried, maybe unemployed, living somewhere out west, probably in a rural area.

[154] Now, don't you want to know where aren't people killing themselves?

[155] Okay, so I'm standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

[156] Washington, D .C., our nation's capital, it's got the lowest suicide rate of any American city, just six per 100 ,000 people.

[157] We sent Vera Lynn Williams there to ask strangers a couple of strange questions.

[158] Do you know anyone that committed suicide?

[159] Personally, no. No. Do you know anyone that died of homicide?

[160] Yes.

[161] Yes, I do.

[162] I've got a son that's been murdered.

[163] I've got cousins that's been murdered.

[164] I've probably been to a hundred weeks in the past year.

[165] But I can't tell you one person that I know that's committed suicide.

[166] Now, as we told you earlier, there are more than twice as many suicides each year in the U .S. as there are homicides.

[167] There are just three places where the homicide rate is higher than the suicide rate.

[168] Louisiana, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

[169] It's not a coincidence that these are also places with large African -American populations.

[170] African -Americans are only about half as likely to kill themselves as whites.

[171] When it comes to murder, meanwhile, African -Americans are nearly six times more likely than whites to die.

[172] In our community, it's different.

[173] We have low rates of suicide and high rates of homicide.

[174] Why do you think that is?

[175] I think a lot of those homicides are probably suicides.

[176] Donna Barnes works at the Suicide Prevention Center at Howard University.

[177] It's very easy when you're stressed and you don't want to live anymore to put yourself in harm's way and somebody will take you out.

[178] And many times we will externalize our frustration, meaning that we're going to take it out on other people.

[179] And then you might have more folks maybe from the dominant culture who internalize your frustration and take it out on themselves.

[180] We have been socialized to believe that a lot of our disadvantages are based on our surroundings, racism, discrimination, and all of that.

[181] So it's really easy for us when we become frustrating and we look at what's going on around us to take it out on the environment and other people rather than ourselves.

[182] I asked David Lester if he had an explanation.

[183] for the black -white suicide gap.

[184] If you're white and in psychological pain, what can you blame it on?

[185] It's like other people are doing well, why aren't you doing well?

[186] Other people are happy, why aren't you happy?

[187] So maybe that in part accounts for the higher suicide rate in whites as compared to African Americans is because whites have fewer external causes to blame their misery for.

[188] I find this idea fascinating.

[189] As Lester is quick to point out, it is little more than an idea.

[190] It's pretty much impossible to prove.

[191] The fact is, we usually don't know much about what's going through a person's mind as they consider suicide.

[192] But when your life is miserable, when it seems beyond redemption or repair, where do you put the blame?

[193] You can blame other people.

[194] You can blame yourself.

[195] What if you could blame a song?

[196] Coming up, places where suicide is epidemic and how it gets that way.

[197] From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio.

[198] Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

[199] As we said earlier, there are about 36 ,500 suicides a year in the U .S. That's an average of 100 a day.

[200] Now, the vast, vast majority of them you never hear about.

[201] They don't make the news.

[202] That's not an accident.

[203] For decades, sociologists have been studying the media's impact on suicide rates.

[204] And some say they've proven that a widely publicized suicide, when described in a certain way, can lead to copycat suicides, a suicide contagion.

[205] Here's reporter Sean Cole.

[206] All right, so we're going to have to go all the way back to 1774 when this novel came out.

[207] The Sorrows of Young Verter by Johann Wolfgang von Gerter.

[208] May 4th, how happy I am that I am gone.

[209] For those of you who have never read it, I had never read it, the Sorrows of Young Verta was written mostly as a series of fictional letters by a young dilettante artist named Verta.

[210] He travels to the countryside, falls in love with a girl who's already engaged, despairs, and then borrows two pistols from her fiancé.

[211] They are loaded.

[212] The clock strikes 12.

[213] I say amen.

[214] Charlotta, Charlotta.

[215] Farewell.

[216] Farewell.

[217] Sorry to spoil the ending.

[218] Now, this book was really popular when it came out.

[219] Scholars talk about legions of men in Europe dressing like the character in blue swallow -tail coats and canary yellow pants.

[220] And while this next part is probably apocryful, the story goes that many people who read the book killed themselves by the same method and sometimes they even killed themselves with the book open to the page one.

[221] where he was described as killing himself.

[222] David Phillips is a sociology professor at UC San Diego and the father of imitative suicide research in America.

[223] In 1974, exactly 200 years after Verta was published, he released a seminal paper called The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide, substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Verta effect.

[224] My students and I were the first to provide modern, large -scale evidence that there is, in effect such a thing as copycat suicide, and we call this, I called it the Verta effect.

[225] Now, Verta is a work of fiction, but the Verta effect focuses more on true stories about suicide.

[226] The theory goes that whenever the media runs with a big sensational suicide story, especially if the victim is famous, you can expect a bump in suicide rates.

[227] Phillips and Company gathered 20 years of suicide data, 1948 to 1967, from the National Center for Health Statistics.

[228] Then they combed through back issues of three major newspapers and honed in on front page suicide reports.

[229] The actress Carol Landis, Dan Burroughs, who ran the KKK in New York, one of the most famous stars in Hollywood history.