End of story

He wasn't gay, but after he broke up with his girlfriend he dated me for four months. Then he shot himself.

By Michael Taeckens

Topics:Suicide

I visited his studio apartment the morning after. The smell was horrible. I guessed maybe 12 hours had passed, I wasn’t quite sure. A large piece of plywood was installed in place of his door because the firemen had kicked it down. There was an inch of space between the top of the plywood and the door frame. I asked an Asian college student across the hall if I could borrow a chair. He handed me a metal folding one without looking at me.

Peering into his room, I saw that everything had already been cleared out — his twin bed, minifridge, potted plants. In their place was a black box, right there in the middle of the floor — making a soft whooshing sound. Was it sucking out all the smoke? The scent of human blood? What was it trying to take away?

There was a bright white outline along the left wall, an enormous shape that was thick at the bottom and tapered into spatters at the top, a waterfall in reverse. This is where the blood had been bleached out. I stepped down from the chair, trying to catch my breath. The Asian student was standing behind me.

“Pretty weird, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t tell him that he’d been my boyfriend, that I had slept in that room for months.

“Fucking idiot. He could have killed everyone in the building.”

“Yeah, I know.” I smiled at him. I didn’t know what else to do. I felt like apologizing. I felt like punching him in the face.

“His name was Tim,” I said, then turned and walked out of the building.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

The campus newspaper headline read, “Gay Student Commits Suicide.” The article went on to describe how Tim set his apartment on fire and shot himself in the head. There was no mention of the pills he had swallowed.

Tim had come out at a gay pride rally at our Iowa City, Iowa, campus earlier that year. The only problem was, Tim wasn’t gay, not really. I was a four-month detour from his heterosexuality. He was grief-stricken over the breakup with his girlfriend of eight years and was desperately searching for a companion. I was that companion, a warm and consoling presence, introduced to him by his sister, Jen.

Tim was a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy-next-door type, a free spirit willing to try anything. Jen encouraged him to go out with me. After our first date he was insanely happy that we had hit it off. I was wary at first, but also punch-drunk at the thought of this handsome “straight” man dating me.

Within days we were spending all of our time together, doing all the things couples do: movies, restaurants, bars, cafes. But after a couple of months things started going awry. We had sex less and less. Tim admitted that maybe he wasn’t gay. He missed his girlfriend and couldn’t stop thinking about her. And yet, he didn’t want us to break up.

It was the middle of winter, snow and ice all over the city. We both sank into deep depressions. We continued seeing each other, but were hardly talking. Most of our time was spent drinking, smoking and sleeping in each other’s arms. Neither one of us wanted to be alone. One day I told him I couldn’t take it anymore, that I couldn’t date someone who didn’t identify as gay. He said he understood. We parted ways with the promise that we’d remain friends.

I lost hope in everything. I hated school, the city I lived in, my body, my face. I pushed myself to buy a bottle of sleeping pills. Just go buy them and see what happens, I told myself. One morning I did it: I had the bottle in my bedroom. I was very still and calm, determined to shove all of these white pills inside my body. Within a few minutes I gulped down all 90 of them, handfuls at a time. I lay back on my bed and felt as if I really accomplished something. It seemed that everything was going to be taken care of. I started dozing off. But then a jolt of fear shot through my body. Is this what I really wanted to do?

I wimped out. At the hospital I was given a charcoal mixture that made me throw up the pills, after which I passed out. When I awoke I was in intensive care, talking constantly and incoherently even when nobody was at my bedside. I shat the liquidy charcoal mixture all over myself. A nurse had to clean me up and change my bedsheets.

There was a brief stay at a mental hospital. I knew one of the orderlies from a local gay bar and was ashamed to be seen by him. I kept to myself most of the time, hanging out in my room and in the smoking lounge. My roommate was an 80-year-old farmer who had attempted suicide. He would wake up in the middle of the night and walk around the room talking to his dead wife. After a few days I told the psychiatrist that I was aware of the mistake I had made, that I didn’t really want to kill myself, and that I just wanted to be at home, in St. Louis, with my family. To my surprise, he approved my discharge. My parents picked me up the next day.

At home I thought of nothing but Tim. How could I tell him what I’d done? Would he be mad at me? Would he ever talk to me again? We had talked only once since the breakup, a tense and forced conversation that left me feeling worse than before.

A few nights after I arrived home I decided to call him, but his phone was constantly busy. I knew he had call waiting. Had he taken the phone off the hook? I called Jen. Busy. I called his mother. Busy. I called Jen’s girlfriend. Busy.

It was only when I called Wendy, my best friend, that I got through to somebody. She said she was on the other line and would call me back the next day. This wasn’t like her — she always called me back right away. I could hear a tremble in her voice. For some reason the thought occurred to me that maybe she had been raped. I was confused and concerned, my heart was beating rapidly.

“What’s going on?” I said. “Are you OK?”

“I’ll just call you back tomorrow.”

It all seemed so obvious, right there in front of my face. But I couldn’t piece it together. “Look, you’re really scaring me. I need to know what’s going on.” I heard her take a deep breath. “Something terrible has happened.” Pause. “Tim committed suicide.”

My friends drove me from St. Louis to Iowa City. We left at 2 a.m. When we arrived in town at 7 a.m. I asked them if we could stop by Tim’s apartment. As they waited in the car I walked up to his place on the second floor, one step at a time, slowly and methodically, wondering if all of this was really happening.

Later that day, Jen called the detective and asked where all of Tim’s stuff had been taken. Everything had been thrown in a dumpster at the “cleaners,” a business that specialized in scrubbing up the messes bodies make. We looked up the address in the phone book and drove there, chain-smoking the entire way.

There was only one dumpster. We climbed into it and started opening the trash bags on top. Tim’s clothes were coming into focus — singed, black, wet, covered in blood. I rifled through another bag and found a book I had loaned him. “James and the Giant Peach.” The cover was sooty but the book looked fine otherwise. I picked it up and felt my fingers sink into something gooey. The back of the book was soaked in blood and brain matter. There was a bookmark inside. I cracked the book open to that page and saw a picture of James and his insect friends sailing over the ocean atop a giant peach.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Sandy, Tim’s mother, invites me to join his family for a private visitation at the funeral home a block away from her house. I have passed this funeral home — a modest one-story, brick affair with shrubs in front — a million times without giving it a second thought. It’s right next door to an adult bookstore I used to visit.

Sandy has requested that the morticians not embalm Tim. The wake and funeral will be closed casket and this is my last chance to see him, my only chance to say goodbye. I’m surprised we’re allowed to see him at all. What will his body look like? Will there be signs of decay? What did they do to his face? I’m unsure of how I will react, afraid of breaking down in front of others. I prefer my grief to be private. But I can’t pass up this opportunity to say farewell, to stare wide-eyed at death.

We all walk to the funeral home together — Sandy; her husband, Mark; Jen; Jen’s 8-year-old daughter, Ali; and me. It only takes three minutes to get there. The funeral director does his best to remain neutral, shepherding us to the visitation room. The room is medium-size and sterile, neat rows of metal folding chairs, a purple curtain against the back wall. An anonymous room that could serve as a makeshift stage for a local talent show. There is one religious icon: a porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary situated among some potted ferns. I hear the low sound of something like a jet in the distance. It’s the low whir of air conditioning, or a machine that puffs out white noise to create a soothing ambience. The same sound as that black box in Tim’s apartment.

I steal a glance at his body on the table — a pressed sheet neatly covering him up to his shoulders — and quickly look away. I feel like the awkward outsider who’s been invited to a family Christmas dinner. I shouldn’t be here. I walk out of the room, deferring first visitation rights to his immediate family members. I walk around the foyer, sweaty palms in pockets, hearing muffled sounds of crying and cooing words, questions from Ali, who doesn’t quite understand what’s going on. Jen comes to check on me and we step out for a cigarette. My hands are shaking. What do you say at a time like this? I don’t say anything. Sandy steps outside and asks me if I want to go in. Yes and no. Yes.

Now the room feels different. The air has a different charge, a hush of expectation. This is it, I think. This is what I’ve been invited to do. I stand in the aisle between the folding chairs: I can see his face is disfigured. I’m crying silently. I’m not the type to put my palms over my face when crying, but I put my palms over my face. The tears are strange, warm, gushing. I have to keep wiping them away, clearing the snot from my nose.

His face is twice its normal size. A crooked row of black X’s runs from ear to ear, his eyes are stitched shut. One eye is raised inches above the other, a bulbous mass of damaged cartilage and vessels and bones propping it up. There are splotches of red, bruised spots, flaps of skin. The left side of his mouth is stretched and split. The hair is matted and clumped in back. His head had split wide open and the mortician had tried to put it back together again. This is the best he could do. I think of Humpty Dumpty. I think of Frankenstein.

Oh, Tim.

His flesh is still pliable, lukewarm. I delicately pick up his arm, run my fingers over his arm hair, lift his fingers up to my face. I pull the sheet back, all the way past his feet. He is completely naked. His body has been washed and has a soft glow. It is perfect. I have the urge to lie on top of him, run my fingers through the hair on his chest and legs, kiss his ruined lips, pretend we are just sleeping.

I want to stay here for the rest of the night, looking at his body. (How much longer will he be a body?) I tightly clasp his hand, as if I’m holding him up from over a cliff. My voice surprises me, a low murmur coming out like a dark thing from a cave: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.

I look over his body, looking more intently than I ever have in my life. His blond hair, his tan skin, his collarbones forming their slight V. The dark hair on his chest fanned out in a symmetrical way, his ribs showing a faint trace of their arc. The hair on his stomach furry like a nest. His legs are muscular, athletic, sexy, his feet large and polished, his toes perfectly proportioned. The smooth hair on his arms and legs is dark, too, his knees and elbows youthful and unscarred. His fingers are long and tapered, three sections of horizontal notches on each one, whorls on his fingertips, unique coded markings all their own.

I put his fingers in my mouth, bite softly down on them. I run his palm over my face, wiping away my tears, kissing the back of his hand. I lean down and press my lips against his swollen cheek. I pull the sheet back over his body and hold him for a long time, just the two of us in the room. I don’t know if this is how to say goodbye, whispering in his damaged ear.

: Michael Taeckens his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has contributed to the Advocate, Heeb, and OUT Magazine. He lives and works in Chapel Hill, NC. More Michael Taeckens

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The depressing toll of the Great Recession

Mental health problems mount nationwide while budgets for treatment and care are shrinking

By Rob Waters

Down and out (Credit: AP/Rick Bowmer)

Topics:Politics of Mental Illness, Great Recession, Suicide

In late 2009, as the unemployment rate in San Joaquin County, California, reached 18 percent and one in twelve homes were being foreclosed, two high school students in the town of Ripon, population 15,000, committed suicide within two months of each other. Over the next eighteen months, sixteen more teenagers around the county took their own lives, a not-uncommon occurrence that public health researchers refer to as “suicide contagion.”

Years of declining budgets had cut the number of counselors, nurses and psychologists in county schools, impairing the ability of individual districts to handle the needs of grieving students, parents and communities on their own. So school officials in cities like Ripon, Stockton, Lodi and Linden turned to each other for help.

The districts made use of a mutual aid pact they’d set up, like those employed by firefighters and police from the same region. On the morning after each death, school nurses and counselors trained in suicide response, along with a team of therapists from Valley Community Counseling, a local mental health agency, descended on the school the student had attended. They spent days, sometimes weeks, meeting with pupils and parents, focusing on kids who knew the victims or seemed at particular risk.

The spirit of cooperation helped the team fashion an effective crisis response and ease the pain of some survivors, said David Love, executive director of Valley Community Counseling. But, by definition, it came too late, he said. “We’re doing everything we can to partner and develop these mutual aid plans,’’ Love said. “But we’re still band-aiding. When you’re doing crisis work, you’re at the back end. The tragedy is that we don’t have the resources early in the process.”

As the U.S. economy struggles to pull out of the worst funk since the 1930s, public services for the country’s most vulnerable populations—children, the elderly, the mentally ill—are being cut or disappearing at a time when the need for them is greater than ever. Faced with gaping deficits, states have slashed $1.6 billion from mental health programs over the past four years, according to a report by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The pain is being felt everywhere.

• Illinois has slashed $187 million from its mental health budget and plans to close three of nine psychiatric hospitals. A budget passed in November by the Chicago City Council will close half the city’s 12 mental health clinics.

• In Detroit, the county mental health program has lost $30 million in state funding over the past three years, forcing numerous cuts to the agencies it supports. Detroit Central City Community Mental Health, which provides outpatient treatment and reentry programs for people leaving jails and psychiatric hospitals, lost a quarter of its funding and cut its staff by a third. Charlotte House, a transitional housing program for people with psychiatric disorders discharged from the county hospital, closed its doors.

• California has cut mental health funding by $765 million, or 21 percent, since 2009. In Oakland, the number of children waiting to see a counselor at West Coast Children’s Center, a community mental health clinic, has swollen to 50. “It’s not a good feeling that there are kids on a waiting list and you can’t hire more clinicians,” said Stacey Katz, the center’s director. “It stresses everybody out. How do we triage? How do we decide who needs services the most without violating our mission that kids should have mental health services when they need it?”

Meanwhile, homelessness, domestic violence, and child abuse are rising. Nationally, nearly 1 million schoolchildren were homeless in the 2009-2010 school year, a 38 percent increase in four years, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

University of Pittsburgh researchers reviewing hospital records from parts of Washington, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky found that the rate of children younger than five brought to emergency rooms with abusive head trauma—brain injuries from being shaken or struck— was 65 percent higher during the 19 months of official economic recession that began in December 2007 than in the previous four years. Sixteen percent of the children died.

“Families are losing their jobs, they’re losing their housing, they’re on the street,’’ said Amy Weiss, director of Parents Place, a San Francisco program that offers counseling and support services to children and families. “We’re seeing more domestic violence, more complicated cases, more poverty. Our caseloads are bigger because there are fewer people and resources. We’re trying to do more with less.”

The economic misery that has swept the nation has savaged places like San Joaquin County, a place of long-standing poverty, large numbers of children and large tracts of homes purchased for little money down by people with scant savings and insecure jobs. To that mix, add years of declining investment in schools and social services.

The 900 students at Ripon High, where the suicide cluster started, have just two guidance counselors to help them. There was a third but the district laid her off before the start of the 2009-2010 school year after losing $6 million in state funding over three years. The cutback hinders the remaining counselors’ ability to address both mental health and academic needs, said Superintendent Louise Johnson.

Ripon High’s student-counselor ratio is better than the California average of one counselor for every 810 students—the second worst of any state. Neighboring Manteca Unified School District has no counselors in its elementary schools and has gone from four counselors at each of its seven high schools to two, said Caroline Thibodeau, the district’s director of health services. The number of school administrators and nurses has also declined, Thibodeau said.

While the number of adults attending to students has been falling, students needs keep rising. The number of homeless children in Manteca has more than doubled in the past five years to 700, Thibodeau said. Rates of alcoholism, drug abuse and child abuse are up, putting families under enormous stress, said Love. And over the past three years, he and his colleagues at Valley Community Counseling treated 60 percent more children who’d been exposed to domestic violence and 50 percent more whose parents were substance abusers.

“It’s a big circle,” he said. “Family stress, community stress, student stress equals higher levels of depression and related issues among caretakers and children. With school cuts, counselor cuts and classroom sizes going up, the schools are seeing more mental health issues and have fewer resources. We’re getting more kids sent to us with clinical depression, PTSD or behavioral acting-out issues. And all this increases the possibility of suicide.”

Cities across the country are grappling with the same issues. In St. Louis, the number of homeless children in the city’s public schools has almost doubled in the past three years to 3,000. Until a few months ago, Elizabeth Snowden, 17, was one of them.

Elizabeth (her middle name) spent her high school years coping with headaches, fear and anxiety as she slept on streets and in overcrowded shelters, searching for quiet places to do homework and escape the stress that has engulfed her family of six since her mother Audrey lost her customer-service job at a St. Louis department four years ago.

“The stress affected me at school emotionally and physically,” she says. “I had a headache every day. I’d argue with my sisters and brothers and take everything out on them. It was tough keeping my grades up. I’d get them up, then fall back down and then I’d get stressed out. I got to the point I couldn’t take it any more.”

Audrey (who asked that her last name be withheld) moved the family to Mississippi, where a promised job evaporated in a region reeling from two hurricanes. When the family returned to St. Louis, they couldn’t regain their housing subsidy and had no money to rent a home. They ended up on the street.

Elizabeth and Audrey have been helped enormously by a social worker whose know their pain firsthand. Deidra Thomas-Murray, now director of homeless services for the St. Louis schools, spent years in her native New Orleans working in schools and with juvenile offenders, then became a refugee after Hurricane Katrina destroyed her home. She and her five daughters and foster daughters spent two weeks sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house in Baton Rouge, then went to Missouri, drawn by a relative’s offer of help. For a while, she said, five families crowded into a two-bedroom apartment while Thomas-Murray collected food stamps and hunted for work.

She found a job as a drug counselor, then a family therapist, and in 2006 was hired as a school social worker. Since 2009 she has coordinated the program for homeless students, networking constantly to solicit donations of clothing and sleeping bags for families. Her main focus: getting teachers and principals to know their kids so they can identify those who are homeless and make sure they get the services they’re entitled to by law.

“A lot of times we’ll see stuff happening with kids, but never ask what’s going on,” she says. “We just assume they’re some BAKs (bad-ass kids), which in many instances, isn’t the case. We, the educators, play a major role in how we embrace this population.”

Her advocacy has helped the district identify more homeless children, one reason their numbers have grown. The other reason is obvious. “More and more families are becoming unemployed and losing their homes,” she says.

Thompson-Murray is painfully aware of the damage being homeless inflicts on kids. “They worry about where they’re going to sleep at night,” she says. “They have difficulty separating from parents. If there’s been violence in the family, they’re preoccupied with whether the parent is safe. They have difficulty focusing. They stare off into space. They can be invisible in a crowd of kids. Or they can be the most disruptive in the class.”

The stress of economic uncertainty isn’t confined to the jobless, or people who have lost homes or services. Therapists working in government-funded agencies are under intense pressure as they absorb the distress of their clients, handle heavier caseloads and fret about their own flat salaries and job security.

Places for People, a St. Louis agency serving the city’s mentally ill, opened a drop-in center in April that offers assistance to anyone in need. The number of help-seekers climbed from 248 in May to 509 in August. “It’s off the charts,’’ admits executive director Joe Yancey. The spike in demand has been so intense that the agency is grappling with whether it has the capacity to continue helping all comers.

The ability to meet the needs of the poor and distressed depends increasingly on extraordinary efforts. Megan Heeney, 26, is an outreach specialist with Places for People by day, helping people being released from psychiatric hospitals. At night, she’s part of a Catholic Worker community that provides housing for homeless women and children. She helped organize volunteers to bring homeless people off the streets when the temperature dips below 20 degrees and recruited local churches to provide shelter.

“We try as hard as we can to help people manage their crises,” she said. “We want to aid people in moving toward recovery yet because of economic conditions, we’re constantly doing crisis management.”

In a time of austerity, superhuman social workers can only do so much.

: Rob Waters writes about health, mental health and science from his home in Berkeley, California. His investigative feature in Mother Jones, “Medicating Aliah,” examined pharmaceutical industry influence over prescribing guidelines and won the Casey Award in 2006. His articles have appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, Mother Jones, Health, Reader’s Digest and other publications. More Rob Waters

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I kissed her and then her husband killed himself

Now I'm in an agony of guilt and my life will never be the same

By Cary Tennis

(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Topics:Since You Asked, Suicide, Marriage

Dear Cary,

I met a woman at work nine months ago. We clicked immediately but I refused her advances because she was married, to her second husband, in fact. After a few months, I could no longer resist the attraction. Immediately after we kissed, she told her husband they hadn’t been in a real marriage for a long time and she was leaving.

She asked him to discuss dividing their possessions. Shortly after, he went upstairs and shot and killed himself.

As you can imagine, she will never be OK. For the first couple of months, I stayed awake 24 hours a day with two mobile phones in my hands in case she needed me. At the suggestion of my psychiatrist, I told her she needed to see a professional, as I am not skilled in counseling and the strain was too great for me. Since then, we somehow launched into a downward spiral of shutting each other out, then hurting each other, and now lying as well.

She spends her time with her parents and 18-year-old son from her first marriage. We live in such a small town that we cannot go out for dinner, spend time with friends, or see each other much at all. When she first returned to work after the tragedy, I would come by her cubicle on bad days and give her a small gift or trinket and a hug, until one of her colleagues warned me that he would cause trouble. A week ago she left her job because she needs more time to heal. I’ve tried to continue finding creative ways to distract her, make her feel normal, and be together.

I am convinced I will never work through this guilt. When I see her old spot at work where her family pictures were, when she spends holidays with her husband’s family, when I go on a social networking site and see pictures of her and her husband, my world gets shaken like a snow globe. Nearly every time I am left alone I break into tears. I am overtaken by the irrefutable fact that my actions led to the extinguishing of a living flame and now it is snuffed forever despite what I would give to change things.

My parents got word of what happened and no longer speak to me. My roommate is moving out tomorrow because he’s grown angry and hateful after unsuccessfully helping me through this. I am nearly completely isolated and I clearly need to dedicate more time to work on myself. Almost everyone I speak to insists that I need to leave her, especially my psychiatrist, but how do you break up with the woman you love after she’s endured such a traumatic loss?

Sincerely,

Overcome with Guilt

Dear Overcome with Guilt,

Your actions did not cause this suicide. They did not lead to it. You were not central to it.

You did not advocate for this person to commit suicide, or provide the means for this person to commit suicide. You knew nothing of any suicidal inclinations he might have had. You did not know him. He did not know you. Presumably, if he knew of your existence, he knew of you only as one of his wife’s co-workers. You did not sleep with his wife. Nor did you know that, after kissing you, his wife was going to go home and tell him she was leaving him.

The one thing you did was that you broke a well-understood obligation not to kiss his wife. That is a real obligation, not to kiss his wife, which you broke. You are not supposed to kiss other men’s wives. You knew that. You did it anyway. That is something to feel remorse about. That is something you did that was wrong.

If it were possible to make amends, that would be something to make amends to him about. Unfortunately, because he chose to take his own life, you cannot make amends to him for that.

So you will have to live with that.

That’s your situation. You committed no crime. It’s not a nice place to be. But it’s not eternal damnation. It is the wretched confliction of feelings that arise when we are tangential to a tragedy.

You are tangential here. You were not central to the suicide and you are not central to this woman’s life.

I think your psychiatrist, who has more knowledge about your situation and more understanding of you as a person than I do, and is professionally trained and licensed to guide people in their affairs, probably should be listened to.

You should leave her alone.

We don’t refrain from kissing other men’s wives because we fear the husband will commit suicide. But there are certain things we might expect a husband to do if he finds out that we kissed his wife. In the movies, a good punch in the jaw is the agreed-upon right action. It’s a non-fatal expression of contempt and serves to reassert the husband’s dominant role in the wife’s affections. Seeing the man she kissed lying unconscious on the ground, she will either run to him, thus affirming that her affections have shifted, or she will run back to her husband, affirming that she recognizes her best bet is to stick with the one who is good at punching. That is how the movies portray these things. We know that real life is different. But we still like going to the movies.

Your response is sort of like a movie. You are all histrionic. You are all saying things will never be the same; you are staying up all night with two cellphones. This is a little overdoing it.

So how exactly did you harm him, and did you harm him in any material way, or only by way of your attitude toward him? You didn’t sleep with his wife, but, knowing that he existed, you did disregard him as a person. You disregarded his status as the husband. You in a sense depersonalized him; you disregarded his existence. That is what we do when we fool around with someone’s spouses; we depersonalize a stranger, or a person known to us; we do things that we know would hurt that person if he or she were to find out. This is not a good thing to do. It probably makes it easier when we do not know the person, but whether we have met or not met, we still know that some person exists whom our actions would hurt if they were to be found out.

This is why we refrain from such things — because we know that they can hurt other people. Generally speaking, our actions do not lead to other people’s suicides, especially the suicides of people we do not even know. Rather, suicidal people make choices over which we have no control. If we could reliably cause the suicides of others, rest assured it would be against the law.

In certain cases advocating for another person to commit suicide has been prosecuted. This man sought out depressed people, “posed as a female nurse, feigned compassion and offered step-by-step instructions on how they could kill themselves.”

That’s a little different, I think you’ll agree. “While it is illegal in Minnesota to encourage suicide, there is no such federal law,” according to an ABC News account of the matter.

Out of another situation in which a person’s suicide was aided by information and interaction on the Web, H.R. 1183 has been proposed, which would “make it a crime to use the Internet to help someone commit suicide.”

I find that interesting, personally, because my 2006 column titled “What’s the best method for painless suicide?” continues to get many hits every month from people some of whom are expecting to get practical, how-to advice. Some of them even write to me angrily or disappointed that I don’t show them where to buy poison or name the best bridges to jump off of.

People do get over the suicides of loved ones. They meet in groups and talk on the phone with hotline counselors and go through their lives. The pain and shock abate. And there is evidence to show that how we talk about such things affects how we will feel. So I would guard against saying such things as she will never get over it. It isn’t helpful. One who has been through such an event may feel outraged that others do not seem to understand its power; they do not seem to understand how deeply we have been hurt or how long the hurt persists or the many small ways in which our day-to-day functioning is impaired afterward. This is true. So it is hard to go through life grieving. It is hard to grieve among strangers who do not know the cause of our halting responses and occasional lapses into blank emotion-filled silences when we are tugged violently by the anchor of the underworld.

That is what it is like to go through life grieving. It causes one to wonder if it might not be better to wear a black armband for a while, so others, even strangers, know to tread lightly. It is hard to go through life with a burden like that.

But it does not change the philosophical or logical problem. You did not cause this suicide. You played a part in this suicidal person’s personal drama. Or, that is, not even you played the part, but your image; this person’s image of you played a part in his own drama.

When you say, “I am convinced I will never work through this guilt,” you do yourself a disservice. Why not instead tell yourself, “I will work through this guilt.”

A part of us, of course, likes the sound of “never.” A part of us clings to it. And inasmuch as it allows us to feel the complete depth of the shock, it serves a purpose; it is poetic language. It is dramatic language. It indicates severity, or degree.

But beware the effect of such pronouncements, because they also work as prophecy. So find more poetic language, if you can; say that the depth of it is tearing you apart, that you feel devastated. You may need some kind of catharsis. Catharsis means working through. In fact, come to think of it, catharsis may be exactly what you need.

And, despite what you say, she will be OK. And you will be OK, too. But it will take time. for now, I suggest you listen to your psychiatrist. Leave this woman alone. Give it time. Back off.

Cary Tennis is Salon's advice columnist. His latest book is "Citizens of the Dream: Advice on Writing, Painting, Playing, Acting and Being." He leads writing workshops and creative getaways, and occasionally tweets and bellows as @carytennis on Twitter.

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Can Facebook save your life?

As suicide notes increasingly arrive in status updates, the social-networking site offers help to the despairing

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

(Credit: Facebook/Salon)

Topics:Facebook, Suicide

In September 2010, Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi posted on his Facebook page that he was “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry” – and then did. Last Christmas, Simone Back wrote that she “Took all my pills be dead soon so bye bye every one.” Several Facebook “friends” added disparaging comments, but no one stepped forward to check on her. Black’s body was found the next day. And last December, Clay Duke posted a Facebook “testament,” writing that “Some people (the government sponsored media) will say I was evil, a monster … no…” He then went on a shooting rampage and killed himself.

Could anything have stopped Tyler, Simone or Clay once they decided to end their lives? Perhaps not. But as the grim status update increasingly becomes the new suicide note, Facebook has taken on an active, interventionist role. Users can now anonymously flag “suicidal content” – and Facebook will directly contact the person who posted it with suicide-prevention assistance. The mechanism has quietly been in place since June, but Facebook announced Tuesday that it was expanding its efforts, offering potentially self-destructive users more resources via a partnership with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

While the information Facebook previously offered was limited to phone numbers, now users have the option of connecting with a crisis counselor through a private, anonymous chat room. Lifeline’s John Draper explained Tuesday that “there are many people in crisis who don’t feel comfortable picking up the phone. This new service provides a way for them to get the help they need in the way they want it.” It makes sense: Someone who prefers the relative safety of online communication, someone who is already online, would naturally gravitate toward chat rather than picking up the phone.

There are times when using a word on Facebook or in a Google search can make a person feel creepily observed. It’s easy to feel – quite accurately – that our every move online targets us for a sponsored message. That monitoring rarely feels in our best interest, but it’s nothing but terrific that since 2010, Google has made sure that the first thing that comes up when someone searches “suicide” is the image of a red phone, the message “Need help?” and the number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Likewise, Facebook’s resources for users who may be suicidal – and concerned friends — are a strong step toward social responsibility. Facebook also offers specific help for LGBT members, with phone numbers and links for the Trevor Project.

Even the smallest gesture – like a suicide-prevention hotline number in the Google search of someone who may be looking for the best ways to die – affords someone with a seed of hope the chance to chart a different course. And if someone reads a friend’s despairing status update and makes help available, well, that’s a pretty noble use of social networking.

These innovations say a lot about our peculiar squeamishness about suicide, and how far removed we can be from our friends’ deepest pain. A potentially suicidal person’s first source of intervention might now be the automated results from a search engine. Or help might come from Facebook’s anonymous support team as a form message.

But as Surgeon General Regina Benjamin wrote on Facebook this week, we all need to learn “how to stand with and support someone who is in crisis.” That means creating online resources and safe means of reporting suicidal behavior. But if Google and Facebook can figure out how to help, surely the rest of us can come up with a few ideas as well. We can start by remembering that a voice on the phone, a supportive shoulder, or the offer to drive someone to a crisis center can be powerful as well. Sometimes, saving a human life still requires a human touch.

: Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams

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“A Thousand Lives”: What really happened in Jonestown?

A new look at the largest mass suicide in American history

By Laura Miller

(Credit: AP)

Topics:What to Read, American History, Religion, Our Picks, Suicide, Books

Were the deaths, in 1978, of more than 900 Americans in Jonestown, Guyana, a mass suicide or a massacre? And were the members of the Peoples Temple, who founded the settlement, the hypnotized victims of a cult dominated by a purely evil man? In the decades since the tragedy, as it recedes from popular awareness, scholars (and not a few cranks) have argued over the answers to these questions, obvious as they may seem to anyone who knows of the event primarily through the mass media. The latest entry in the discussion is “A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception and Survival at Jonestown” by Julia Scheeres, which looks at Jonestown from the perspective of the church’s rank-and-file members.

Strictly speaking, this story is not “untold”; of the 100 or so survivors of Jonestown, a few have written their stories, and a compilation of oral and written firsthand accounts has been published. However, Scheeres used a large cache of recently released FBI files to write what she describes as the first “comprehensive history of the doomed community” to incorporate that material. She also conducted her own interviews with survivors. Above all, her account is notably levelheaded in a field where sensationalism, conspiracy theories and bizarre reasoning run free.

In particular, Scheeres wants to show that the people who died at Jonestown weren’t “brainwashed zombies,” as they have sometimes been described. She also deliberately refrains from use of the word “cult,” a term currently in disfavor with students of comparative religion. To paraphrase the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich (who said, “A language is just a dialect with an army and navy”), they argue that the only thing distinguishing many religions from so-called cults is that the religions have more numerous and powerful members.

For those unfamiliar with the story of the Peoples Temple, Jones was a charismatic Pentecostal pastor who, in 1950s Indiana, founded a church remarkable for its commitment to racial integration and aiding the poor. In the 1960s, he persuaded much of his flock to move to a community in Northern California and, in the 1970s, the church’s headquarters was relocated to San Francisco. There, Jones continued to win converts from among the dispossessed — drug addicts, delinquents, single mothers, the elderly and the unemployed, most of them black — while also attracting educated idealists inspired by the mixture of spirituality and social justice that Jones called “apostolic socialism.”

In its early years, the Peoples Temple did many good works: running soup kitchens and food and clothing drives, rehabilitating at-risk kids, nursing junkies through the agonies of withdrawal, providing free healthcare and services to seniors. Jones also proved adept at impressing radical-chic celebrities and local politicians — the latter were particularly interested in the large blocks of obedient voters he could deliver. San Francisco Mayor George Moscone even appointed Jones to the Housing Authority, where his entourage of brawny bodyguards and cheering seniors made the meetings more exciting, if less functional.

From early on, Jones used charlatanry to gain followers and donations, figuring that he’d turn the usual revival-tent antics to the service of a “better cause.” With the assistance of trusted aides, he staged assorted healings, mind-readings and other “miracles.” He was indefatigable — mostly because he was gobbling prescription drugs, stimulants known to produce paranoia in those who abuse them. Soon he was faking assassination attempts as well as healings, and threatening to kill enemies and apostates by supernatural means. Scheeres clearly believes that Jones’ drug problems played a major role in the deterioration of the Peoples Temple from a progressive evangelical church into an authoritarian cult.

Scheeres may not want to use that word, or “brainwashed,” but her own book demonstrates the need for stronger language to describe the Peoples Temple than “new religious movement,” the “value neutral” term preferred by religious scholars. Jones and his lieutenants employed techniques of isolation, intimidation and coercion to control church members, former members and perceived enemies — like the journalists who began asking too many awkward questions in 1973, prompting Jones to set up an “agricultural mission” in the small South American nation of Guyana. Many church members went to Jonestown for what they thought would be a few months, only to find themselves stranded in the middle of a dense jungle with no funds and their passports locked in a safe by church authorities.

As Jones’ paranoia worsened and the ability of the community to sustain itself faltered, the residents — effectively prisoners — were subjected to starvation rations, public denunciations, beatings, grueling labor details and the interminable demented harangues Jones slurred into the PA system at all hours. During drills that were dubbed “white nights,” Jones put everyone on alert, braced for military attacks from the commandos he insisted were lurking just outside the fences. He kept his weary flock up until the wee hours, demanding vote after vote on the option of “revolutionary suicide,” that is, a community-wide resolution to kill themselves rather than fall into the hands of their (nonexistent) beseigers. On more than one occasion, he ordered them to drink a Kool-Aid-like punch that he pretended was poisoned, as a “test” of their loyalty.

The physical and psychological stresses Jones inflicted on his followers — many of which fall within agreed-upon definitions of torture — explain in part why they were so vulnerable to his apocalyptic hysteria. They also lived in apocalyptic times, under the shadow of the political assassinations of the 1960s and haunted by an ever-present intimation that some form of revolution might happen at any moment. Also, church members believed that “fascist America” was spying on them and plotting their deaths because federal officials really were doing just that to such groups as the Black Panthers, who considered the Peoples Temple their allies.

The triggering event for the tragedy was an investigatory expedition to the compound led by Rep. Leo Ryan in response to relatives outside the church who complained that their family members were being held captive. Although Jones customarily kept dissidents and potential defectors drugged and confined during such official visits, several residents still managed to ask Ryan to take them with him when he left. As the group boarded two small aircraft outside the settlement, some church members followed and opened fire on them, killing Ryan, three journalists and one of the defectors. At that point, Jones realized that this would be his last chance to fulfill his long-cherished, megalomaniacal fantasy of making his followers die for him.

Scheeres calls the horrors of Nov. 18, 1978, a “massacre” rather than a mass suicide, pointing out that many of the victims — exhausted and disoriented as they were when Jones ordered them once more to drink poisoned punch — resisted, especially when they realized that this time the poison was real. Some were compelled to drink at gunpoint while others were forcible injected. Twenty-four of the victims were infants who were fed the drink by adults and 150 were under the age of 10. However, the willingness of enough church members to carry out Jones’ orders — murdering their own families, friends and finally themselves — indicates that his control over much of his flock remained absolute.

They would become the largest number of American civilians to die in a single, non-natural disaster until 9/11, yet Jonestown is less well-known than, say, the Manson Family murders to many people born since 1980. It doesn’t fit into a familiar narrative or offer a politically convenient villain. Jonestown illustrates the corruptibility of both religious piety and leftist utopianism, but the left does seem to struggle with it more than conservatives. For anyone who places too much faith in the espousal of right-on ideology (and that would include a lot of academics), Jim Jones is particularly troubling: How can someone who said all the right things go so wrong?

For all the thoughtfulness of “A Thousand Lives,” Scheeres herself runs aground trying to defend Jones’ followers from being written off as suicidal sheep. “If anything, the people who moved to Jonestown were idealists,” she writes. “They wanted to create a better, more equitable society.” But it is precisely the idealists who are most likely to get sucked into a nightmare like Jonestown, because when your goal is so very beautiful, it is so very tempting to cut moral corners.

It all began back when Jim Jones told himself that for the sake of social justice, it would be OK to fake a few “miracles.” Each new act of deception or bullying simply amplified that leeway a little more, infecting the whole community. For Jones, the power to do good mutated into power for its own sake. Jonestown is the darkest reminder of how, when the ends are allowed to justify the means, the means become an end in themselves.

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller

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How I learned the secret rule of grief

After I lost my family, I refused to believe how long it would take to heal. Now I see the wisdom in that number

By Sheila M. Trask

Topics:Life stories, Suicide

Four years. I nod my head in agreement as the nurse keeps talking. I am in the medical center for a routine blood draw, to track the thyroid condition I’ve lived with for most of my life. But the nurse is not talking about the levels of thyroid stimulating hormone in my blood. She is telling me about her husband, who has started to answer the phone again four years after his father died “suddenly.”

The word “suddenly,” like “unexpectedly” is code for suicide. I instantly know what she is trying to say. I live in a small town; she surely has heard about the recent sudden and unexpected deaths in my family. My brother in September, my father in March, with my mother’s cancer death right in between. Everyone in town knows the story by now. It is April.

Good Yankee girl, though, she understands stoicism and asks no questions except, “How are you doing?”

She does, however, launch into this story. She tells me how long it has taken her husband to recover from his father’s death. How many years it takes to climb back up from getting the call that takes you to the floor. She tells me how happy she is he can go out again, see family again, and answer the phone. After four years.

I look at the needle in the crook of my arm, the vial filling with my blood. I accept her Band-Aid and try to smile.

I sympathize, empathize even. But I sincerely believe it will NOT take me four years to recover. There’s no way. I have an 8-year-old son I am homeschooling. I have to be there to explain long division and spell words like “ubiquitous.” These details are my lifeline. I can’t fall apart now, even for a little while, and certainly not for years. It makes no difference that I’ve lost my entire family of origin inside six months.

***

Looking back now, I see the difference it made, though it wasn’t the one I feared. I didn’t fall apart. I kept right on going, and learned a lot about asking for help and honoring my limitations. Still, I wasn’t quite me. I measured everything by how much better it was than the day, week or month before. I noted the first time I could fall asleep without my husband in the room with me, and knew I was feeling safer. Or the first time I cried when “Sweet Child of Mine” played on the radio and I realized the numbness was fading. And later still, when I heard the song and didn’t need to cry. I became expert at measuring the distance I was traveling away from the visions of loaded ambulances and empty houses.

What I couldn’t see, though, was how far I had to go. That was probably best that way. It would be too cruel if you fully remembered what it was like to laugh, dance and sing, without being able to make your way to the dance floor, or even hear the song. Each step took a day, each song a month, until years had passed since a ringing phone signaled devastation.

The third year was the hardest. I started to see the celebrations in life again, but only to name them and move on. I could go to a concert and listen to music, but it was more accomplishment than enjoyment. Every holiday brought its haunting from seasons past; July fireworks sounded too much like guns, and I had nowhere to go at Thanksgiving. When our favorite Korean restaurant stopped serving on Thanksgiving Day, our family of three found ourselves eating pizza at Price Chopper. I had survived, but this was not the atmosphere I wanted for my son.

Then, I reached the magic number. Four years. It turns out, that nurse was exactly right. It’s been that long now and I have all of my senses back. The awakening started last summer when I visited my mother’s sisters and saw her face, my face, alive in them. And it spread when we went to my husband’s family reunion and made more connections. We discovered we were not alone.

The healing continues as I watch my son learn, cheer at his wrestling matches, and pick on his puns. I now walk by our brook and feel the pure bliss of spring sunshine on my head. I’m reading Buddhist philosophy and playing the Avett Brothers CD and telling everyone how amazing these things really are.

As it was for that long-ago nurse’s husband, one of the hardest things has indeed been answering the phone when it rings. I still hesitate. There’s always the possibility of unbearable words on the other end. Instead, I find it’s likely to be a friend excited about her newest pug puppy, or neighbors offering to bring over a cheesecake, and I am glad I answered the call.