i thought about it long and hard and i am gonna do it … as i sit here crying not understanding why i am so sad
After long hard thought I have also decided to do it. I am beyond all the crying I just feel numb. Frozen. It’s better than feeling sad
when all is said and done the end has truly come
Leave all worthless and vile behind / amidst wide spread wings bright / I’ll give you comfort and delight, / Never a worry never a fright / Neath my wing you will grow and know all you once sought / come to me / My Dark Angel
Susan [not her real name] is still unconscious not responding. i will be back tomorrow to print any messages to her for her mom to read to her around noon … QT, her ex-husband
People in distress will reach out just about anywhere for help. The above messages, along with many others, began appearing in my email box, and in those of subscribers to an international suicide-prevention discussion group run from Australia on April 2, 1998. By April 4, “Susan” had reportedly taken an overdose of various medications. Her ex-husband continued to correspond with a second apparently suicidal woman, who eventually posted her phone number at his request. Another man requested that Susan’s mailing address be forwarded so that everyone could send her cards and gifts to let her know she was loved. Susan’s mother had read to Susan the emails of encouragement and sympathy she received. Susan had regained consciousness and was soon to be released from hospital, with expectations of forming relationships with the people who had wished her well, despite the fact that she had never met a single one of them in person.
Some subscribers to the discussion group—distress centre volunteers, social workers, psychiatrists, and others with an interest in the subject—began forwarding Susan the addresses of bona fide on-line crisis counselling services (which this group is not), as well as messages attempting to talk her out of her plans. Others, like “Dark Angel,” encouraged her. Still others in the group contacted the on-line manager, alerting him to the situation. He said he would “gently prod” anyone who was suicidal to the appropriate on-line support group, though it’s uncertain whether Susan herself would have felt a gentle prod while unconscious. A lively debate ensued, as everyone tried to figure out what did, didn’t, should have, or could have happened—and contemplated the brutal irony that a collection of people with a stated interest and in some cases expertise in suicide prevention manifestly failed to prevent an attempted suicide.
It was indeed a creepy feeling, checking my mailbox every day, and regarding the growing suspense of each new installment, like the latest soap opera episode. Who, exactly, is qualified or duty-bound to direct traffic on the information highway, when it looks like someone is about to crash and burn, and what are we to do when we ourselves end up witness or victim in the pileup?
This scenario isn’t unique: More and more, suicidal people are finding in the Internet a means of communicating their thoughts and feelings. Why not? There’s safety in knowing you are anonymous, though not so entirely that you couldn’t be found, in a pinch, if someone in cyberspace read your message and took the trouble to alert authorities who could track you down, which has happened. And anyone who sends out a suicidal message to strangers, even if he or she can’t admit it, is asking, and surely hoping, to be saved. “The threats may involve a bit of drama,” says my friend Hilde of the Samaritans. The Canadian Samaritans offer only phone—distress counselling, but the British branch of the organization has provided on-line support for people in crisis since 1995. “Suicidal people are feeling so worthless, so powerless, that they want to invoke a response from someone, somewhere. The Internet is an ideal vehicle to get that validation,” says Hilde.
Suicide prevention experts still believe that for most people in distress, face-to-face or phone communication is more useful: The connection made is closer for obvious reasons, and it is easier to gauge, through cues of body language or voice, the real severity of the person’s risk for suicide. But there may be a small group of people for whom communication via computer is actually more effective—possibly the only way they would communicate their feelings at all. Though the UK Samaritans still receive most of their cries for help over the phone—about 96 percent of their 4.4 million contacts per year—emails from the distressed are on the rise, with 7,300 contacts in 1997.
It’s just one issue up for discussion in the new and growing field of “psychotechnology,” which studies human behaviour in electronic environments. A recent U.S. conference explored such subjects as “the postmodern self,” “the fragmented personality,” and “on-line pathology.” In the case of the on-line suicide counselling and discussion, a host of moral and ethical implications arise, particularly when well-meaning but entirely amateur Net-surfers start meddling with genuine human desperation. If the case of Susan is anything to go by, we still don’t know what is going on.
“It’s a serious issue and I have a lot of reservations about it,” says Pat Harnish, director of the Toronto Distress Centre, which has yet to provide on-line counselling along with its existing anonymous phone services. But the national Kids Help Phone, based in Toronto, has added an on-line service to its phone counselling for young people, after a pilot test attracted a significant number of troubled boys who said they would never confide in anyone, except via the anonymity of email or a live, one-on-one chat-room session with a trained counsellor. “The Internet has potential for young people who are shy about reaching out,” says Ted Kaiser, manager of on-line services for Kids Help Phone. Apart from an incident in which some girls faked a suicide, which was quickly verified as false, Kaiser says the service is being used responsibly. “The nature of the medium, the fact that you have to sit there and type out a message, and that you get something in writing back, means that it has a calming effect,” says Kaiser, noting that that is particularly useful for impulsive teenagers.
People trained in assessing suicide risk among phone callers or electronic help-seekers are at least trying to be sensitive to the unique dynamics of on-line relationships, but now there’s a whole other troubling phenomenon on the Net: sites run by people who are in one way or another fascinated by suicide, ranging from the earnest, helpful, and informative to the puerile and repulsive, if not downright dangerous.
Infoseek’s search engine pointed me to 172, 657 pages containing the word “suicide.” At the 1997 conference of the American Association of Suicidology in Memphis, a Seattle psychiatrist who had studied the Internet estimated a global page total of more than 350,000, likely to keep rising as we hit the millennium, with less than a third devoted to actual suicide prevention. During one cruise, I easily accessed the melancholic musings of Freak, tree, and Burn Worm (not their real names, I suspect), who had made their electronic way, along with dozens of suffering strangers, to the Emotional Repository of Haveaheart’s Depression and Suicide Home Page. “My mind is lathered with numerous thoughts” was a typical opener to lengthy discussions of painful childhood memories, relationship breakups, insomnia, ineffective therapists and drugs, and the generally cruel state of the world sensitive souls are forced to inhabit—and often consider leaving by way of suicide. Together, they sank into pits and abysses, listened to the silence scream, brooded in the darkness, and offered each other cyber-hugs, along with poems and song lyrics that were by turns morbidly purple, irritatingly self-indulgent, predictably cynical, and touchingly confused and yearning. Under the liberating cloak of anonymity, Freak, tree, and Burn Worm appeared to take comfort from connecting with others of their gloomy ilk, by way of their distantly scattered computer screens.
Eavesdropping as a journalist on the cyber-conversations of the depressed made me feel a bit like a waitress in a rowdy bar at closing time—the patrons are having a whale of a time, but to a sober outside observer who’s spent several hours in their company, they seem so tedious, at times pathetic, if only they knew. Empathy I may have, but couldn’t we all just go home and get some sleep?
Thousands of web pages appeal to people interested in the latest speculations about the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Bre-X’s Michael de Guzman, and the Heaven’s Gate cult members. And many pages further signal the morbid state of pop-cult obsessions, with the self-promotions of musical groups, mostly Goth and industrial, that have discovered a handy formula: Pick a word, any word, slap “suicide” in front of it and voila! Your band has a name. Long live the Suicide Kings, Suicide Commando, Suicide Snowman, Suicide Algebra, and Suicide by Apnea.
Champions of questionable humour include the Cool Ways to Kill Yourself site: “Don’t be boring and just take sleeping pills—go out with style and flare!” Suggested debonair deaths for don’t-wannabes include falling through chain saws, swallowing Christmas ornaments, chopping your own head off while standing next to a world leader, and death by Seinfeld, which involves having a strong, burly friend beat you to death with Jerry Seinfeld—it sounds more like assisted suicide to me.
It’s difficult to know what order of solemnity, faux or otherwise, is intended by alt.suicide.holiday, and difficult to confirm the reported suicide of Fang and others who have left what appear to be suicide notes on the website. You enter by clicking between two human skull icons, and only after reading and agreeing to heed a rather prickly warning: “These pages deal with serious topics of a mature nature. Some users may find the content morally or ethically unpleasant. If you think you are one of these people, please do not proceed further. If you do proceed, you do so by your own choice and agree not to raise any complaints with either the author of these Web pages, or the authors of the work contained here, or the site on which they are stored.” The warning is there, presumably, because well-intentioned people have indeed complained about alt.suicide.holiday’s content—anything and everything you ever wanted to know about suicide, and notably, chat among what appear to be genuinely suicidal people who do not wish to be talked out of their plans. The site has garnered criticism for publishing a comprehensive suicide Methods File. Here, you can discover the pros and cons of death by way of a range of drugs, from insulin to digitalis, and musings on the merits of dozens of other checkout scenarios. Though it is illegal in most countries to provide and assist a suicidal individual with the actual physical means to kill themselves, publicly disseminating general information of this kind is not. That’s why Final Exit can be an international bestseller, and why sites like a.s.h. can exist with impunity.
That anyone would be obsessed enough with this subject to compile such a detailed and lengthy list may be disturbing, but upon examination, it appears meant to be mostly humorous, in an aggressive, black, and definitely-not-for-everyone way. There is, for instance, a graphic entry for disembowelment, billed as “trendy for insane martial arts fanatics and gay Japanese poets called Mishima.” Despite the juvenile quality of much that appears on alt.suicide.holiday, it does seem to take its mandate as a suicide information source seriously, offering links to support groups for depression and other psychiatric disorders, to on-line counselling provided by the British Samaritans (jo@samaritans.org), and even to sites containing the scholarly musings on suicide and immortality of philosopher David Hume. Hard to say who exactly this is all aimed at, besides angst-ridden undergraduates who have been exposed to too much poetry by Sylvia Plath. I tried several times to access a Personality Test that promised to tell me how I measured up to other a.s.h. visitors, but the site was perpetually inactive. The wisdom of the alt.suicide.holiday “author” Thomas B. Jones II also shows up as a reverential quote on a Goth site called Dance to the Sound of a Suicide: “When you hate daylight, when you hate anything, you will develop a sort of ambiguity about life and you get reckless in your habits. You overeat. You take dope. You fall in love with a bad person. You declare war against society.” I was happy enough to exit alt.suicide.holiday, with its final, foreboding image of a sickle-wielding grim reaper, and the turgidly dispensed advice: Be Not Afraid of What Comes Naturally.
While I may have questioned my own journalistic ethics in peeping and reporting on the intensely personal conversations of various support groups (forgiving myself by reasoning that anyone who posts a message must be aware that they are going public on a global scale), I had to seriously review my membership status as a decent human being when I found myself staring at DeathNews—”Takes You Where Living Can’t!” It’s a “forum on death culture, including downloadable video capture of executions, suicides, mutilations, atrocities, war crimes and other scenes.” I didn’t make it beyond the preview page, where the two photographic images served up as teasers—a penis being pierced, and what looked like a body with not much of its head still intact—no doubt pale in comparison to the “new, improved Deathloops” I might have sampled.
But don’t confuse DeathNews with the ultra-respectable DeathNet, the on-line voice of the Right To Die movement, and winner of numerous awards, including the Canadian Internet Directory’s Top Web Site of 1996. The site almost cheerfully espouses “death with dignity” and “self-deliverance.” In lovely Deco script, The Art & Science of Suicide offers “the latest how-to literature of suicide.” Where the a.s.h. Methods File is predominantly frivolous, this one is deadly serious. As it’s all “for mature adults only,” you must click verification that you are over the age of twenty-one. I don’t know how they would tell the difference between my forty-year-old touch and that of a curious teenager. And since the vast majority of people who commit suicide are well over twenty-one, this seems a gratuitous nod to public responsibility. If this site had audio, it would be New Age synthesizers and harps, or Hooked On Classics Pachabel covers. But for me, no amount of lulling, breathy-voiced aura, tasteful typeface, and mainstream approval can pretty up the consumerist mentality at the heart of all this death talk. What I really want to know is: will I receive an attractive tote bag if I make a purchase at the Life’s End Bookstore advertised here?
Still, it’s not hard to see why some would question whether any of this is dangerous, after several Net-related suicides. One California teen committed suicide by lying down on railroad tracks, in accordance with information on “Cool Ways to Kill Yourself.” The site was bookmarked on his computer, and the downloaded information in his knapsack. In the months after the Heaven’s Gate deaths, San Diego distress centres documented one suicide that appeared to be a copycat; there has also been a case of a suicide pact carried out in Canada between a man from Ohio and one from Ontario who met and made their plans via email. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an on-line civil liberties group, has criticised the media’s simplistic fuelling of fears about the Internet around such cases, taking a classic democratic freedom-of-speech stance, and pointing out that the Internet, in and of itself, does not possess evil powers of mind control, and therefore could not “cause” a suicide. But the issue of who or what is in control, and the ramifications of the Internet for human communication, go deeper and have far more subtle impacts than that position addresses.
It’s heartwarming to hear stories of small acts of heroism, like that of the man who alerted police after reading a woman’s on-line posting that she’d just taken a lethal dose of pills. And if depressed people who find it difficult to confide in others find comfort and understanding via their computers, could this be a bad thing? In a word, yes. Of course, no one can stop suicidal people from interacting with one another on the Internet or anywhere else, though the benefits of on-line peer support may on occasion be outweighed by the downside of fuelling each other in the tunnel vision that typically characterizes the suicidal state. Issues of addiction and dependancy also come into play. A person who already feels painfully isolated may only be driven further inward by the handy keyboard and its at times questionable electronic solace. And in the case of someone other than a trained counsellor in a controlled setting, there’s something both naive and grandiose about seeking to “help” a suicidal person by getting to know them on-line and even meeting them in person. The case of Susan illustrates this problem. It goes against every tenet of modern distress counselling, which always maintains anonymity, and offers help from people who know what actually constitutes help. “If we were to trace calls on everyone who expressed suicidal ideation, people would very quickly stop calling us,” points out Hilde, of the Samaritan phone services. She suggests the same is true for people using the Internet. “Most people still want to retain the power to decide. They choose this anonymous form of disclosure because there are no strings attached and no interference.”
The Net may have saved lives, but it can also deceive, cheapen, and commodify. There were certain websites that I could not enter without having to crack out my VISA card. As we make judgments, we must also beware hypocrisy. Tasteful DeathNet receives mainstream design awards, while the more crudely executed alt.suicide.holiday is easily scorned. Yet some of the lethal recipes each site makes available are the same, and like the disturbing DeathNews, DeathNet wants my VISA number, adding new meaning to the expression “shop till you drop.”
The Net draws people together around their obsessions or ailments, but when the subject is as profound and complex as suicide, it may have serious drawbacks in addressing them. Experts advise that if in the course of your Internet wanderings you stumble upon someone you believe to be suicidal, it’s wise to compassionately direct him or her to seek help from trained people, on- and off-line—don’t try to play God. “We can’t save the world. We can’t save anybody,” says Hilde philosophically. “All we can do is help someone save themselves.”
It’s good advice, and I thought about it as I explored the Internet myself. Along with joining an on-line discussion of suicide prevention, I also subscribed to an on-line suicide-survivor support group. I never made my presence known by formally introducing myself, though a single electronic message would have ended up in the mailboxes of however many members there were at the time scattered throughout the English-speaking world. Instead I simply read the mail that landed in my chunk of cyberspace. It amounted mostly to a cosy conversation among a few veteran members, and the tentative words of the newly bereaved looking for somewhere to turn in their confusion and, in some cases, desperation. It was not uncommon to open my email box each day and find messages like this: “Hi, my name is Mary Doe. Two months ago, my husband shot himself, and since then, my life has been a nightmare. I don’t know what to do, no one seems to understand, and so I thought I would try this group.” In response would come a cluster of sincere messages of support. I only ever responded once to an individual, and even then, I opted to maintain privacy and sent my response to her plea, which resonated deeply with my own experience, to her email address only. I have no idea whether she received it, as I never got an answer. I suspect my message was one of many.
Sometimes new voices would join in, and confess that they had been lurking on-line for months, reading messages but not participating, until someone wrote something that moved them to finally take the plunge and reveal their presence. I can only assume there were also others out there who preferred to remain unseen, gaining something in the way of insight or comfort from words aimed at others yet applicable to them. Evidently, I was not the only one who was reluctant to go public in this forum. Why the reticence?
For me, it stemmed partly from a vague discomfort with the assumption of virtual, instant intimacy among strangers. Was this not potentially overwhelming, or purely voyeuristic? How could you not want to respond helpfully to all those people with their pain bursting forth on your screen, yet how could any one person adequately do so? What level of emotional responsibility do people assume when they take it upon themselves to reach out and randomly touch someone in cyberspace?
The technology may be new, but the dilemma it poses for human interaction is ancient. The words we use to describe ourselves and our experiences are not literally us, but it seems easy to forget that when the electronic tools of would-be communion are so readily at hand. Some people express themselves in writing better than others—what you see on the screen is not necessarily what you’d get in person, and someone who is not adept at written communication may be at a disadvantage, or even unwittingly destructive, in the context of computerized communication. Can all that you might intuit from taking in a person’s physical presence—from hearing a voice or looking someone in the eye—really be divined through an accumulated cluster of typed words? If the answer is no, and I believe it is, then just how useful is this electronic emotional stroking? As I also learned the hardest way, even in a live, intimate, flesh-and-blood relationship, it is difficult enough to understand another person’s inner life, to know his truth, much as we might wish we could, or imagine we do.
Most of the on-line participants probably had the capacity to place their activity in perspective. There was some genuine information-sharing, some giving and receiving of support that didn’t seem out of proportion. Yet the fact that so many flock to their computer keyboards in search of connection says something rather sad about the isolating tendencies of the real world. If grief were more acceptable to express, if more people knew how to respond to and allow for it as a matter of course, the bereaved would not feel so driven to marginalize themselves, risking distortion and prolongation of their sorrow.
For beyond these issues, my hesitation to participate, and my decision after a couple of months to “unsubscribe” from the group, also had to do with a waning sense of identification, three years after my own tragic loss, with these unfortunate people in the thick of fresh grief. I was beginning to establish boundaries between myself and the intensity of early bereavement—something I had to do, yet always recognized was a delicate balancing act. One woman in the on-line group diligently and publicly welcomed each newcomer, prefacing every message with an account of her loss, which had occurred more than a decade earlier. Reading this repetitive message, I confess to wondering why she didn’t send her stock response privately to each novitiate sufferer, sparing others its almost daily reappearance in their emailboxes. I became uneasy with the way this individual so routinely bustled to the rescue, the rote manner with which she trotted out her mourner’s credentials. What personal satisfaction did she derive from this? Wounded healers don’t like to admit it, but there are some gains to be had in giving. Acknowledging these boosts to one’s self-worth, the void of a person’s unexamined inner conflicts these activities can fill, is more honest than imagining that any mortal can or should be a nonstop pouring faucet of saintly beneficence. Anyone who denies it’s draining to open yourself to multiple griefs is delusional, or has hardened to a point that is anything but saintly, and probably unhelpful.
Altruism can indeed mask narcissism. It’s one thing to offer genuine empathy, and to do so from a position of strength that you have reached in resolving your own grief to the best of your capacities. Then, you have something to share beyond sorrow. It’s quite another to hide out in the company of the bereaved, searching their faces, or email messages, solely for mirror reflections of your own. If listening to another person express grief becomes merely a jumping-off point for talking about yours (“Oh, yes, I know what you mean. It’s just like when I …”), then you are in no position to truly help someone, and the only mirror you should be looking into for the time being is your own. Karen Letofsky has had to let go of a few volunteers over the years, whose idea of helping others was telling them what to do or feel, and who in some cases badgered either the survivors they were supposed to counsel, or their fellow volunteers.
I had to ask, as I contemplated this daily flow of suicide-survivor cyber-chat, is there not a danger, in the support group that never ends, of becoming addicted to the vicarious thrill of breaking another’s fall, or to the sensation of falling and being caught? Why close the wounds when it feels so good, and is so easy, to keep them open? At what point do the tools of support turn into the crutches of collectively nurtured long-term disability? These issues apply far beyond on-line support groups, and need to be seriously addressed by the survivor movement and those in the field of bereavement counselling.
Surviving a tragic experience may mark and change you, sometimes profoundly, but is it not limiting to make it a predominant badge of identity? It’s taken a long time to get here, but I now think of my own survivor state in the same way I view my greying hair, or my right elbow, weakened when I dislocated it in a fall ten years ago—simply realities to be lived with, alterations, rather than complete transformations, in the self I was before these changes or events occurred. Just the way it is. I’ve been known to do something about the hair; weight training has strengthened the elbow; much soul searching, and simple time, have made Daniel’s suicide recede, finally, to a less central position in my life.
There is one other thing I now know. Beyond the support groups, on- or off-line, beyond the grief counselling and psychotherapy, the hand-holding, the sharing of tears and mutual mining of our experiences, beyond the conferences and workshops, beyond the reading and writing of any number of articles and books, there is for every mourner a dimension of grief that is inviolably private, mysterious, unique as a fingerprint, literally beyond words. This is what I remind others, and myself, when I’m asked, do I not feel exposed, writing a book like this? (The honest answer is yes, sometimes.) We can gather strength by standing together to “name our brokenness,” as Norma Beattie instinctively knew, but it is in moments of silence and solitude that the essence of our loss is most powerfully revealed. In facing grief, as with death itself, there comes a point when each one of us must inexorably go it alone. If we have been well and truly supported, we will have the strength to endure it.
And in doing so, become more than survivors.