The greatest misconception about suicide is that it’s predictable. We all have an idea of the kind of person who would do such a thing: depressed, sleep-strained, unmotivated, and disconnected. Yet this picture is entirely false; in many cases it’s the opposite of what we actually see. Here’s Kay Redfield Jamison, writing in her wonderful book Night Falls Fast:
Those patients with schizophrenia who are more intelligent and better educated, for example, who perform better on measures of abstract reasoning, and who demonstrate greater insight into the nature of their illness, are more likely to kill themselves [my emphasis]. Patients who do well socially and academically when young and who then are hit by devastating illnesses such as schizophrenia or manic-depression seem particularly vulnerable.
In other words: smart, sociable, over-achivers can be just as suicidal as withdrawn folks once illness hits – and often times illness isn’t given much expression. Jamison goes on to stress that many people fool their peers expertly, despite the darkest of feelings. Here she is again, in the book’s prologue, writing of her own ordeal:
Because the privacy of my nightmare had been of my own designing, no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I had been keeping. The gap between private experience and its public expression was absolute; my persuasiveness to others was unimaginably terrifying.
The point is, we are terrible at judging “the kind of person who would do such a thing” – especially parents when it comes to their own children (understandably so). We need to shed the mindset that we can grasp suicide, that we can see it coming. We need to open ourselves up to surprise. Suicide is not the province of the preternaturally depressed. It is, in a sense, all around us.
Douglas Faneuil is the founder of Living Proof Productions, a not-for-profit devoted to suicide prevention based in New York City. He also designs database solutions for companies throughout the Northeast.