My former boss and close friend Sharon, a suicide loss survivor, had treated Dylan’s death as a suicide right from the start. Since I couldn’t join a support group, she brought me stacks of books. For her, Dylan’s intent to die by suicide was a given, and she saw, long before I did, that it was an important piece in the overall puzzle.
Sharon’s presence and conversation were a solace, but the pile of books and pamphlets about suicide she brought me sat unread for months. Even if I could have concentrated long enough to read more than a sentence or two, I couldn’t yet focus on Dylan’s intention to hurt himself, but only why and how he had gone to the school to hurt others. My ignorance was huge, and so I could not imagine that Dylan had been depressed, or suicidal. Those words had nothing to do with us, or with our situation. Devon had told me that after dancing with her at the prom, Dylan had dropped a kiss on the top of her head. Was that the behavior of a depressed person?
After seeing the article in the break room, I started into the stack of books that Sharon had brought me, and what I found there surprised me a great deal. I believed myself to be an educated person, and a sensitive one. But, like many people, I had unthinkingly bought into many of the most prevalent (and damaging) myths about suicide. Opening those books was the first step in a lifetime’s work of educating myself and others—and of coming to terms, in a real way, with what had gone wrong in our own home and family.
Survivors often comment about how remote suicide seemed to them before they lost a loved one to it; the real question is why we persist in believing it’s rare, when it is really anything but. Someone in America dies by suicide every thirteen minutes—40,000 people a year. That is anything but insignificant.
According to the CDC, suicide is the third leading cause of death among people aged 10–14, and the second among people aged 15–34. So, besides accidents and homicide, nothing kills more young people in this country than suicide—not cancer, not sexually transmitted disease. A 2013 study looked at almost 6,500 teens. One in eight had contemplated suicide, and one in twenty-five had attempted it, yet only half of them were in treatment.
More than a million people in the United States attempt suicide each year—which means three attempts every minute. Many of them do so without raising any red flags, an indication that our standard assessment practices may be of limited use.
Even after more than ten years as a suicide prevention activist, I still find those numbers—and the general public’s ignorance about them—staggering. I taught Dylan, as I had taught his brother before him, to protect himself from lightning strikes, snakebites, and hypothermia. I taught him to floss, to wear sunscreen, and the importance of checking his blind spot twice. As he became a teenager, I talked as openly as I could about the dangers of drinking and drug use, and I educated him about safe and ethical sexual behavior. It never crossed my mind that the gravest danger Dylan faced would not come from an external source at all, but from within himself.
In my deepest self, I believed that those close to me were inoculated against suicide because I loved them, or because we had a good relationship, or because I was an astute, sensitive, caring person who could keep them safe. I was not alone in believing that suicide could only happen in other families, but I was wrong.
Almost everything I knew about suicide was wrong. I thought I knew what kinds of people tried to kill themselves, and why—they were selfish or too cowardly to face their problems, or captive to a passing impulse. I had bought into the cultural cliché that people who died by suicide were quitters—either too weak to handle the challenges of life, or attention-seeking, or trying to punish the people around them. These, I learned, are myths that are born out of thinking about suicide without really trying to inhabit the suicidal mind.
Suicidal thought is a symptom of illness, of something else gone wrong. Most suicides are not impulsive, spur-of-the-moment decisions at all. Instead, most of these deaths are the result of a person losing a long and painful battle against their own impaired thinking. A suicidal person is someone who is unable to tolerate their suffering any longer. Even if she does not really want to die, she knows death will end that suffering once and for all.
We know there is an incontrovertible correlation between suicide and brain illness. Studies from all over the world suggest that the overwhelming majority—from 90 to 95 percent—of people who die by suicide have a serious mental health disorder, most often depression or bipolar illness.
Many of the researchers I have talked to believe that (barring chronic illness–related end-of-life decisions), suicidality is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy mind. Dr. Victoria Arango is a clinical neurobiologist at Columbia who has dedicated her career to studying the biology of suicide. Her work has led her to believe that there exists a biological (and possibly genetic) vulnerability to suicide, without which a person is unlikely to make an attempt. She is currently working toward identifying specific changes in the brains of people who have died by suicide. “Suicide is a brain disease,” she told me.
Dr. Thomas Joiner, whose books are both meticulously researched as well as beautifully compassionate and personal, writes as both a psychologist and a survivor of his father’s suicide. His theory of suicide, a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles, has redefined the field.
He proposes that the desire to die by suicide arises when people live with two psychological states simultaneously over a period of time: thwarted belongingness (“I am alone”) and perceived burdensomeness (“The world would be better off without me”). Those people are at imminent risk when they take steps to override their own instinct for self-preservation, and therefore become capable of suicide (“I am not afraid to die”).
The desire for suicide, then, comes from the first two. The ability to go through with it comes from the third. Over the years, this insight would prove important to me.
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I finally started to read some of his journal pages. He was expressing depressed and suicidal thoughts a full 2 years before his death. I couldn’t believe it. We had all that time to help him and didn’t. I read his writings and cried and cried. This was like the suicide note we never got. A sad, heart-wrenching day.
—Journal entry, June 2001
From the day the tragedy occurred, we had been desperate for information about Dylan’s state of mind when he died. He had purposely left nothing behind, and law enforcement had emptied his room of anything of relevance, so there was little to study. After nearly two years, we had come to accept we would never know what he had experienced during the last months of his life. Then, in 2001, Kate Battan’s office called. The sheriff’s department had pages of Dylan’s writing in their possession, and offered to share copies with us.
These writings are always referred to as “journals,” but really these were scattered pages, compiled by the investigators after the fact. Most of them were taken from Dylan’s school notebooks, although some of the bits and pieces of paper he wrote on were old advertising flyers or other scraps, which he then tucked into various binders and books. The stack of photocopied pages was about half an inch thick. Some entries were a sentence long, while others went on for pages.