Impact of suicide ~ echo opinion from NPR Scott Simon

Thank you to Scott Simon for this NPR Weekend Edition radio essay.  Suicide impacts generations~ it's not one isolated tragedy, its impact is generational.

Echo from June 9, 2018, but the message is universal and timeless.

"Someone who struggles with suicide may think it will end their pain. But it will also inflict a pain that can pass from person to person, one generation to the next."

Scott Simon speaks about the tragedy of suicide from his family's experience

I have to talk in an utterly personal way about suicide. My grandmother took her life, and my mother, who struggled against the impulse several times, said, "Suicide puts a fly in your head. It's always in there, buzzing around."

The apparent suicides of Kate Spade, the accomplished fashion designer, and Anthony Bourdain, the spirited traveler and chef, occurred the same week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the suicide rate has increased more than 30 percent in half of states in the country since 1999. Suicide is now a major public health crisis in this rich and blessed land.

It is risky to make generalizations about suicide — whether it appears to have been triggered by depression, job loss, sickness, romance, drink or drugs. The person who takes their life may feel alone and isolated. But they leave behind those who love them and who are left to wrestle with sleepless regrets and ceaseless wondering.

Maybe that's why suicides can run in families. Dr. Clarence Hemingway killed himself in 1928. One of his sons, Leicester, discovered his father's body. Another son, Ernest, then a young novelist, wrote his mother-in-law: "I'll probably go the same way" — and took his life in 1961, just a few years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the years that followed, his sister Ursula and brother Leicester Hemingway also took their lives. And Margaux Hemingway, the model who was Ernest's granddaughter, took her life in 1996.

Each of their stories was different; but each of them had that fly of a thought of suicide, buzzing in their heads.

And there are ripples from suicide. Comedian Robin Williams killed himself in 2014, and there was a 10 percent increase in suicides in the four months that followed. That syndrome is now called "the celebrity suicide effect," what David S. Fink at Columbia University described to CNN as, "the consequences of a celebrity suicide in the digital era." You have to wonder — worry — whether that might happen now, too.

Someone who struggles with suicide may think it will end their pain. But it will also inflict a pain that can pass from person to person, one generation to the next.

If you struggle, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Or call 911. Or walk into a hospital or up to a police officer and say you need help. Walk into a church, mosque or synagogue. Walk up to a stranger if you have to — the kindness of strangers can be real. Do not suffer in silence or isolation. You can help save others, as well as yourself.

From The Rotarian by Frank Bures - On not being Scrooge

Thank you to Frank Bures who writes:  
"As a freelance writer, I’ve never been what you’d call wealthy. But when I was growing up, my dad was a doctor, and we never worried about where our next meal would come from. Today I live in a neighborhood that is solidly middle class and diverse – in the color of the hybrid cars, if nothing else."

Am I living on an island? And could that be affecting my ability to see the plight of (a) guy in scraggly clothes? I’d always thought of myself more along the lines of Bob Cratchit. Now I had a miniature Jacob Marley (sitting) in my back seat, calling me Scrooge.

From Julie: Charles Dickens should've received a Nobel Prize for literature, by creating the Scrooge metaphor for miserliness. Unfortunately, the humanitarian awards began in 1895, well after the author's death in 1870.  Nevertheless, I'd sure nominate him, posthumously, because his creation of Scrooge raised the bar for all of us who need reminders about how to improve our human condition.

On Not Being Scrooge by Frank Bures from December 2014 "The Rotarian"

"To build compassion, get out of your comfort zone."

Down the road in front of me, the light turned red. As our car slowed, from the corner of my eye I saw a man standing in the middle of the street with a sign that said he was homeless and needed money. 

My wife and two daughters were in the car with me. I looked straight ahead.

From behind me, a small voice spoke. “Can we give him some money?” It was my eight-year-old daughter. I didn’t answer. The light turned green, and I drove on. The voice spoke again.

“Why are you so mean, Daddy?” she said.

“Yeah,” my wife chimed in, smiling. “Why are you so mean?” She was sort of joking, sort of not.

My daughter continued: “How would you feel if you were a poor person and all you had was scraggly clothes and people just drove past you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And honestly, I didn’t know how I would feel – let alone how that guy felt. In fact, I hadn’t thought about that sort of thing for some time. Back in college, for a senior project about homelessness, I’d played a homeless person in a movie. And I’d done some volunteering here and there, but in raising children lately, everything extraneous has been swept away.

For most of the year, it’s easy to get absorbed in our own lives. But the holidays are supposed to be different. This is the time when our thoughts are supposed to turn to others – to the people we buy gifts for, to those less fortunate than us. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol plays on stages across the country. Every year, ghosts visit Ebenezer Scrooge and show him how hard his heart has become, and how little happiness all his wealth has brought him.

Wealth, in itself, is not a bad thing. It often helps you live longer and be healthier. It provides opportunities to see the world. It can fund an education and a place to live. But there can be a cost to having it as well, which research is now untangling. Paul Piff, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has co-published several studies that have found that wealthy individuals behave less “prosocially” than poorer ones. They give less of their money, percentage-wise, to charity. They feel less compassionate toward people in need. They are more likely to cheat on games (in a laboratory situation). And they are less attuned to the emotional states of others.

All of this seems to suggest, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, that the very rich are different from you and me (and not just because they have more money, as Ernest Hemingway quipped). But according to Piff, it’s not that they are different, it’s that being rich makes you different.

In studies that have temporarily altered the self-perceptions of low-income participants, making them feel better off, he says, “suddenly they start behaving as if they are actually wealthy. It’s not so much about wealthy people behaving in particular ways, but rather the experience of wealth making people behave in particular ways.”

But other research further complicates the subject. One “lost letter” study in London (in which letters were dropped to see how many people would mail them) showed that 87 percent of letters dropped in wealthier neighborhoods were mailed, while only 37 percent were mailed in poorer ones. And though that could be interpreted as looking out for one’s own, a Georgetown University study found that altruistic kidney donations (giving a kidney to a stranger) are more likely to take place in wealthy communities than poor ones, a finding that “paradoxically indicates that community-level income may positively predict prosociality even while individual-level wealth does not,” the authors wrote.

This is all complex – we humans, after all, are not so easy to figure out. But we may find a key in a 2012 study by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which showed that when wealthy people live in more economically diverse ZIP codes, their charitable giving rises from an average of 2.8 percent to 4.2 percent.

Wealth isolates. Big houses. Big cars. No need to ask favors of people. Perhaps this is what underlies much of the shift in behavior among wealthy individuals. When we don’t need to interact with others, our ability to imagine their lives diminishes. Yet this is something Piff says we can easily reverse.

“In our lab work,” he says, “we find that wealthy people are less generous in general. But if you show them a brief video about child poverty around the world, they become just as generous as everyone else. So even brief reminders of the needs of others can build an inroad into this psychological island that you inhabit.”

As a freelance writer, I’ve never been what you’d call wealthy. But when I was growing up, my dad was a doctor, and we never worried about where our next meal would come from. Today I live in a neighborhood that is solidly middle class and diverse – in the color of the hybrid cars, if nothing else.

Am I living on an island? And could that be affecting my ability to see the plight of the guy in scraggly clothes? I’d always thought of myself more along the lines of Bob Cratchit. Now I had a miniature Jacob Marley in my back seat, calling me Scrooge.

I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to suffer from what the writer George Saunders said was the thing in life he regretted most: failures of kindness. Maybe if it wasn’t too late for Scrooge, it wasn’t too late for me. I asked Piff about the best way to cultivate a more compassionate mindset.

“Just get out there,” he said. “Get out of your comfort zone. Have more contact with other people. The people who are the most satisfied with their lives are the ones who are the most embedded in their communities and who have engaged in acts of kindness and philanthropy. There’s a lot you can get out of being kind to others that money can’t buy you.” — Frank Bures