The Noonday Demon (89 page)

234
For my discussion of the benzodiazepines, I have relied on the work of Dr. Richard
A. Friedman of Cornell, and in particular on oral interviews conducted with him in the spring of 2000.

234
The dangers of excessive benzos are discussed in Mark Gold and Andrew Slaby’s
Dual Diagnosis in Substance Abuse,
pages 20–21.

234
For a fuller description of roofies, see David McDowell and Henry Spitz’s
Substance Abuse,
pages 65–66.

235
The origins of heroin with Bayer are discussed in Craig Lambert, “Deep Cravings,”
Harvard Magazine
102, no. 4 (2000): 60.

235
David McDowell and Henry Spitz’s
Substance Abuse
provides a short history of ecstasy, pages 59–60.

235
Michael Pollan’s piece appeared under the title “A Very Fine Line,”
New York Times Magazine,
September 12, 1999.

238
Keith Richards’s remark was discovered in Dave Hickey’s brilliant book
Air Guitar,
before the title page. I thank the very hip Stephen Bitterolf for sharing it with me.

243
The idea that there is often no clear causal link between depression and suicidality is taken from a number of authors intimate with both phenomena. As George Colt writes on page 43 in
The Enigma of Suicide,
suicide is no longer thought of as “depression’s last stop.”

243
The quotation from George Colt is from
Ibid.,
312.

243
That over 40 percent of the people in the general public who committed suicide had had psychiatric in-patient care is taken from Jane Pirkis and Philip Burgess, “Suicide and recency of health care contacts: A systematic review,”
British Journal of Psychiatry
173 (1998): 463.

244
A. Alvarez’s remark on attempts at exorcism is from his
The Savage God,
page 96. His words about suicide and ambition appear on page 75.

245
These famous lines from
Hamlet
are in act 3, scene 1, lines 79–80; the second quotation is from act 3, scene 1, lines 83–85. There is of course no single and clear interpretation for this speech from Hamlet. I would point readers toward C. S. Lewis’s
Studies in Words,
for example, which devotes a whole chapter to the relationship between “conscience” and “conscious.” I would also emphasize the brilliantly lucid interpretation provided by Harold Bloom in
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

245
Albert Camus’s notion that suicide is the one philosophical problem is in
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays,
page 3.

245
Schopenhauer’s remarks are from his essay “On Suicide” in
The Works of Schopenhauer,
page 437.

246
Santayana’s statement comes from Glen Evans’s
The Encyclopedia of Suicide,
page ii.

246
Freud’s remark on having no way to approach suicide is taken from a speech he gave at a gathering of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society on the subject of suicide, April 20 and 27, 1910. I have taken it as quoted in Litman’s essay “Sigmund Freud on Suicide,” in
Essays in Self-Destruction,
edited by Edwin Shneidman, page 330.

246
Albert Camus speaks of the illogic of postponing death in
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays,
page 3.

247
Pliny’s quotation is taken from
The Works of Schopenhauer,
page 433.

247
These lines are to be found in John Donne’s
Biathanatos,
page 39.

247
The quotation from Schopenhauer is in the book
Essays and Aphorisms,
page 78.

247
The quotations from Thomas Szasz come from his book
The Second Sin,
page 67.

247
The Harvard study is described in Herbert Hendin’s
Suicide in America,
page 216.

248
Edwin Shneidman’s quotation about the split is from his book
The Suicidal Mind,
pages 58–59.

248
Edwin Shneidman’s statement about the right to belch is quoted from George Colt’s
The Enigma of Suicide,
page 341.

248
The assertion that someone commits suicide every seventeen minutes was calculated using statistics for total number of suicides per year, provided by the NIMH (31,000 for year 1996). The calculation: 524,160 minutes per year divided by 31,000 suicides per year equals one suicide every 16.9 minutes.

248
That suicide ranks number three among causes of death for young people is taken from NIMH Suicide Facts Web sites (statistics are for year 1996). That suicide ranks number two among college students is taken from Kay Jamison’s
Night Falls Fast,
page 21. The comparative statistics on suicide and AIDS and the figure for suicide-attempt-related hospitalizations are both taken from Kay Jamison’s
Night Falls Fast,
pages 23 and 24 respectively.

248
The World Health Organization (WHO) statistic on suicide comes from
The World Health Report,
1999. The study that found suicide to have increased 260 percent within a geographic area is U. Åsgård et al., “Birth Cohort Analysis of Changing Suicide Risk by Sex and Age in Sweden 1952 to 1981,”
Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica
76 (1987).

248
The statistics on suicide and manic-depression, and suicide and major depression, are taken from Kay Jamison’s
Night Falls Fast,
page 110.

248
The connection between suicidality and first episode is in M. Oquendo et al., “Suicide: Risk Factors and Prevention in Refractory Major Depression,”
Depression and Anxiety
5 (1997): 203.

248
The figures on suicide attempts and completed suicides are in George Colt’s
The Enigma of Suicide,
page 311.

248
The document containing the apparently conflicting statistics is Aaron Beck’s
Depression.
On page 57, in a survey of suicide research, Beck cites two studies that claim radically different findings. The first study’s findings “suggest that the risk of suicide in a patient hospitalized for depression is about five hundred times the national average.” The second study, presented in the next paragraph, states, “The suicide rate for depressed patients, therefore, was twenty-five times the expected rate. . . .”

249
The NIMH position that “research has shown that 90 percent of people who kill themselves have depression or another diagnosable mental or substance abuse disorder” is on their Web site at
www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/harmaway.cfm
.

249
That Monday and Friday have the highest rate of suicide is reported in Eric Marcus’s
Why Suicide?
page 23.

249
The rate of suicide by hour of the day is in M. Gallerani et al., “The Time for suicide,”
Psychological Medicine
26 (1996).

249
The increase of suicide during spring is reported in David Lester’s
Making Sense of Suicide,
page 153.

249
That women have a higher rate of suicide during the first week (menstrual phase) of their menstrual cycle is discussed in Richard Wetzel and James McClure Jr., “Suicide and the Menstrual Cycle: A Review,”
Comprehensive Psychiatry
13, no. 4 (1972). They also review studies that point to elevated rates of suicide attempts during the last week (luteal phase) of the menstrual cycle. There is, however, controversy
regarding the methodological validity of many of these studies. For a critical review of the literature, see Enrique Baca-García et al., “The Relationship Between Menstrual Cycle Phases and Suicide Attempts,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
62 (2000). The effect of pregnancy and childbirth on maternal suicidality is reported by E. C. Harris and Brian Barraclough, “Suicide as an Outcome for Medical Disorders,”
Medicine
73 (1994).

249
Émile Durkheim’s watershed book was published in 1897 as
Le Suicide.
My discussion of Durkheim’s classifications is taken from Steve Taylor’s rigorous book
Durkheim and the Study of Suicide.

250
The quotation from Charles Bukowski I got from a billboard on Sunset Boulevard. I have not been able to find its precise location within his work. I do not recommend driving on Sunset Boulevard during rush hour to locate this reference.

250
The quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville comes from his justly famous
Democracy in America,
page 296.

250
Émile Durkheim’s extemporization on the social origins of suicide is discussed in Steve Taylor’s
Durkheim and the Study of Suicide,
page 21.

250
The notion that adults, children, and people with psychiatric illnesses who commit suicide are at least two to three times as likely to have a family history of suicide as those who do not is compiled from over thirty studies and reported in Kay Jamison’s
Night Falls Fast,
page 169.

250
Paul Wender et al., “Psychiatric disorders in the biological and adoptive families of adopted individuals with affective disorder,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
43 (1986), report higher rates of suicide among biological families than among adoptive families. For a review of studies on identical twins and suicide, see Alec Roy et al., “Genetics of Suicide in Depression,”
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry,
suppl. 2 (1999).

250
The information on suicide clusters is in Kay Jamison’s
Night Falls Fast,
pages 144–53 for locations, and pages 276–80 for recent epidemics.

251
The suicide epidemic following the publication of
The Sorrows of Young Werther
is described by Paolo Bernardini in his unpublished manuscript “
Melancholia gravis
: Robert Burton’s
Anatomy
(1621) and the Links between Suicide and Melancholy.”

251
The report that suicide rates go up when suicide stories occur in the media, and the report of a jump in suicides following the death of Marilyn Monroe, are in George Colt’s
The Enigma of Suicide,
pages 90–91.

251
A discussion of how suicide-prevention programs may in fact inspire suicides occurs in Kay Jamison’s
Night Falls Fast,
pages 273–75.

251
That suicide attempts predict suicide is reported in Rise Goldstein et al., “The Prediction of Suicide,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
48 (1991). They write, “We were able to demonstrate that not only a history of prior suicide attempts but also the
number
of attempts is critical, as the risk of suicide increases with each subsequent suicide attempt.” Page 421.

251
The quotation from Maria Oquendo et al. is from “Inadequacy of Antidepressant Treatment for Patients with Major Depression Who Are at Risk for Suicidal Behavior,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
156, no. 2 (1999): 193.

252
That lithium is the drug most tested for its effects on suicidality is recorded in Kay Jamison’s
Night Falls Fast,
pages 239–41.

252
That the rate of suicide among bipolar patients who discontinue use of lithium rises sixteenfold is indicated in Leonardo Tondo et al., “Lithium maintenance treatment reduces risk of suicidal behavior in Bipolar Disorder patients,” in
Lithium: Biochemical and Clinical Advances,
edited by Vincent Gallicchio and Nicholas Birch, pages 161–71.

252
That patients treated with ECT have lower suicide rates than those treated with medications is outlined in Jerome Motto’s essay “Clinical Considerations of Biological Correlates of Suicide,” in
The Biology of Suicide,
edited by Ronald Maris.

252
Freud’s formulation of suicide as a murderous impulse toward the self is discussed in a number of his writings. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” he writes, “We have long known, it is true, that no neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back on himself from murderous impulses against others.” See
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 14, page 252.