The suicide machine
The suicide machine is on; the suicide machine is turning.
I know its sound, the sound of its engine: I grew up in a suicide city.
I was ten, and eleven, and twelve, in a place named Leominster where the suicide machine ran strong between 1984 and 1986. The dead — six we knew about — crashed themselves into buildings; they shot themselves with guns; they stepped in front of trains. Lately, it’s national names and faces, largely known and lesser known — Robin Williams; Chester Bennington; Chris Cornell; Avicii; Kate Spade; Anthony Bourdain — six on this list plus all the ones we do not know about.
Suicide rates in the US have risen since 1999, according to a recent CDC report. In twenty-five states, it’s increased 30% in that timeframe. In some places, such as North Dakota, a nearly 60% spike. In the study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked an increase in self-harm and suicides among both men and women, in all ethnic groups, in cities and in rural areas. Most of these cases, more than half, did not involve people with mental-health diagnoses.† Most of them happened at the end of the barrel of a gun.
At least three of the kids who killed themselves in Leominster, back in the mid-1980s, during the course of those two strange years, did so with guns. Shotguns in bedrooms — three in total went that way in two separate incidents. Another with a rifle in the driver’s seat, his car stopped in the middle of the road, his engine still running. Car crashes, deliberate. The first one involved two young people, dead at once from plowing into a loading dock. And then, at the end of the outbreak, one more: a young man traveled from his home in New Hampshire and drove himself into a Leominster wall, much like the first boys had done.
The Leominster suicides heard about each other, as Leominster heard about them, as the country did, as did listeners farther away. Before the Internet, before TMZ and People and online forums and all the digital conduits we’ve built, channels that now help keep our perpetual state of horror fresh, the word still traveled. The Leominster suicides heard about the hows and the whens and the wheres of what happened. Some gathered similar instruments. Some traveled to the places where the machine ran loud.
“We just don’t know why,” said Leominster High School’s principal, back then. The press came to town, and from all over, and it published stories: the meetings; the guidance counselors gathering in classrooms and cafeterias; the specialists pushing up glasses and suggesting that no one could say when or why it started, or if and when it would stop.
The why of it, however, wasn’t a mystery to us — not at ten, or eleven, or twelve, not to the older kids in high school either. They why of it was that it existed and we could see it happening to others, and sometimes we could envision it happening to ourselves.
The why of it had to do with a halo of mythos that spread over that city during those months, a narrative, a magnetism that pulsed from the center of the suicide machine. I’m not the first, or the most qualified, to suggest that a magnetism is at work in these moments and that the pull of recurrent suicides is a thing that spreads. Jennifer Michael Hecht, for example, considers the power of these stories, the attraction they create. Here’s what she had to say, updating an article in Vox on June 8, 2018, just after Anthony Bourdain’s death — yet another doorknob, yet another hanging.
Studies have shown, over and over, that the way we talk about suicide publicly can have astounding consequences. News of one person ending their own life can lead to more suicides, especially for people similar to the victim in age and gender. When they occur within professions, schools, ethnicities, or towns, experts call them suicide clusters, or speak of contagion, or social modeling. … When people in a vulnerable state are bombarded by reports of the specific details of a suicide, including the method, it triggers ideation and action.
Yes, the media is a far-reaching teller of stories, but the truth about the suicide machine is that it’s not a product of our media, and it’s not a product of our technology. The suicide machine relies upon storytellers, but it doesn’t care how the story is told. If we focus on the conduits, the platforms and channels that tell our stories farther and faster, these things we’ve built that allow us to talk to each other, to talk to ourselves, that redouble, triple, and quadruple the suicide machine’s reach, we miss the central truth. Papers, or broadcasts, or computers linked together and glowing in our palms — all the suicide machine needs is us.
*
We lived with the engine’s sound.
Some of us were initially too young to walk the high-school hallways, right when it was happening, but we were soon old enough, and when we did get to the ninth grade the stories about a certain stretch of corridor, stories about suicide graffiti somewhere under newer coats of paint, these still radiated from the suicide machine. Stranger tales, too, because inside the field of the suicide machine the effect is very much like a radiation: cells of the first waves of stories metastasize — the nature of early accounts morphs from tales of desperation to rumors of addiction, drugs, and finally (maybe ultimately) to the mythical … the old satanic whispers that the deepest parts of our imaginations never fully shake. The magnetism of the dead lingered, too, powerful enough that neighbors sent their kids to Catholic school rather than risk the public rolls, even several seasons after the suicides had stopped.
None of these tellings came from the Internet, and their power wasn’t strongest when reporters put the stories in the newspapers; their power was strongest when we gave them to each other in hushed and breathless moments, strongest as we told each other what had happened, as we lived though the deaths, embellishing the tellings, renewing the stories ourselves as we watched the extent and reach of each death grow.
At the heart of the suicide machine is a lodestone; it doesn’t pull on wires and circuits, it pulls on the parts of us that Karl Menninger wrote about, fifty years before Leominster and eighty years before our present cluster of deaths. In Man Against Himself, as Menninger put it in his book, his sustained consideration of self-destruction, we at times unconsciously want to do it, to launch ourselves headlong after some trailing glimpse of the dead that go before us — and, as Hecht more recently notes, we are quantifiably drawn to behaviors that make it happen. We are drawn to the stories and the places that hold the power of the suicide machine in their words and walls and streets.
It draws us toward its center, where the suicide machine creates as well as it destroys. It ends life and it casts life anew. It saddens the survivors, and it focuses their love for the lost. This is a dangerous equation, amounting to a kind of acceptance: “It’s a hard idea to test, but it’s possible that a cultural script may be developing among some segments of our population,” said Julie Phillips, a sociologist at Rutgers, in 2018, about the suicide cluster and the threat of a new kind of normal. All of us looking at each other, some of us deciding if we could do it. We see each other in these stories, and sometimes we see ourselves.
† The detail risks misleading: a suicidal person, even if lacking diagnoses, may well suffer from conditions of mental health.