Books: The Taste of Hemlock

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After Alvarez it is almost a pleasure to turn to something as thematically underwrought as German-trained Philosopher Jacques Choron's dry survey course in suicidology. Whether or not this is the age of death, Choron points out, the U.S. suicide rate has not increased for more than 20 years. (Since World War II it has hovered near eleven per 100,000 population each year.) Though suicide is listed as the tenth largest killer in the U.S., even that fact is misleading since it accounts for only 1% of all yearly deaths. Choron spent years working in suicide-prevention centers. Like Suicide Counselor Paul Pretzel, he takes some pride in the fact that the suicide rate has lately been reduced in the highest category—people from 60 to 65. (Hope, says the proverb, makes a good breakfast but a poor supper.) Just the same, Choron feels that suicide should be made easier in a few cases, most notably as a sort of self-inflicted euthanasia for the hopelessly sick or incapacitated.

The assigning of absolute internal or external causes for suicide—from sheer loneliness to Freud's famous death wish—founders on the mysterious (and miraculous) fact that under similar stresses some people kill themselves and some do not. Counselors like Pretzel naturally worry less about absolutes and man's right to die than they do about the necessary conspiracy of the living to help one another carry on. An estimated 90% of attempted suicides who are saved by prevention centers are pitifully grateful afterward.

How to Do It. Pretzel also reports that only 15% of the 9,000 calls that each year come into the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center (one of the nation's oldest) are rated high risk. The judgment depends on a number of things, among them age, economic and marital status. Not surprisingly, the single are more likely to go through with it than the married, the childless more likely than those with children. Also important for friends and counselors, says Pretzel, is a quick estimate of how strong the caller's death wish is. A rough measure is how specific a means he has chosen, how deadly it is, and how easy to get hold of. Out of squeamishness, out of refusal to believe the threat, out of plain fear that it might touch things off, few people will ask a threatened suicide one key question that must be self?" asked: If he "How has do not you yet plan to made kill up your his mind exactly how, says Pretzel, the immediate risk is small.

One shift in the suicidal pattern that only Choron considers is the recent rise of such deaths among teenagers. Drugs and cultural dislocation seem handy enough explanations. But the fact stirs the question of how in youth, the heart first acquires a residual trust in life strong enough to carry it through later hardship.

As a 19th century man glumly opening the door on the 20th, Freud once wrote: "The moment one inquires about the sense or value of life, one is sick."