Why Are We Killing Ourselves and What Does It Mean?
Suicide and the Longing For Transformation
“There is but one truly important philosophical question: the question of suicide. The moment upon which one decides whether life is worth living, you answer the fundamental question of philosophy.” Albert Camu
Given all the mass murders, killings by cops, racially motivated violence, and death, it may surprise one to learn that more people die each year from suicide than from homicide. According to the CDC, there were more than two and a half times as many suicides (48,344) in the United States as homicides (18,830) in 2018. It is the tenth leading cause of death in the general population and the second among individuals between the age of 10 and 34.
While we are understandably outraged by all the violence around us, public outcry over the rising tide of suicide seems to raise less concern. It is true that in 2020 homicides skyrocketed while the overall number of suicides dropped. However, this does not take into account the spike in overdoses and suicides among young people and minorities during this same time period.
Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention attributed the lower suicide rates to the Pandemic, stating that “During the early phase of a natural disaster, there’s a sense of community building, a feeling that we’re all in this together.”
That feeling was apparently short-lived, as we have recently seen. Due to increasing polarization in the country during the same time period, the feeling of togetherness has waned. The toll taken on individuals over the long haul has increased the rates of depression and alienation, which translates into higher rates of both homicide and suicide.
If you include the number of people who have attempted suicide or considered it (almost twice as many in June 2020), the enormity of the problem comes into clearer focus. We are literally killing ourselves.
Suicide, of course, is nothing new, but the upward trend may signal increased distress at both the individual and collective levels. Jungian analyst and author James Hillman believes that suicide has both an individual and a communal aspect. Says Hillman, “Others are entangled in your death as you are in theirs. Suicide becomes a community matter.” He suggests that in each case of self-killing, “the world must bear witness.”
COMMON BELIEFS ABOUT SUICIDE
We know that there are many reasons why people choose to end their life. There are also myriad myths about it. A common belief is that suicide is an irrational act committed by emotionally unbalanced individuals who possess an inherent weakness of character.
But a peek below the surface reveals that suicide can also be the result of a rational decision. Such is the case with people suffering from a painful and terminal illness. Historically, protecting one’s honor, not bringing shame upon the family, or avoidance of being killed by someone else, as in the case of warriors, have been powerful motivators.
Another belief about suicide is that it reflects anger turned inward. But anger at self means self-hatred and has little to do with hatred of others unless that hatred is projected outward, as is the case in mass killings where the perpetrator kills himself after murdering others or in cases of “murder by cop,” in which an individual provokes the police into killing him or her.
Sometimes, suicidal thoughts or feelings are viewed as a cry for attention, as when Megan Markle recently disclosed in an interview with Oprah her thoughts of “ending things” while living in the Royal Palace.
Public reaction to her admission was one of disdain. How could someone with everything consider killing herself? She must surely be saying it to get attention or to have people feel sorry for her. But what Markle accomplished in the interview was to highlight how pervasive and uniquely individual suicidal feelings are.
In his book, Beyond Pleasure, Sigmund Freud, attributed suicide to the Death Instinct or Thanatos. He claimed that “the goal of all life is death.” He believed we had an innate capacity for self-destruction, equal to the destruction of others.
Ironically, Freud himself committed a form of suicide when he enlisted his physician to prescribe an overdose of morphine once the pain from cancer became too much to bear. In his case, suicide was not a result of mental illness, desire for attention, anger turned inward, or even self-sacrifice. It was a rational choice and one in which he consulted family members beforehand.
SUICIDE THROUGHOUT HISTORY
Freud’s theory about neurosis might have added weight to the “insanitizing” of suicide (attributing it to mental illness) that was first introduced in eighteenth-century England, but Freud’s own attitude about suicide (evidenced by his actions) actually harkens back to an earlier time when suicide was legitimized under certain conditions.
In early Greek and Roman times, for example, free will and the right to manage one’s life as one saw fit was an important value. Plato believed that suffering from a fatal illness or dishonor made suicide justifiable and should not be a source of disgrace.
In fact, the word Euthanasia, which means putting someone out of their misery, comes from the Greek word for “good death,” referring to ending an individual’s life if they would otherwise endure severe, incurable suffering or disability.
The practice of ending one’s life due to illness, disability, or uselessness has a long history. Among certain nomadic and Innuit tribes, it was expected that family members who became too old to be helpful and indeed presented a liability to the tribe, would voluntarily remain behind to die, often making a bed in the ice for the long winter’s sleep. Similarly, in Hinduism fasting to death was acceptable for monks who had no more responsibilities to justify their existence.
In some societies, death by suicide was considered acceptable if one dishonored the family or lost a battle to the enemy. Such was the case for Ajax after losing face to Odysseus during the Trojan War.
More recent examples include Japanese Kamikaze pilots during WWII who were hailed as patriots for driving their planes into enemy warships. In fact, Japan has a long history of sanctioning suicide, if not endorsing it. The Samauri, for example, were encouraged to commit suicide rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, and their female family members were taught to commit Jigaki (slitting the neck) to avoid capture and rape, thereby maintaining their chastity. Today, Japan still has one of the highest rates of adolescent suicide in the world.
Words for suicide didn’t even appear in the lexicon until after the 1st Century A.D. Even the Bible fails to weigh in on it. While today suicide is considered a sin by most Christians, there is little explicit prohibition of it in the Bible.
Instead, the holy book is littered with examples of people who killed themselves, including Judas, Jesus’s own disciple, who hanged himself in guilt for betraying his lord.
It was St. Augustine in the 4th Century who first described suicide as a sin. But this was due, in part to his need to stop a large number of Christians from choosing to die as martyrs. Of course, none of this stopped the self-killing.
Suicide, it seems, is universal and cuts across all cultures and all times. One can even say that it is built into our DNA, or as Jungian psychologists would say, it is archetypal.
SUICIDE AND SHAME
While the decision to end one’s life is sometimes a conscious one, too often it is not; it is the result of desperation and emotional pain. One source of that pain is shame. Unlike guilt, shame is not related to a single act. It is the consequence of feeling essentially unworthy. In the case of shame, one has not “done” something bad. They “are” bad. To the core.
The feeling of shame can be deep enough to plummet one into feeling ashamed for simply existing. In a 2014 presentation before a Dutch psychoanalytical group, Robbert Wille described this kind of shame as not only about the shame of existing “as we are” but shame about the fact that we are.
“It is accompanied by a merciless and total rejection of the subject’s self and by feelings of extreme worthlessness and inferiority coupled with the all‐pervasive conviction that it would be better not to exist.”
Shame results from early experiences of physical or emotional abuse, not measuring up, being bullied, the victim of racism, or a physical or emotional disability, especially when there is no one to help mediate the feelings of worthlessness that arise and no way to compensate or escape the dejected feelings.
Another source of suicidal feelings, often related to shame, is chronic and profound depression. By itself, depression isn’t a bad thing. We all get depressed, but again, when one feels there is no escape from it or that they have become a burden to others because of it, the pain may be too intense to tolerate.
In that case, suicide may be experienced as the only option. Even Socrates claimed that suicide was an acceptable means to escape an unbearable life.
SUICIDE AS THE LONGING FOR TRANSFORMATION
All this is not to say that suicide is acceptable as a way to deal with things, but that it is part of our humanity. Except in cases where the act of suicide is a practical solution to an individual or societal circumstance, it is often not death per se that is sought, but the end of emotional suffering, as Socrates suggested.
Underneath the death wish, however, is often a longing for transformation or rebirth. James Hillman in his book Suicide and the Soul, argues that the suicide impulse is an instinctive drive and that an individual who commits suicide does not fear the hereafter but is heeding the call to transform.
What is implied in the idea of transformation, from a psychological perspective, is a kind of symbolic death, a death of whatever is causing pain or stopping the organism from further growth and development.
Psychologist Katherine Best, in a 2014 article for the Assisi Institute Journal, explains it this way: “The ‘dark night of the soul’ is “the death experience of an old pattern or lifestyle, as the new way of living is gasping to be born, the soul crawling towards transformation like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.” Her approach to suicidal clients is to help them look for a way to die symbolically, rather than literally. To a client who is contemplating suicide, she asks, “What really needs to die? A relationship? A false belief? A social mask or role? Physical power? Your Shame?”
In his 2002 book, Transforming Depression; Healing the Soul through Creativity, David Rosen claims that what needs to die in a suicidal client is their distorted relationship to their ego or conscious sense of identity. Instead of literally killing themselves, they need to make a symbolic shift from an ego identity to a larger sense of Self.
Take, for example, the person who suffers from deep shame. What may be needed is an ability to transform the shame and sense of worthlessness into a sense of purpose which involves developing a relationship with the higher Self and shattering the negative mirror image provided by the outer world. I have experienced this with clients who cannot live up to cultural or parental expectations and suffer unbearably from it, feeling worthless and alone. The problem is that they are too identified with outer expectations rather than the needs of their individual soul or what Carl Jung called the Self.
Rosen interviewed survivors who jumped off the Golden Gate bridge. He found that among those he interviewed, their motivation to kill themselves was steeped in a profound feeling of aloneness, alienation, depression, rejection, worthlessness, and hopelessness.
Yet, the moment their feet left the bridge, the jumpers regretted their choice, feeling they had made a mistake. All who survived described feelings of spiritual transcendence afterward. Moreover, 90% never made another attempt there or anywhere else. One can speculate that in that lethal moment, the higher Self was screaming, “No! Don’t kill me!”
What Rosen discovered was that subsequent to their death leap, each of the survivors managed to undergo a “symbolic suicide.” That is, they were able to let die (and then grieve) the parts of themselves that were causing them pain. The 10 individuals who set out to die by suicide “had somehow cleared the way for psychic regeneration (and) had symbolically killed their previous negative ego identities,” says Rosen. “Through the act of surviving their depressive and suicidal states, they had transformed themselves.”
I have experienced similar outcomes with clients who initially expressed a desire to die only to discover that they need not kill the literal self, but instead can transform those parts of themselves that are sucking the life out of them.
SUICIDE AT THE COLLECTIVE LEVEL
Treating the cause of suicide at an individual level is something therapists are trained to do. But what about an entire society, one that is suffering from trauma, loss, helplessness, oppression, shame, and fear and is lashing out in violent and irrational ways?
That may well describe the current situation in our country today. Collectively, we feel angry and helpless, full of grief, fear, mistrust, and despair. We seek change. We seek renewal, but in our anger and helplessness we destroy something or someone, be it ourselves or someone else, or both.
The Insurrection on January 6 is a tragic example. The riot at the Capitol resulted in death at the hands of others, as well as death by suicide. Police officer Brian Sicknick died of a stroke following the clash with rioters. He was hailed a hero and given a hero’s funeral.
But two other police officers, Jeffrey Smith and Howard Liebengood, also died following the attack. Both officers fought alongside Sicknick, but they were not offered a hero’s funeral, nor even a designation of death in the line of duty because both died of suicide. In fact, information about their deaths is scant.
In ancient times people devised rituals to act out in symbolic ways the desire for death and rebirth. They also created gods and goddesses to do their bidding. The ancient Greeks portrayed suicide on stage, enabling the audience to have a cathartic experience and to feel the human tragedy of it. In his book Wonderworks, The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, Angus Fletcher notes the healing quality of Greek drama.
Many of the plays of that time incorporated therapeutic techniques equivalent to today’s EMDR to help people “revisit (their) past experiences of trauma by staging suicides, murders, and assaults interspersed with choral chants” which served to comment on the action being witnessed.
The chorus, along with the audience, could view for themselves the unfolding catastrophe as part of “a larger cosmic pattern,” that activates “a shift from tragic helplessness to “a sense of helpfulness,” and, according to Fletcher, this cognitive shift is experienced in our brain as “a visceral belief in our power to heal.”
Unfortunately, we have few collective rituals in our modern world that enable us to traverse this journey through death and rebirth in such an experiential and symbolic way. So the only recourse for way too many people is to enact it literally.
One alternative, at an individual level, is to explore our suicidal feelings with a therapist, counselor, or another healer, but therapy itself can feel shaming due to the archaic idea that only the mentally ill seek therapy. It’s a holdover from the “insanitizing” mentality mentioned earlier. Besides, it doesn’t change the greater society, although it may impact it one person at a time.
Another alternative would be to engage in a national dialogue about suicide and its meaning in today’s world, to do the hard looking at who we’ve become as a social body, and to redefine who we really want to be.
After watching the evening news, one can only wonder if all the anger and violence we see signals an unconscious, collective cry for rebirth, a societal attempt to kill off what in us desperately needs to be transformed if the country and perhaps the species is to survive. The killing off, however, needs to be symbolic.
If we don’t undergo this arduous process we may see even more suicides, some of which take others down with them, as we’ve seen in so many mass shootings.
There will always be violence. There will always be wars. And people may always kill themselves. We know there is a connection between violence toward others and the rate of suicide. Both are indications of distress and a longing for change and transformation.
The rising worldwide rates of violence against another and violence against self signal a worrisome desperation for rebirth. We are long overdue.
As Katherine Best points out, suicide has been with us since the beginning of time and will remain with us forever. That is, “unless we find the courage, love, and honor for all that (is) part of the divine dance of creation.”
There is still time to stop killing ourselves and pushing suicide into the shadows by asking “What is it that really needs to die here?” “What needs to be reborn?” And finally, what is it that will bring about transformation and rebirth, not only to individuals but to society as a whole? Once we have accomplished that, maybe we can answer Camu’s question about whether life is worth living — or not.
