How “Iris Chang” became a verb

The author of "The Rape of Nanking" inspired her friends by fearlessly confronting some of history's darkest moments. A eulogy.

By Paula Kamen

Topics:Suicide

In college, I would have liked Iris Chang more if she hadn’t always been one step ahead of me, frustrating all my major life ambitions.

During our junior year, I applied for the one available hopefully-path-paving summer-magazine internship in New York City. The program took only one student from each journalism school. She got the job.

The next summer, I applied to a major Chicago daily newspaper for an internship. Despite my terror, the interview seemed to go well. I called in a week later, as instructed, and they told me, “You were close, but someone else got it. Also from the University of Illinois, by coincidence. You probably know her.”

I was not alone in eating Iris’ dust. Other editors on our college paper eyed her with the same mixture of amazement and frustration. One day, Iris had the idea to become the college stringer for the New York Times from Urbana-Champaign. Not wasting a minute, she called the New York Times’ main desk, said she wanted to be a stringer, and soon after published a story in the front section. (And then five more over the year, until they told her to stop, so the paper would not raise eyebrows by disproportionately covering Champaign.) A few days later, I heard another editor on our staff grumble about it; she had wanted that position, but Iris beat her to it. I later met an editor of the college literary magazine. He was still bristling about a past encounter with her, for supposedly “taking over” the publication on the first day she went to a meeting.

Then, some time in the early 1990s, a little after graduation, Iris called me to get together in Chicago. She apparently had no idea how she had trampled my hopes and dreams. She considered us to be friends. I almost declined, but then decided to think this out rationally.

At that point, I made a conscious decision not to hate Iris Chang. With some distance from school, things were clearer. Any moron could see that she wasn’t just getting by on her good looks. She was obviously very talented and could teach me something. As the features editor of our college paper, I had edited her articles — or actually never edited them — because they always came in perfect. The facts, grammar, punctuation, gerunds, everything. In retrospect, I was still marveling at a lucid story she had written about recent breakthroughs in a very complicated area of artificial intelligence.

During that meeting, or perhaps another one, I was immediately sorry to see that the grueling hours at her new job at the Associated Press were wearing her down. In college, she was a steamroller of energy. But now she was frail and told me her hair was coming out. I saw then for the first time just how hard she worked, how she put a piece of herself into every story she covered.

We soon moved to lighter topics. She was happy about planning her upcoming wedding. Her explanation for the marriage was simple. One day in college, she decided she wanted a boyfriend. Someone suggested that frat parties were a good place to meet guys. So she went to one, and there she met her red-haired husband-to-be, a star engineering candidate from a small farming town. He was delighted with — instead of taken aback by — her drive and candor.

She asked me how I was getting along. At that time, in the middle of a Bush-era recession, I was fruitlessly applying for work at local suburban newspapers. So I was starting to freelance. I told her of an Op-Ed I had written, that I would try to get published. She immediately suggested that I send it to the New York Times. I thought she was joking. I didn’t have such pretensions. I thought maybe some local alternative paper might want it.

But lo and behold, the piece was accepted — and a year later, on perhaps the slowest news day in history, the Times published it. My luck was changing — not long before, I had signed a book contract to write on the same topic.

At that point, I had a revelation. So, that was the Iris Code. I had finally cracked it. And it was so simple: Think big. Almost to the point of being naive.

Meanwhile, Iris Chang’s life accelerated. She regained her old vitality and accepted an offer to write a book of her own, published in 1995, on a persecuted Chinese-American scientist and what he revealed about the paranoia of the McCarthy years in America. In 1997, she published her blockbuster “The Rape of Nanking.” Then, I was really impressed.

She had made a major historical discovery: a hidden Nazi diary chronicling the massacres by the Japanese in China in new detail. In China, the WWII atrocities have long been a national nightmare, and they have received attention from historians and academics over the years. But it took Chang’s energy, will and engaging writing style to make the massacre come alive to a popular audience in the West. From reading her letters, I knew how hard she had worked on that book. She traveled through China on her own and challenged the U.S. government for long-classified documents. She was genuinely shocked at the atrocities she had exposed, and reacted with a pure, honest rage — like someone seeing evil for the very first time. She couldn’t understand the possibility of knowing about such things and not writing about them. Part of the power of her interviewing was that she had no filters to block out anything that was being said to her; I suspect she didn’t even know that people came with filters.

While fame and fortune were not her priorities, she also seemed to enjoy her success, which came completely naturally to her. She called me to watch her on “Nightline,” read her interview in the New York Times, and see her on the cover of Reader’s Digest. But she only casually mentioned her private meeting with Hillary Clinton on global human rights issues, as if everyone had such experiences.

Talking with her usually energized me, but I would sometimes wait for days to call her back because I knew a conversation with her would require a minimum of about two hours. Her energy often overwhelmed me. She wanted to know about every detail of my social life, my writing and my health. Then she barraged me with a torrent of advice about concrete steps to take to fix any problem I might have.

In the end, despite the typical work-related conflicts we both dished about, she would exclaim how lucky we were to be authors, to be able to spend our days writing about what most interests us. “Always remember how privileged you are,” she told me, when I related my regular doubts as to whether my life course was one of pure folly.

During her visits to Chicago, usually on some kind of book tour, my friends occasionally noted her quirks, sometimes humorously, and sometimes not. She was still pissing people off, always without realizing it. When she was in town for a book tour, I had her contact a reporter friend at a local paper. She appalled him by calling him up and, without any foreplay involved, told him the details of what he was to cover.

Some wondered why she never wore a wedding ring. I could understand her reasoning — that she didn’t want anything encumbering her movement — but I was surprised at her surprise at some of the results. She seemed honestly aghast and unprepared whenever a supposedly earnest intellectual type at some conference on “torture and atrocity” made a pass at her. “But he was married,” she told me. “So what’s your point?” I asked. I couldn’t figure out how someone so world-savvy about geopolitics could be so naive in other areas.

After these visits, I also knew what to expect from her. A week later, never fail, she sent me a snapshot she’d taken of us, which I filed away with the letters that enclosed them. They were often written on old-fashioned homey stationery or cards, the type your immigrant grandmother would buy at Walgreens, with simple and unsleek scenes of sparkly Christmas trees or flowers.

By that time, I was definitely a firm convert to the Iris Code — to the point of spreading the gospel. When I occasionally went to universities to speak on my books, and then was a guest at writing classes, I would lecture students to “Iris Chang” it. She had become a verb to me. An action verb.

“Just think big!” I told them. “That’s half the battle! What do you have to lose? If someone turns you down, they turn you down, so what? And then you move on. Just get a sense of entitlement, will you? It doesn’t matter if you’re in the Midwest. Or if you’re at a public school. Just decide what you want and go get it. To the point of being naive. Your voice is not your voice. It’s the voice of your generation! Just Iris Chang it!” I explained, almost taking on her passionate tone as I spoke.

The last time I saw Iris was in the spring of 2003, when I went to see her read in Chicago for her third book, a history of the Chinese in America. She was in good spirits, and we had a good time afterward going out for stuffed pizza in a small group and hearing about her latest adventures. I was curious about her next project, and the stories she was gathering for it. I knew they were intense, like those she had covered for “The Rape of Nanking.” As a sign of the darkness of the interviews’ content, a typist hired to transcribe them cried all the way through the work. The interviews covered the brutal ordeals suffered by U.S. soldiers during the Bataan Death March in the Philippines in World War II. For about four years, their Japanese captors starved and tortured them with unimaginable cruelty. A soldier, for example, would be ordered to bury his friend alive. If that person refused, they would make someone else bury him alive.

In these interviews, the surviving elderly soldiers also complained that the U.S government had turned a blind eye to them. Besides feeling abandoned while they were prisoners, the men were upset that the United States did not adequately prosecute the captured Japanese offenders. Some of the men talked about expecting finally to come home to the U.S. to great fanfare, to see “the rockets’ red glare.” But no one at home seemed interested in what they had gone through. “‘But then, there was no rockets’ red glare,’” one subject said, over and over again.

As was the case with many of her other subjects, that interview was probably the first time that soldier had talked about his experiences in the war. A war in which his comrades had sacrificed so dearly, some with their lives, and others, with their sanity. While this material was difficult, I hoped that the book would do the same for the Bataan Death March that “The Rape of Nanking” had done for the atrocities at Nanking, that it would raise a new level of awareness about this largely forgotten chapter of history. Iris represented these men’s last hope to get their stories told.

The months passed, and I got involved in my own projects. A few weeks ago, a mutual friend e-mailed me that Iris was trying to reach me, and that she had been sick for the past few months. Then, on Saturday, Nov. 6, my cellphone rang. When I heard the tone of Iris’ voice, I excused myself from the friends I was visiting and stood outside in their yard for privacy. The bounce in her voice was totally gone. Instead, it was sad and totally drained, as if she were making a huge effort just to talk to me. I remembered that she recently had been sick.

She said, “I just wanted to let you know that in case something should happen to me, you should always know that you’ve been a good friend.”

Over the next hour, I stumbled to ask her about what had happened. She talked about her overwhelming fears and anxieties, including being unable to face the magnitude — and the controversial nature — of the stories that she had uncovered. Her current vaguely described problems were “external,” she kept repeating, a result of her controversial research. They weren’t a result of the “internal,” that is, they weren’t all in her head. I asked her about what others in her life thought about the cause of this apparent depression. She paused and said, “They think it’s internal.”

We talked in more detail about her family, still of great support through this time of crisis. I fired questions at her, repeating the same ones over and over again although I kept hearing all the same answers. She was fixated on not seeing herself as having anything wrong with her. I was reeling from the apparent suddenness of this crisis. I thought I had her figured out, years ago.

“This is all temporary! It’s a storm that will pass. You have to wait it out. This is not how I see you,” I assured her.

“That’s not how you see me? Then, how do you see me?” she said, with sudden intense interest.

“Energetic,” I said. “You’re someone truly engaged with life. A hero! You’ve been a total inspiration to me! You’ve helped so many people.”

“Yes, engaged with life,” she said, brightening a bit. “Remember that. If anything would ever happen to me, people are going to talk, and you have to remind people of that.”

I repeatedly asked to speak to her husband, but she said he was busy. Then, we talked more and I felt a bit relieved to hear from her that her husband, and her parents, were near. Some of her old warmth returned to her voice when she asked me about my experiences living with chronic pain, how I have coped through years of it. I talked about it for a while and said I’d send her some book titles that have helped me. In return, she suggested herself that she research how other investigative journalists deal with their stresses.

Yes, and then when I got back to Chicago, I said, we’d talk. She didn’t respond.

Before we finally hung up, she said one last time: If anything happened to her, I had to let people know what she was like before this happened.

And I said I would.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

The Iris Chang Scholarship Fund: A scholarship in honor of Iris has been established by her family at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The address is:
University of Illinois Foundation
Attn.: Jeff Roley
1305 West Green Street
Urbana, IL 61801-2962

Make checks payable to:
University of Illinois Foundation
In the memo field:
Iris Chang Scholarship Fund

Questions? Contact:
Stacy (217) 244-7912
Jeff Roley (217) 244-7912, roley@uif.uillinois.edu

: TK More Paula Kamen

- 0Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

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

- 19Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

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.

What? You want more?

Read more Cary Tennis.
Ask for advice. Letter writers please note: By sending a letter to advice@salon.com, you are giving Salon permission to publish it. Once you submit it, it may not be possible to rescind it. So be sure.
Ready? OK, Submit your letter for publication.
Or, just make a comment to Cary Tennis not for publication.
Or, send a letter to Salon's editors not for publication.

More Cary Tennis

- 55Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

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

- 10Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

“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

- 49Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

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.