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Vice’s Suicide Spread Has a Right to Exist

Vice magazine created a shitstorm by publishing a photo spread of models depicted as famous female authors at the moment of their suicides. I’m all for freedom of expression and would never advocate banning such things. But as an art fan I can offer my critique: This spread was utter crap.

Mood music:

Vice pulled the feature down from its site after a public outcry, but the print version is still available and the magazine got the desired attention in the process. That’s what magazines like Vice are all about — doing shocking things for attention. In radio, that’s what shock jocks do. Fine.

But as someone who lost a dear friend to suicide and has watched many good, talented souls lose the battle against depression and insanity, it seems like all we have here is a glorification of brilliant lives gone to waste. The photos include a model portraying Virginia Wolf at the moment she fills her clothes with boulders and drowns herself. The “Last Words” feature also recreated the suicide of Beat poet Elise Cowen, who jumped to her death from the window of a building her parents were living in at the time.

Though the spread has been removed, the photos also appear with an article on the controversy in the publication Jezebel.

When I say this spread was crap, I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who admittedly gets set off about suicide. But that’s a personal opinion. If people want to create this kind of art, that should be their right.

As well, once something is published, the publication ought to stand by it. Pulling the spread was stupid. If you’re not willing to stand by your art, you’re a coward. I offered my critique. Others should be able to do so as well.

I don’t know if there’s a lesson in here. I’m not one to tell people how they should express themselves. That would be hypocritical of me.

As for the question of whether the spread glamorized suicide and possibly inspired future acts of self-demise, I’m not really worried about that. Art depicting that kind of darkness has always been out there. That’s a staple of the heavy metal music I love so much. People may find that kind of art cathartic or they may not. But neither the art or the artist is responsible for what people do because of that art.

Instead of banning art that glorifies suicide, we need to keep coming up with better suicide prevention tools. Fortunately, there’s a lot of activity on that front, including movements in the tech industry to provide suicide prevention training and forums for those experiencing job depression to make sense of their lives and relate to the pain of others.

As long as such prevention and education activities persist, we have a fighting chance to gain an upper hand over depression, even in the face of art that makes suicide look glamorous and cool.

Vice Fiction Edition

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Mindy McCready and the ‘Celebrity Rehab’ Curse

CNN doesn’t say so directly, but in its follow-up coverage of country singer Mindy McCready’s death, it suggests that those who appear on Celebrity Rehab are cursed.

Mood music:

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The report notes that McCready is the fifth Celebrity Rehab alum to die in the last two years. She follows former Alice In Chains bassist Mike Starr, Real World cast member Joey Kovar, Grease actor Jeff Conaway and Rodney King, who had been beaten by police in 1991, to the grave. McCready’s death is especially horrific. The mother of two shot herself to death on the front porch, the same spot David Wilson, her boyfriend and father of her children, committed suicide a month ago.

Many people watch Celebrity Rehab to laugh over the wreckage of celebrity lives. We see these people at rock bottom, slaves to their addictions. Their money has run out, their careers have crashed and burned and they can’t stop from embarrassing themselves in public.

When we laugh at the spectacle, it’s usually over the relief that it’s not us on the TV. Some viewers have sympathy, while others make heartless, tasteless jokes about how the mighty have fallen.

Some people have suggested that the show’s host, Dr. Drew Pinsky, is presiding over a Hollywood circus, showing off the freaks to an eager public, so to speak. But that’s not how I see it.

Pinsky has seen a lot of his famous friends die at the hands of addiction and the underlying mental illness, and his stated goal is to show people just how terrible a disease this is. He told CNN:

One of my hopes was, in bringing ‘Celebrity Rehab’ out, was to teach people how dangerous addiction was. … If I was doing a show on cancer, there would not be much surprise when my cancer patient died. In fact, we’d celebrate a few years of good quality life. People don’t understand that addiction has virtually the same prognosis. If you have other mental health issues on top of that, it’s so much worse. …

There’s a cautionary tale here about the stigma of mental illness and the way in which the public attack celebrities who take care of themselves. … [McCready] became so fearful of the stigma and the way people were responding to her being hospitalized that she actually checked herself out prematurely. … She is a lovely woman, we have lost her, and it didn’t have to go down like this.

Having followed Pinsky’s work over the years, I think his efforts are sincere and useful.

We see celebrities crashing and burning on TV, but countless people from all walks of life suffer these horrors every minute of every day. We can’t help them unless we know the behaviors to look for. Pinsky and the people who have been on his show have given us quite an education.

I hope we don’t waste it on mere gawking.

Dr. Drew and Mindy McCready

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Lessons From the Hemingway Curse

I’ve always been drawn to Ernest Hemingway and his family, not because of his writings or his antics, but because of the deep stain mental illness has left on the Hemingway legacy.

Mood music:

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I remember an English teacher talking about Hemingway’s 1961 suicide. The teacher suggested Hemingway was an asshole, that he was too macho to accept that he was getting too old to seek out adventure and thus gave up. I accepted that answer for a long time, and when my best friend killed himself in 1996 the Hemingway perception colored how I dealt with my own loss.

Hemingway was an asshole for doing what he did, the teacher had suggested. Therefore, my friend was an asshole for doing what he did.

It’s too bad I saw it that way. If I knew the truth about mental illness back then, I would have had a healthier outlook on what had happened in my life. I still would have grieved, of course. But maybe I wouldn’t have been so haunted for so long. I’m not bitter about that. I ultimately learned my lessons and was able to make peace with the past. But my awareness has drawn me to other suicide cases, including those of the Hemingways.

Besides the famous author, actress Margaux Hemingway ended her life in 1996, the same year as my friend. All told, seven members of Ernest’s family have died by taking their own lives, according to CNN.

It makes sense. Depression runs in families and so can the coping tools for dealing with that depression.

Looking for resources to manage your depression? Check out our Coping with Depression, Fear and Anxiety page.

The CNN story mainly discusses the so-called Hemingway curse and how actress Mariel Hemingway, sister of Margaux and granddaughter of Ernest, has dealt with it. From the article:

Every family, even famous ones, have secrets. The Hemingways are no different. “We were, sort of, the other American family that had this horrible curse,” says Mariel Hemingway. She compared her family to the Kennedys — but the Hemingway curse, she said, is mental illness. Hemingway explores the troubled history of her family in “Running from Crazy,” a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. “Knowing that there’s so much suicide and so much mental illness in my family, I’ve always kind of been ‘running from crazy,’ worried that one day I’d wake up and be in the same position,” Mariel Hemingway, 51, said at a support group for families of suicide, as shown in the film.

Making the film must have been a liberating experience for her. By pulling all those family skeletons from the closet, she’s freed herself from some of the haunting and educated a lot of people in the process. That’s always been one of my main motivations in doing this blog.

If blogs like mine and documentaries like hers can bring a few people some peace of mind and detonate the stigmas around mental illness, it will have been worth it.

Ernest Hemingway

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Friends Of The Gifted Need To Learn Suicide Intervention Tactics

One thing I’ve learned over the years: Some super-smart, super-gifted, ahead-of-their-time people often battle with depression and eventually lose their war. So it was for my best friend who took his life 16 years ago. So it has been for far too many of my industry peers.

Mood music:

I’m thinking of them and for those who continue to struggle with depression daily. I’m grateful, particularly in my industry, for those who have stepped up to support those who need help.

A few years ago, one friend suggested creating a suicide intervention tactics workshop at security cons, focusing specifically on gifted tech folks who are particularly vulnerable. That idea has led to a lot of great content that has no doubt saved lives.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned since starting this blog, it’s that depression and anxiety run high in the information security industry. I’ve had many discussions with people who have battled their own demons. All of them were brilliant, innovative and downright gifted.

They remind me of my long-dead friend. I often think about how his intelligence made him hyper-aware of the world around him. He had moments of extreme joy and extreme pain. You could say he knew too much to be happy.

If there’s one thing I wish I had back then, it would be the skills to see where he was headed and the tactics to help him back off the ledge.

To Amber’s point, friends and colleagues of the sufferers in our industry need to learn tactics to make a difference.

I don’t consider myself gifted, but in the last several years I’ve found tools to cope with my own depressed feelings. I’ve learned to use music, humor, writing and counseling as weapons against the dark. Medication alone is never enough. Sometimes, it makes things worse.

Those tools are essential, as are tactics we could all use to help those who can’t seem to help themselves. Putting those things on display at tech conferences (virtual and, eventually, in-person again) could be as important as the technology on display.

I’ll keep trying to do my part to make it happen.

Skeleton in Pain

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Aaron Swartz and How to Deal With Suicide

I read many articles this weekend about the suicide of Internet prodigy and activist Aaron Swartz. Most were about how we should view his legacy in the face of charges that he used MIT’s computers to gain illegal access to millions of scholarly papers kept by JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals.

Mood music:

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Some call Swartz a hero who stood up for Internet freedoms. Others point out that he broke the law and had to be punished.

All that is beside today’s main point: The 26-year-old, co-creator of RSS and Reddit, was a tortured soul, the victim of a horrible illness many still fail to comprehend. It’s an illness I suffer from, and it claimed the life of my best friend 16-plus years ago.

Swartz, a man I never met, was open about his depression. Like other sufferers — like me — he wanted people to understand that it was a true illness, as dangerous to the body and the brain as cancer is when left unchecked.

Now he’s another tragic statistic, and those left behind have to come to terms with the nature of his death.

In the years since my friend’s death, I developed a code of conduct that allowed me to stop wallowing over that evil day in November 1996:

  • Don’t blame yourself; it’s pointless. No matter how many times you replay events in your mind, the fact is that it’s not your fault. For one thing, it’s impossible to get into the head of someone who is contemplating suicide. Sure, there are signs, but since we all get the blues sometimes, it’s very easy to dismiss the signs as a normal bout of depression. When someone loudly contemplates suicide, it’s usually a cry for help. When they say nothing and even appear OK, it’s usually because they’ve made their decision and are in the quiet, planning stages.
  • Don’t blame others; it’s equally pointless. Take it from me: Nerves in your circle of family and friends are so raw right now that it won’t take much for relationships to break apart. A week after my friend’s death I wrote a column about it, revealing what, in hindsight, was too much detail. His family was furious and most of them haven’t talked to me since. They feel I was exploiting his death to advance my writing career and get attention. What I’ve learned, and this is tough to admit, is that you’re going to have to let it go when the finger pointing starts. It’s better not to engage the other side. Nobody is in their right mind at this point, so go easy on each other. Give people space to make their errors in judgment and learn from them.
  • Don’t demonize the dead. When a friend takes their life, one thing that can gnaw at survivors is the notion that if they believe in Heaven and Hell, they believe those who kill themselves are doomed to the latter. I’m a devout Catholic, so you can bet your ass this one has gone through my mind. What I’ve learned, though, is that depression is a clinical disease. A person suffering from depression who then kills themselves isn’t in control of their actions, and Catholics, at least, don’t believe God punishes them for that.

    Even if you don’t believe in an afterlife, you might feel angry at your loved one for intentionally leaving you just when they did. It comes to the same thing: that person was sick and couldn’t make good decisions. My practice today is to simply pray that those souls will be redeemed and that they will know peace. It’s really the best you can do.
  • Break the stigma. One of the friends Swartz left behind has already done something that honors him: She went on Facebook and directed people toward the American Association of Suicidology website, specifically the page on knowing the warning signs. That’s a great example of doing something to honor your friend’s memory instead of sitting around second-guessing yourself. The best thing to do now is to educate people on the disease so that sufferers can help themselves and friends and family can really be of service.
  • Get on with your life. Nobody will blame you for not being yourself for a while. You have, after all, just experienced one of the worst tragedies there is. But try not to let it paralyze you. Life must go on. You have to get on with your work and be there for those around you.

Life can be brutal. But it is a beautiful thing. Seize it.

Aaron Swartz

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Putting a Face on Suicide

There’s a page on Facebook everyone should check out called Putting a Face on Suicide. It’s powerful stuff.

Mood music:

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Having lost a close friend to suicide, this page hits me where I live. We hear about suicide statistics all the time. We know of the famous suicides, like Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Cobain. But regular people die by their own hand every day, and their faces are easily forgotten. That’s what makes this Facebook page so important.

Putting a Face on Suicide is the personal project of Mike Purcell. His son, 21-year-old Christopher Lee Purcell, died by suicide in 2008 while serving in the U.S. Navy. Since then, the father has relentlessly worked to break down the bullshit notions about suicide — that those who take their own lives were simply weak, scared, quitters and the like.

Here’s part of Purcell’s mission statement for the project:

Every 40 seconds somewhere around the world someone dies by suicide, that’s 99 people every 66 minutes. Every day, that’s almost 100 people in the United States alone, and over 2160 worldwide. Putting a Face on Suicide (PAFOS) is a suicide awareness project that creates posters and videos to pay tribute to those we have lost to suicide with dignity and respect. PAFOS humanizes the daunting statistics; lovingly replacing numbers with faces.

PAFOS is an ongoing project soliciting pictures of your loved ones who died by suicide. Its objective is to collect 99 photos of people who have died by suicide for each day of the year; i.e., 36135 faces will represent 365 days of loss by suicide in the United States. PAFOS uses each photo in a poster and a video, posts it on the PAFOS Facebook page, and creates a personal tribute page featuring your loved one.

When you visit the page, the first thing that will strike you is how happy many of these victims looked when the pictures were taken. There are smiling teenagers who had promising futures. There are older people who look content to spend their senior years doting on grandchildren. There are veterans of our most recent wars, looking proud, sober and ready for whatever life throws at them.

Whenever someone dies by their own hand, you hear the inevitable comments that start with but:

“But she had everything going for her.”

“But he was always smiling.”

“But he had a beautiful wife and children, a gorgeous house and a high-paying job. How could he do this?”

Those are natural questions to ask when you first hear the news of a suicide. It’s part of the shock and disbelief we feel.

Yet the questions also show how little we understand the insidious nature of depression. Much of the stigma comes from that religious belief that death by suicide is a trip straight to Hell. It’s not necessarily true, and a friend of mine found this bit of clarity in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

2282 Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.

2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.

Instead of worrying about where in the afterlife our lost friends and family are, we should do what is in our control: remembering the best these souls gave in life and honoring their memories. The Facebook page does that and more.

PAFOS: Peter

PAFOS: Thomas Edward Albright

PAFOS: Paige Rose

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Grief Management Put to Music

Weeks after a loved one dies and we’ve allowed ourselves to fall apart, we have to make a choice: Stay in a fetal position, hidden from the world, or stand up and move forward. This is a little tribute to someone who made the latter choice.

Mood music:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/48842027″ iframe=”true” /]

I don’t know Ian Clark very well. We’re connected on Facebook, and I’m very fond of his mom’s band, The 360s (he plays drums in that band and is guitarist/vocalist in a band called Razors in the Night). But I sure as hell know what he’s going through.

A few weeks ago, he lost his best friend and cousin, James Morrill. I’ve watched his family grieve in their Facebook posts, and I can’t help but remember when my brother died unexpectedly in 1984 and my best friend followed suit nearly 13 years later. My friend’s death had a particularly damaging effect on me because that was a suicide. After he passed, I spent the next two years viciously binge-eating my way to 280 pounds of uselessness. Badly depressed, I hid from the world, staying indoors watching Star Trek reruns instead of staying connected with other friends.

You could say I chose to stay in the fetal position.

Since his moment of heartbreak, Ian has plowed ahead with his music and has honored his cousin by writing a song — the one featured as today’s mood music.

So far, I’d say he’s decided to move forward. It inspires me.

I hope he keeps doing what he’s doing — channeling his feelings into the music. Music is one of the best therapies in times of grief. And when you’re writing it, you have the chance to help others make it through their own trials.