Review: 'Stay: A history of suicide and the philosophies against it', by Jennifer Michael Hecht

The prologue to Stay is unpromising. Two of the author’s friends killed themselves, despite seeming to have plenty to live for. These events “knocked around” Jennifer Hecht, impelling her to write a blog with a bold imperative: “Don’t kill yourself. Life has always been almost too hard to bear, for a lot of the people, for a lot of the time. It’s awful. But it isn’t too hard to bear, it’s only almost too hard to bear.”

The blog became a newspaper article and Hecht was inundated with emails from the suicidal and their intimates, thanking her for having instructed them to “Stay”. Emboldened by this response, she wrote the book.

This preface left me nervous that I was in for an emotional rant. But au contraire: Hecht has produced a work for the cerebrally inclined – but not one which, I fear, will achieve her main goal of diverting the suicidal from their course of action.

The main problem is that the first half of the book is devoted to a scholarly discussion of ideas about the legitimacy of suicide. We get the Greek and Roman Greats, pro- and anti-. Religion emerges, making it a sin and then a crime, at some length. Then come the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, reacting against the barbarities of the religious response to suicide – torturing the dead bodies of suicides and placing them prominently in public places.

One cannot but be impressed by Hecht’s breadth of knowledge, mostly expressed with a light touch, and there are many fascinating details. Having endured the torrential rain and high winds of the last fortnight, one is inclined to agree with Montesquieu’s view that the English climate causes a “disrelish of everything”.

But if Hecht’s true goal is to persuade the general reader to hang on in there, it is hard to understand why she needs so much detail. I doubt that those contemplating jumping off a bridge will get very far into Chapter One.

This is a shame because when we have finally hacked our way through the thickets of philosophical history into the uplands of modern social science, on page 149, sunlight does await us. Hecht takes us systematically through the strong evidence that suicide is contagious and therefore, before you kill yourself, you should think carefully about the others you might take with you.

A study of the whole Swedish population looking back over the last 30 years shows that suicide is three times more common amongst children whose parents died that way. This is not the result of genes: children who lose parents through illness are not at greater risk; it’s the manner of the death that plants the idea of repeating it. While rates of being hospitalised with depression are subsequently considerably increased in children who lost parents in accidents or illness, actual suicide is not more likely.

Further evidence that suicide is contagious comes from suicidal clusters identified in groups of doctors, police and farmers. Since 2007, suicide has risen steadily in the US military. In 2012, more died by their own hand (349) than in combat. By no means was this all due to the trauma of war. Half of the military suicides had never been deployed. Contagion seems to be the cause of the rise.

Contagion is also rife in schools and universities: a student suicide increases the risk of further ones in an institution. When celebrities or characters in television fictions kill themselves, the vulnerable are put at risk. People of the same gender and age as the celebrities or TV characters do it in greater numbers in the succeeding months.

By the end of this chapter, Hecht has made a highly persuasive case, lending weight to the plea she makes: “I ask for soldiers and veterans in despair to think of other soldiers and veterans… young people might be convinced to have the same concerns… a middle-aged woman must think of other middle-aged women…” and so on.

She contends that we owe it to our future selves and our communities not to do it, concluding: “…first, you have a responsibility not to kill yourself; and second, the rest of us – and you yourself – owe you our thanks and respect. We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith – a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.”

The sudden lurches in the book from cerebral, detailed academic arguments to almost pious injunctions, are an oddity. Above all, there is a curious lack of empathy for the state of mind of someone who is seriously considering suicide. I suspect that the vast majority of such people are unlikely to work their way through her cerebrations and even if they do, will not to be swayed by logic, rationality and evidence.

At the moment I know of two people who may well commit suicide. Both are highly educated, intelligent and thoughtful. I think it improbable that they would plough through all of this book, even though it has robust and lucid prose, and the exposition is good. I doubt that such cerebral arguments and evidence are the kind that will persuade them, either way.

Behind much suicide lies the impulse to communicate an angry reproach: “Now look what you have made me do, you bastards! Now you know how I feel!” Both the parents of one of the suicidal people I know killed themselves. It is resisting the wish to show how furious he is with them that he needs help with. Hecht does not provide it. There is a suspicion that her need to belabour us with her scholarship is either a (narcissistic) wish to prove her academic credibility or some kind of cerebral defence against the emotions triggered by the death of her friends. Nowhere does she discuss her own feelings about suicide, such as whether she has contemplated it. She seems to have escaped into intellectualisation with occasional emotional outbursts breaking through.

Perhaps if she had metabolised her own anger, despair and sadness she would have written a book more likely to succeed in its admirable goal. When someone is suicidal, just ordering them to be stoical, or providing hundreds of pages of logical arguments, is not enough. A good antidote to suicide is David Bowie’s song “Rock‘n’Roll Suicide”. In it, Bowie (a persona itself adopted by David Jones, his real name) separates from the character of Ziggy Stardust and tells him that he is not alone, that he is watching him. He ends by telling his alter ego to give him his hand, that he is wonderful. In the process of self-soothing, Bowie reached out to us all. The suicidal need to feel loved, not hectored or given highbrow rationales for living.

Oliver James is a chartered clinical psychologist. He is the author of ‘How to Develop Emotional Health’ (Macmillan)

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