Special guest Candace Opper tells Mike and Sarah about how the death of a rock star changed the field of suicidology (which is a thing). Digressions include eating disorders, car crashes and the insane grimness of the term “family annihilation.” The cringe-worthiness of Mike’s teenage years reaches new depths.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Special guest Candace Opper tells Mike and Sarah about how the death of a rock star changed the field of suicidology (which is a thing). Digressions include eating disorders, car crashes and the insane grimness of the term “family annihilation.” The cringe-worthiness of Mike’s teenage years reaches new depths.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Kurt Cobain
Sarah: What would you like to do first? I was thinking that since Candace has been listening to the show…
Mike: Oh no, sorry. Condolences for your hours.
Sarah: Michael!
Candace: Welcome to You're Wrong About, a podcast that fills a void in your life when you're a mom and don't have time to research all the things that you were obsessed with as a kid. And so your friend, Sarah Marshall, researches it for you.
Sarah: Or your friend Michael Hobbes does.
Mike: My friend suggested a tagline this morning. He said, we're debunk mates.
Sarah: We sleep in our debunk beds.
Mike: I'm Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: And I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm a writer for Buzzfeed, and The New Republic, and also The Believer.
Mike: So we have a special guest today, Candace Opper. Candace, do you want to just tell us a bit about yourself?
Candace: I am Candace Opper. I have published some essays in various places, Guernica, Lit Hub, Creative Nonfiction. But my big news is that I've been working on a manuscript for several years, and it recently got selected by Cheryl Strayed to be published with a small press out of Arizona called Kore Press. It won their annual memoir contest.
Mike: Oh my God. Congratulations. Can you say what it's about?
Candace: Oh, it's not top secret at all. And it's very related to what we're going to talk about today. The book is about my experience losing a friend to suicide when we were kids. He killed himself a week after Kurt Cobain. And it was like very obviously a copycat suicide, which is both unusual and normal. But it's also about obsession and how I, over many years, have been obsessed with the death of this person who I call a friend, because I don't know what else to call him, but I actually didn't really know him very well at all. And why did I get attached to this specific phenomenon. So that's my very bad elevator pitch for this book.
Sarah: It's an elevator in a big building.
Mike: And this leads very well into what we're talking about today, which is kind of Kurt Cobain, but then also more broadly this phenomenon of copycat suicide, and also adolescent suicide. Yeah. Where do you think we should start, CandAce? What's a good place to start this whole story?
Candace: Well, you guys usually start with your little ‘what do you remember about this’ or ‘what do you remember about that event’, right?
Mike: Oh yeah.
Candace: See, I have been listening.
Sarah: Do you want to tell us your memories of the Kurt Cobain suicide, Sarah? Do you remember what kind of, I guess where you were and what you thought about at the time?
Sarah: I had no awareness of it at all. It was in ‘94 and I would have been five or six. That was the year of Tonya Harding and I do have memories of that. That was my formative Pacific Northwest news item of 1994.
Mike: That's your Rosebud.
Sarah: I don't think I have any memory of it, at all. What about you, Michael? You were a Seattleite.
Mike: One of the overwhelming themes of the show is that I was an insufferable teenager in 94. I was 12 and I was already into music and I was in Seattle for the whole grunge thing. I was aware of it. But, because I was insufferable, I was not into that music at all. I was really into Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin, and all these other bands. So the whole time that history was happening around me, I was like, this is dumb, it's a fad, it's going to end. Why are you guys into this? It's so stupid.
And then this is like double insufferable, five years later when I was at the age when like you're supposed to discover Nirvana, right, I discovered Nirvana. And I was like, hey, I wonder what this band is. And I got really into it. I was like, oh my God, this guy is like a genius. And I got really sad about Kurt Cobain killing himself five years after he killed himself and five years after everyone else had already processed this. And for one day I wore a black armband.
Candace: Oh, it was like the anniversary?
Mike: No. It was just because I had found out about it and I wanted to wear this black armband. Everyone at school was like, did a firefighter die or something, why are you wearing a black armband? I was like, Kurt Cobain. And they're like, that happened five years ago, what are you doing? And I'm like, isn't it sad, though? And I never wore it again. So I was actually really bummed, but not at an appropriate time to be bummed.
So what was your relationship to it Candace? How old were you?
Candace: So, I was 13. I didn't care about Nirvana at all at the time. I was really into listening to movie scores on tape, Jurassic Park and Dracula, Bram Stoker's Dracula, specifically. That's what I was really into. And I think I had just started to dip my toes in the water with Radiohead and Red Hot Chili Peppers and some of the stuff. Yeah, I guess I liked Pearl Jam and stuff, but Nirvana was way too rough around the edges for 13 year old Candace. So I remember when getting the news about Kurt Cobain dying. Because they found his body three days after he actually died.
And the news had come to us later in the day. My best friend, Liz, at the time she was on some school field trip and she called me frantically from her hotel room. They were in Boston, I think. And she called me frantically, “Kurt Cobain died! He killed himself!” You know, freaking out. And I was like, Is that the guy from Nirvana? I sort of vaguely knew who it was, but she was really panicking about it. And I just remember being like, yeah, okay. It wasn't a thing to me at all. And then I remember going back to school, because that was on a Friday night, going back to school the following week. And there were some kids who were in mourning, dressed in all black or something, as people were making a big deal about it. The sort of grungy kids. Then we heard some rumor about some kid who had to go get his stomach pumped because he had taken a bunch of pills. And I was like, are you kidding? That's so stupid. Who cares about this dumb rockstar, blah, blah, blah.
And then a week later, this guy Brian, who I was in school band with, shot himself. And we were on spring break at the time. And we found out a couple of days later. And sort of the news, the details of it came in shifts, you know, we didn't find everything out right away. But I later confirmed, it seemed like a rumor at a time, but he had Nirvana CDs by his body and articles about Kurt Cobain in his pocket. I think when I heard that, I was like, what? Wow, okay, this is bigger than I thought it was. How does this possibly happen? Why is this person so influential? I didn't even really know that Brian liked Nirvana. And so then that kind of snowballed.
Mike: Can you walk us through Kurt Cobain's life? Just the broad outlines of him as a person and what led to the suicide. There's never any one reason he killed himself.
Sarah: Oh, we're going to get to that.
Candace: Yeah. So the formal, scientific, industry or study of suicide is called suicidology, which I learned while doing research. And it's like a sect of people who are psychologists and sociologists who like specifically focus on suicide and suicide prevention. So in that kind of world, Kurt Cobain is sort of considered more or less a textbook suicide. He had a rough childhood, you had a sort of tumultuous family life. His parents got divorced at a young age and they were really at odds with each other for a long time. He went back and forth living with his mom, living with his dad, and he had step-parents that weren't really great. And he just didn't really grow up in a loving environment. Also, his grandfather had two brothers who died by suicide.
Mike: Oh, wow.
Candace: That is almost always a factor in suicides is that there is another suicide in the family or a suicide close to the person. Also, there was an instance where he and a couple of friends, I think when he was in eighth grade, were walking home from school or something. I don't remember the specific details, but they found a body of someone who had hung themselves. I think it was somebody's brother that they went to school with. The story was that they just were mesmerized by it and just stayed there for a half hour, an hour before they went and got anybody, because they were just stunned by it. So I think that having those suicides as examples in his life, not that it necessarily introduced the idea to him, but that it normalized it in a way.
Mike: Well, yeah. Is the explanation for that among sociologists is that there's a genetic component to it, or is it just like you think of it as an option growing up?
Candace: Both, because I think that mental illness a lot of times has passed down genetically, but it's social as well. Especially in places like Washington, the suicide rate in these kinds of big, empty states is much higher because of the conditions of some people living there. And the access to guns is really a huge factor in it. Guns account for, I think, between 60% and 70% of suicides in America every year.
Mike: Holy shit. It’s that high?
Candace: Yeah.
Sarah: And what is the highest demographic for suicide in America?
Candace: The highest demographic is white single men between the ages of, I think 55 and 75. It's also really high among native Americans and it's really high among veterans. I think it's the third cause of death often for people 15 to 24 years old.
Mike: So what else made Kurt Cobain textbook?
Candace: He was really depressed for a long time. He struggled with depression. Depression is diagnosed a lot more often now than it probably was in the seventies and eighties, you know. And so I don't think he was probably formally diagnosed with it. Maybe when he was in his twenties he was. But he also suffered from physical illness. He had really bad digestive and stomach issues for a long time that no one could figure out what was wrong with him, they couldn't be diagnosed. And that spiraled him into heroin use when he was in his early twenties, because he was obviously in the music scene, and he was surrounded by that culture a lot. But I think he found out pretty quickly that using heroin would subdue his intestinal issues. And I think that was part of the reason why he got hooked.
Mike: So he was self-medicating.
Candace: Yeah. He went to several doctors. It was not for lack of trying to figure out what's wrong, but no one could figure out what was wrong with him. And there's a good chance that his digestive issues were just like roped into his psychological issues, which is often the case. I think that he kept using heroin for that reason for a long time. And suicide is often higher among people who are drug users as well.
So he was a gun owner, he was depressed, he was a heroin user, he had a physical illness. One of the things that the media likes to come back to a lot is that he just couldn't cope with his fame. That's a narrative that people really like, and that's a narrative that was the same one applied to Marilyn Monroe as well, that she just couldn't cope with being a star.
Sarah: And when we make that argument, it feels like that's an argument that we make to sew up the suicide of someone who seems to “have it all”. And I wonder if when people tie things up that way, if they're countenancing what fame was for that person, because it feels like we have this idea of film, fame, it's a crazy ride and not everybody can handle it, and sometimes people die. And does that argument really address what fame is and does to the people who experienced it at that level?
Candace: No, I think it simplifies it a lot. I think how a lot of people react to that is like, why would you want to kill yourself if you're famous and all these people love you and you have all this money. They don't get it and I think it really simplifies the complicated reasons that someone would end their life.
Mike: It also is a nice contrast, if you're writing a lead for your story about a famous person killing himself. It's a person who seemed to have it all who’s actually suffering on the inside. It's a way to emphasize the contrast and the counterintuitive narrative, which is always more interesting than a guy who has a history of depression and owns a bunch of guns and uses a bunch of drugs and has been sad for years and ended up killing himself. That's a pretty predictable narrative, right?
Candace: Kurt Cobain’s suicide was the first celebrity suicide for a long time when it happened. So the press had more tools to deal with it at the time.
Mike: And the fact that he's very popular among a demographic that's at high risk for suicide anyway, also gives it extra resonant.
Candace: Absolutely.
Mike: One thing that I've always found interesting, and maybe this is like a total tangent from your research, is where did the conspiracy theory that Courtney killed Kurt come from? That's something that you still hear today, like in a Yoko kind of way. And I just wonder where did that originate? Why did that catch fire? It just is weird to me.
Candace: So Kurt, let's talk about the last couple months of his life first. So he was in a downward spiral for several months. So he died on April 5th. The previous month in March, he was on tour with Nirvana in Europe. And when he was in Rome, he had a suicide attempt in a hotel room with Courtney, but it was sort of sold to the press as a heroin overdose, but he had written a suicide note and taken a ton of pills and had taken like a lethal dose of heroin as well and he barely escaped that alive. They just told the press that he had an overdose. And they canceled the rest of the tour And they went back to the states. Courtney and all of his friends were conducting these interventions and trying to get them to stop drugs. And, you know, they had a baby at the time. They had Frances Bean who I think had just turned two that winter. And so they were really trying to get them off drugs. And he was at a point where it had just gotten out of control, and he just didn't want to hear it, He didn't want to talk to anybody. and he bought a shotgun. He had other guns, but I think that he had gotten them confiscated at some time when Courtney had called the police and he had gotten arrested.
And so he bought a shotgun and so they were worried about his life as well. And then they finally convinced him to enroll, that's not the right word, to go into rehab. I think she was recording or finishing up recording her album down in Los Angeles. So they went down there and he checked into rehab, and this was like late March. And then he escaped, he was there for a few days, he climbed a wall, he escaped, and he flew back to Seattle, but she didn't know where he was. Nobody knew where he was. So she hired a private investigator. She hired him to try and find Kurt in Seattle because she was worried. They couldn't find him anywhere. And that the details of his last few days are really piecy, because he was just like maybe hanging out at his dealer's apartment and maybe hanging out with another friend and nobody really knew where he was.
And he eventually went back home, but he was in the guest house. So I think if people had gone to his house, they wouldn't have found him there and he was like staying in the guest house, which is on the same property. But it's just a garage with a room above it. So this guy who was hired as the private investigator did not believe that Kurt committed suicide. And so he was the one, I think, who started the deeper investigation into his death because he thought Courtney had something to do with it, even though she was the one who hired him to investigate this.
Sarah: It’s the perfect cover story.
Candace: Yeah, exactly. So I didn't look too deeply into it, but I feel like this private investigator is the guy who started that.
Mike: Who planted those seeds.
Candace: Yes, who planted those seeds. But then I discovered this other guy who's-
Sarah: Who seems like such a delight based on just watching your face as you watch his videos.
Mike: Oh, is this the weird public access guy?
Candace: Yeah.
Mike: That's kind of a known thing in Seattle. This guy goes on public access TV and shows up at I think city council hearings and stuff, and he’ll be like, why haven't you reopened the investigation? Why haven't the documents been released? Why has XYZ been redacted? He's sued a bunch of times.
Candace: Yeah. So I don't know if he still does public access, but for several years he had a weekly show that was an hour long where he would just record himself talking into a cam recorder about his private investigation into this matter. And he's a journalist, or calls himself a journalist, although I don't know if that's just like…
Sarah: I'm a journalist. I say that to people and the journalism police haven't gotten me. So anyone can say that.
Candace: He's evidently a journalist and he's investigating this. And he's talked to lots of people, it seems like. And he has perpetuated this rumor for a long period of time. And I think he ran for mayor at some point in Seattle?
Mike: Probably. Our mayoral ballots are long, dude. There’s a lot of weird, the Death Cult Socialist party. There's weird shit toward the bottom of the ballot.
Candace: So he was definitely toward the bottom of the ballot at some point, but he also just recently sued the city and the Seattle PD to re-release the photos, or release for the first time the photos actually of Kurt's body. Because he believes it was mutilated and that he was actually murdered. And this was like this year that they just had the trial, and they didn't do it because he didn't file the right paperwork.
Mike: And also didn't Courtney and Frances Bean file something saying this is fucked up. Nobody wants to see these pictures. This is traumatic.
Candace: Frances Bean made a public statement that was like, please do not release. She's been harassing her whole life about it. Please do not release these photos of my father. You know? So he lost that battle, but-
Sarah: He still wages the war. And so does he believe Courtney did it? Is that the horse he’s whipping?
Candace: Yeah, I think that's the basis for it. And honestly, in most of these instances, I think it's just a bunch of people who hate women who are trying to put it on Courtney. And then Courtney is a hated person.
Mike: You know, it is weird. It's wildly disproportionate to the way that people feel about Courtney when it's maybe you don't like her music and maybe she was like a bad girlfriend, but I don't know, lots of people are bad at being in relationships.
Sarah: Didn't Norman Mailer stab one of his wives and William S. Burroughs accidentally while inebriated shot and killed one of his wives or girlfriends. And when men do this, it's well, when you’re a creative genius, you just accidentally, or maybe on purpose, kill your female partner occasionally. That just happens. It's par. But if you're married to someone who commits suicide after lifelong depression and struggles with addiction, it's oh, she did it.
Candace: I think also in a lot of cases with suicide, people just will find any way to believe it's something other than that.
Mike: From a suicidology perspective, is there any basis for this idea that one person triggers another person’s suicide?
Candace: There's a couple of different ways of looking at it. So, we were talking earlier about how Kurt had these suicides in his family and in his life. And that's a different type of, they refer to it as contagion, then celebrity suicide. Because I think when it happens in your family or when it happens in your community, and especially with adolescents, it is absolutely an issue with cluster suicides with adolescents that happen. In many cases, if there's one suicide in a school, there's going to be another. Which is a dangerous, dangerous thing. And schools are getting much better at having post suicide protocol to deal with how do we stop a cluster from happening? But it does happen, unfortunately, kind of frequently.
Mike: But this idea of talking someone into suicide or driving someone to suicide. There’s not really much of a basis for that.
Candace: That's a myth, I think. Okay. And another one of the myths that the people in the suicide prevention community always bring up is that if you talk about suicide, it's going to sort of give someone the idea.
Sarah: Someone who hasn't heard of suicide before.
Candace: In this country, I don't think that's an issue. That's definitely a myth because talking about suicide often helps people deal with a crisis that they're potentially in. But with celebrity suicide, it's almost always blamed on the media and how the media represents that suicide.
Mike: True.
Sarah: Michael, do you have a beef with the media that we should discuss?
Mike: I'll let the expert talk about that.
Sarah: Speaking of Courtney, my knowledge of this comes entirely from Candace's book. I feel the legacy that we now know in the shorthand of Kurt Cobain’s suicide is maybe Courtney did it, or, you know, obviously she didn't, but we associate her role and connection to that with the person who gets blamed for it. And I feel like what we don't remember is the attempt to stop a potential cluster suicide after and Courtney's role in that.
Candace: Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So two days after Kurt's body was discovered, and you may remember this, Michael, there was a big vigil in Seattle Center.
Mike: Which I did not go to because I was a loser.
Candace: You hated it. And I think there were between 7,000 and 10,000 people who showed up. There was a vigil after John Lennon was shot, and people just showed up somewhere. It wasn't like an organized thing. This was very much an organized thing and people were already thinking in terms of okay, we have a potential huge crisis on our hands. Because here is a rockstar that people idolized and he just died by suicide in a very violent manner. And this could potentially be very influential to young people. So what can we do about it immediately? So they had this vigil in Seattle Center that was organized and funded by one of the big radio stations there. I can't remember, some big Seattle radio station. And the city of Seattle paid for half the cost of it. They had people who worked for the youth suicide prevention center in Seattle come and speak. And they had Krist Novoselic, was there, and other people who knew Kurt in the community came to talk about him and to talk about how he struggled and he was really suffering, but suicide is not the answer. It was basically like a huge public dose of suicide prevention. Let's get everyone all in one place and tell them this all at one time.
And I think the reason they specifically did that there is because one of the theories is that if there is going to be a contagion, in fact, it's going to happen where this person lived, more likely than outside of there.
Mike: Really? That's interesting for a public figure. That's interesting for a celebrity that would matter.
Candace: Right. And I have thoughts on that clearly, but you know, that was their idea of let's do this in Seattle. And the most notable thing that happened there is that Courtney Love recorded, word for word, she read Kurt's suicide note and prerecorded it. And she talked about him as well, but she read the entire note and they recorded it and they played it at the vigil. And at the time it was really a revolutionary thing to happen in suicide prevention, but also just in the media. For her to make it public, and make it public so soon. And got to think back, this was before the internet, this was before people would just be able to Google that and find a picture of it online. You know what I mean? It was really monumental for suicide prevention. It was a way to show that he was struggling and that it was not a romantic way to go, but also she tore him up for it. She kind of improved throughout the reading, she was talking and just she was mad and she was upset and grieving and crying. And she was just being her Courtney Love, a hundred percent Courtney Love, like sniffling snotty mess. But it gave people the opportunity to make it more about her grief then to make it about, better to burn out than fade away kind of thing, which he actually wrote in the note.
Sarah: And a spectacle becomes the person you leave behind, as opposed to the person who exits.
Candace: Right, right. Making these things public and just having her sort of telling people who are listening what they should think about it is really smart, because it removes the opportunity, I think, for them to romanticize it.
Mike: Is that considered a good public health intervention, or was that considered a mistake, that vigil?
Candace: It's now considered a good public health intervention. I think people were sort of scared at the time. And ironically, the weekend that Kurt's body was found was the annual American Association of Suicidology conference happening. And so all the suicidologists were at one conference on the other side of the country, I think it was in New York. And the woman who spoke at the vigil who worked at the Seattle Youth Suicide Prevention Center at the time, her name is Sue Eastgard, and she gets this phone call from her clinic. And they're like, you got to get back to Seattle today, because this huge thing is happening. And she didn't even really know who Kurt Cobain was. I interviewed her a couple of years ago. She shows up at this vigil and all of a sudden there's 10,000 people there. And she's like, holy crap, I had no idea that this was going to be what this is about. But it's generally now looked at to be a really positive event because they were able to focus on suicide prevention and make it about that, as opposed to romanticizing this person's death.
Mike: I guess that's like a public health intervention, in a way.
Candace: It is a public health intervention. It is. And it was the first time anything like that really happened or happened at the speed that it did. And now it's sort of, I don't know if it's looked at as a model, but it's definitely looked at as a positive thing.
Mike: So is this where we get into the way that the media constructed the suicide and the media, are there ways in which the media dropped the ball?
Candace: Yes and no. So two years after Kurt died, a study was put out by four sociologists called The Kurt Cobain Suicide Crisis. And they were basically assessing to see if there was a suicide crisis. They based their study in Seattle. And according to the statistics, the suicide rate in Seattle for that April was actually lower than it was, much lower than it was, the previous year. And their theory is that it was because of the vigil, but also in general that the media did a better job than they historically had done dealing with suicide.
Part of the reason is because a lot of publications in Seattle specifically reached out to this suicide prevention clinic to ask, how do we report on this? How do we write about this? Media was actually reaching out for answers on how to report on it. And so their theories are like, hey, the suicide rate was down, the media was acting smart, and they dealt with it really well.
And there was one person named Daniel Casper who was at the vigil and went home and shot himself. And he's considered to be a soul copycat in the Kurt Cobain legacy. But it's hard for me to read that because I know that I had a friend who was very clearly a copycat, but that's not the kind of thing that you're going to ever be able to find any information on.
Mike: Right, because that it doesn't show up in the statistics as like a copycat suicide.
Candace: No, because the statistics don't get any more specific than the age, the gender of the person. And you'd have the cause, so if it were a firearm or asphyxiation or pills or something you could access that information, but you don't know the reasons why. You don't get a list of reasons why or even more specific details.
And I later went back and read the police report of my friend's death. Sure enough, there were Nirvana CDs and there was a magazine in his pocket. And the magazine in his pocket, it was Entertainment Weekly and I read that article, and it said very specifically what kind of gun Kurt used, that he shot himself in the side of the head. And those are the kinds of details that the media is not supposed to include. You can look up specifics as to the guidelines the media is supposed to use when they're reporting on a suicide, and one of the main things is don't include those specific details of a death scene, because many people can read it as a how to, and it did to my friend who literally was mimicking the scene.
One of the things I talk about in the book is that there's this study saying oh, this was great, the vigil was great, the suicide rate was lower, but you can't because they just did the study in Seattle, and they were only basing it on those statistics. It’s like, you can't know. So it's a very difficult thing to study.
Mike: Can I ask, this is really interesting to me. I wrote an article last year about high rates of suicide among gay men, which remained really elevated, even though gay marriage, blah, blah, blah.
Sarah: Yeah. Marriage is going to lower a suicide rate.
Mike: So I described in there a friend of mine there who killed himself when he was 32, this is 10 years ago. And I described, not in great detail, but two or three sentences, he killed himself in a pretty unique way. And I described that in the article, and I did get a couple of emails that were like, look, this is a how to guide, it's extremely irresponsible to describe this. Which I hadn't considered when I was writing it because it didn't feel like a how-to to me. And as a writer, specificity is always more interesting than generics, right? So you don't just want to say, my friend killed himself. You want to say my friend grabbed a Smith and Wesson .22 off the top shelf. You want to say specific things, so I didn't think I was making a monster, but I also, I get that you don't want to be…
Sarah: You were being a well-intentioned non suicidologist, which is what so many of us are.
Mike: And you know, and I've heard the same thing with anorexia. I'm writing this article about obesity right now, and I've interviewed a lot of people that used to have anorexia and have struggled with eating disorders. And a lot of them have said, one woman was telling me that when she hears diet ads on the radio, she gets suicidal, and she wants to drive her car into a tree. If she hears diet ads that are like, ‘lose 10 pounds in two weeks’, the specifics of it literally make her want to kill herself or make her want to bring her eating disorder back. And it's weirdly the things that make it an interesting story that are also the things that make it really dangerous.
And so in this article, when I’m trying to write this entire article without mentioning anybody's weight, and without mentioning how many calories a day somebody was eating, or any specifics about the amounts or the types of food they were eating, because it might be a how to guide for somebody struggling with anorexia. And I'm just interested in sort of how we found out that this was an issue or how we found out that telling these stories was having this effect.
Candace: Well, if you look back through the 20th century, in terms of how things were reported, there was a time when suicide was just considered very sensationalistic, and people eat it up and love to read about it. And it was often back before suicidology formally started and there was this investigation into oh, many people who died by suicide also have a mental illness, before people were thinking of mental illness as an actual health issue and not oh, that guy's just off his rocker. Suicides were considered either rational or irrational and in people's minds, it was sort of split down the middle. So irrational would have been like if you're just in the loony bin and you kill yourself, then that's an irrational suicide.
But if your wife leaves you and you lose your job and your car breaks down or whatever, you're just having a really bad week and you decided to jump off a building, that was considered a rational suicide. Suicidology formally sort of came to be in the 1950s. That's the first time people were actually studying people who had attempted suicide and people who were struggling with suicide crises. It was the first time they started to develop, oh, these are the warning signs, these are the things you might see in someone who is having a suicidal crisis or is maybe thinking about it, these are the things to look for.
And they did a really comprehensive study on suicide notes and what are the kinds of things you'll find in a suicide note? It was actually I think one of the first formal studies they did on suicide was they had collected all of these notes out of people's morgue files. And then they sort of documented all the tenants of it. And then they had a bunch of just civilians write what they thought a suicide note was going to be and they compared the two. And the authentic notes were actually just very practical. It was, you can find my will in this drawer, please. They were very practical, because often when someone is going through that crisis, they've already made the decision and they're just trying to settle their affairs. And everyone who was faking suicide notes was just talking about woe is me, you know, right.
Sarah: Why wasn't this brought up in Heathers? If all of the teachers hadn't been so loopy, someone could have been like, Heather's suicide note is actually quite unusual and seems fake.
Mike: So typical suicide notes are more like an instruction manual?
Candace: In many cases. Not always, but in a lot of cases, the person has already made the decision and so they're often in a sort of a state of calmness and just being very rational about what the logistics are going to be.
Mike: This is an extremely dark story, but my friend that killed himself, he planned it more than six months in advance. And he told everybody that he was moving to California. Because that would give him a chance to say goodbye to everyone. So he told me I'm moving to California, we're not going to see each other as much. And we sort of hung out the last time and it was like, it was a goodbye. And he knew how much of a goodbye it was, but he didn't tell anybody else.
And he was one of these guys that had tons of friends. He was a total social butterfly. This whole thing of this fake contrast between like how could someone who's so gregarious be so sad. But of course it was the gregariousness that kind of made him feel alone. But I didn't know before that suicide even could be that premeditated.
He left a DVD with his favorite songs that he had left instructions to play at his funeral. He planned this out like invading France. I didn't go to the funeral because I was living abroad, but I talked to some people that went and they said that it was really divided between the people that were just sad and the people that were sad and angry. If he had been planning this for this long, why didn't he tell somebody? Why didn't he get help? Why didn't you look into medication or counseling, or just telling us - his friends - what he was going through? And so a lot of people were just really pissed off basically, that like, why would you go to this level of premeditation on a suicide and not try to not kill yourself? It was totally baffling to everybody.
Candace: Wow. To my knowledge, that's actually pretty unusual that someone would plan for that long.
Mike: Yeah. My understanding is that's quite rare. After his death, I got really interested in gay suicide and I ended up writing an article about it last year. And my understanding is that most suicides have at least an element of spontaneity in them. You're having a bad day or something. Your boyfriend breaks up with you or something like that. And you just sort of do it and it's pretty quick that the deed is done. It's rare to spend months planning it.
Candace: Yeah. There's often a catalyst that will sort of be like the final straw for people. But unfortunately the catalyst is often blamed as the reason why, when it's typically many things that are building up and leading to that.
Mike: So what are the most common catalysts? Is it money stuff? Is it relationship stuff?
Candace: Those are at the top of the list. I think it depends on the location actually. I feel like in a lot of countries when there's just a big economic crisis going on, among Chinese farmers, for example, people are struggling so much, their quality of life is so low that the suicide rate is really high in that case.
It's interesting talking about the media and your question about including details in an article you wrote, and clearly, I agree that the media needs to be responsible in what details they include. But in a way, I almost feel like it's way more important for us to dedicate our energies to the bigger things that are our huge suicide factors. Which are people not having access to mental health help and people having too much access to guns. These are just huge issues. And for us to be like nitpicking at the media, let's put our energies elsewhere.
So let me get back to the history of the media's role in this. So anyway, the first formal study that was done on the media's effect on the suicide rate was done in 1974, I think, by the sociologist named David Phillips.
Sarah: It’s amazing to me that we can have an observable problem for so long before someone's like, what if we tried to mitigate, try to look at developing some best practices or what if we tried to prevent people from committing suicide? It seems like we really took a while.
Candace: From what I've read, it seems like suicide for many years was often looked at as just sort of like a survival of the fittest, especially in America. If someone can't handle life, then we don't need them around, get rid of them. And the suicide statistics were often totally skewed because in the cases where there wasn't a note or it wasn't a very obvious suicide, people would often rule it as an accident to save families from exorbitant grief and being ostracized from their communities.
And so I talked about the study that guy did about the correlation between the newspaper articles and the suicide rate. But it was actually, I didn't even say the name of the study, which is called The Werther Effect. He names it after Goethe’s Werther as it should be actually pronounced in German. But I say Werther, because I'm not one of those American people who pretend to be some culture. Anyway, I'm just going to call it Werther.
So Werther is a book about a young man. It starts off very happy and then becomes very forlorn, because he falls in love with a woman who is engaged to someone else. And it is a long sort of slow downward spiral of unrequited love. In the end, she gets married. He's very despondent. He borrows her husband's shotgun and shoots himself. And this was published in the 1700s, I want to say, late 1700s. There was immediately a big response to this book. And one of the responses is referred to as ‘Werther fever’, where people started to dress the way that Werther dressed in the book. Which I think was blue coat and yellow britches. And I don't remember specifically, but because young people specifically responded so aggressively to the book, it was banned in several places because people were afraid that people were going to start killing themselves to imitate this character in the book.
And there is one certainly known person, I think her name is Christine Von Las Berg, who drowned herself with a copy of Werther in her pocket. And I think that set off sort of the first copycat crisis in Western history for a sort of celebrity copycat crisis.
And so the guy who did the study in the 70s, he called the copycat crisis the ‘Werther effect’ based on that. But there's actually been some debunking studies done that there is any copycat crisis after Werther at all, besides this one woman, because there haven't actually been any other confirmed cases. People will cite things like, there were 200 suicides, but there's actually very few confirmed statistics around it. So it may have just been this one woman or a handful of people. But I guess that's what's fascinating about copycat suicide is that we will never know.
Mike: I guess, any suicide to some extent. Right. As you said, it's always multifactorial.
Candace: Yeah. So in 1974 this sociologist named David Phillips, did this study where he compared suicide rates. I think he just used the suicide rates in the country to highly publicize suicides. I think he does a study in America and a study in England, I think. And so he looks at front page stories of suicide and he compares it to the rate in the weeks after that story was published. And then he compares it to the year before and the year after. And he sees this absolute correlation between the suicide rates go up when there's a highly publicized suicide. And one of the notable examples that's in there is Marilyn Monroe, who died by suicide, I think it was 1962.
Sarah: Unless the Kennedy's killed her, because we can't let anything not be a murder.
Candace: And she's another person that a suicidologist would call like a textbook suicide, you know. She had a tumultuous family life growing up, and she ran away from home to Hollywood, and she was very depressed for a long time and was seeing a psychologist, was seeing different doctors and things like that, and she died of a barbiturate overdose. That was like a pretty big Hollywood suicide, obviously. There was a lot of newspaper coverage about it, and there was a spike in the suicide rate by 12% or 13%. Which was pretty freaking big.
So, you know, he draws us in conclusion that yes, there's a correlation between how much the media reports on suicide, how much it's focused on, and the suicide rate. So that was in the seventies and that was the first time that people started to realize that there was an issue. So by the time that Kurt commits suicide, people are fairly knowledgeable about this. And I think specifically because they know that he could potentially be very influential to the adolescent suicide group, which adolescent suicide in and of itself didn't even become recognized it as a thing until the early eighties, really. Kids were killing themselves, but it wasn't on anybody's radar because people just wanted it under wraps for the family's sake. And a lot of teenagers would do things like drive their car into a pole and which is just a car accident.
Sarah: It’s all those dead man's curve songs from the fifties that are allegedly about drag racing.
Candace: Yeah, but in the early eighties, there was a big suicide contagion cluster in the Northern suburbs of Chicago. And it was the first time that it was really heavily publicized. And people were looking into this, like, why are these rich white kids killing themselves? I think it was like 17 kids over a period of 12 or 13 months in these related suburbs, which is a big deal. And they're all just you know, upper middle class, white kids, and people were like, what the hell is going on? And then there were these clusters that were happening all over the country in the eighties. Right.
Mike: This friend of mine from Alaska says they lost four kids a year to suicide in her high school. Because one kid at my high school killed himself, and I mentioned this to her, and she's oh yeah, we had 20.
Sarah: When you think about large, rural states with a lot of gun access.
Candace: Yeah. So there's these clusters and that's sort of when adolescent suicide entered the public spotlight when. as you know, afterschool specials sort of enters the health education classes and a movie like Heather's happens, which is like a parody on everyone freaking out about adolescent suicide.
But then the AIDS crisis happens, and AIDS is taking way more people than adolescent suicide is, and that becomes a much more immediate, we need to educate kids on this. And even though suicide is still happening, the rate and in 1990 was much lower than it is now and much lower than I think it was in the early eighties and then it takes center stage.
So by the time Kurt Cobain happens a few years later, it was sort of dormant for a while, but then people start to think about it again and worry about it. But for the most part it's looked at among sociologists that the media actually dealt with it pretty well. I think it was the first time that, you know, if you go back and watch the Kurt Loder MTV specials that weekend when it happened, he's saying the crisis number, the 800 crisis number, over and over. If you're struggling, if you're having suicidal thoughts, call this number. And that was really new at the time. That was the kind of thing you'd see at the end of one of those very special episodes or whatever, but it wasn't the kind of thing that was in the sort of sphere that you see everywhere now. Anytime anyone writes an article about suicide, there's that number at the end of it and it's all over the place. And it's, I think it's just sort of like a standard practice to include that information, but that was really new at the time. And that was happening all over the place, but it wasn't necessarily happening in Entertainment Weekly or Newsweek.
Mike: Can I give a few thoughts?
Candace: Yes, please.
Mike: First of all, the fifties and sixties were fucking terrible.
Sarah: It's one of our themes.
Mike: When we talk about going back to these halcyon days in America, it is amazing to me how many problems we were sweeping under the rug. During those days this idea of the perfect suburb family depended on, let's not talk about priests raping people, let's not talk about suicide, let's not talk about drug use. There were all these problems that weren't seen as crises.
Sarah: Because we weren't talking about them. They were still happening, we just couldn't admit that happening.
Mike: We weren't interested in finding out why they were. And I think what this represents is that issues go from being acts of God to being public health crises. And I think issue after issue has become this thing where it's well, some people are just alcoholics, there's nothing you can do for them. And then all of a sudden, oops, there's this whole field with genetic determinants and behavioral determinants and there's lots of things that you can do about alcoholism. Wow, this is a public health thing. And then suicide, is just some people kill themselves. How weird. And then it’s like, oh, there's actually a science to this. And we've gone through the same phase with so many issues. I am very involved in car accident Twitter.
Sarah: What is car accident Twitter?
Mike: Well, basically, for a really long time in America, car accidents were seen as acts of God. About 8 or 10 years ago, people were pointing out that Sweden has 1/8th the rate of car accident deaths that we do. And it's like, how wide are the lanes? What is the turning radius so that people can go really fast around a corner where they can't see in front of them? How many stoplights do you have? How many seconds are the stoplights? Hey, wait a minute, car accidents aren't actually an act of God. Car accidents are constructed right near a public health crisis, and there's something we can do about them. And I’m sure there's 50 other issues that now we think of as active God, that in 10 more years, we'll be like, Hey, wait a minute, this is actually a constructed problem, we can do something about this.
I guess one of the stories you could tell about just what civilization is, is realizing to what extent you're constructing these things that seem like they're inevitable, and realizing that not everything is inevitable.
Candace: Absolutely.
Mike: Those are my thoughts.
Sarah: I’d like to add my thoughts on top of those thoughts in our de-bunk bed. One thing that this makes me think of is that in terms of things that catalyze suicide, and of course the first thing I think of to bring this into my wheelhouse and closer to murder is John List. He killed his whole family and then he disappeared and was found via America's Most Wanted decades later. In the same way that suicidology, I think can sound too hilariously on the nose for people to believe that it's a real word. I've told people about the phenomenon under the Family Annihilator. And they're like, what? And I'm like, no, that's the technical term.
Mike: The technical term for that is family annihilator.
Candace: Wow. It sounds like a bad horror movie from the eighties.
Sarah: I'm shocked it wasn't. I like it because I think it speaks to the mindset that emerges, seems to emerge at this time of you have to annihilate your family. With John List, it's similar to Jonestown. It's similar to the suicide of Bud Dwyer, which we talked about in our snuff films episode.
Candace: Which was also a film that Kurt Cobain watched repeatedly. He found a pirated tape of it at a thrift store, and he was obsessed with it.
Mike: That's fascinating.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. One of the vendettas I never expected to have was now against Pennsylvania news shows of the eighties for deciding to show that on TV, because once you release a contagion, it's out for good. You can't take it back. And in every case, you know, Bud Dwyer was being forced to resign from the socially lauded role that he had been in. Jim Jones was about to lose his followers, lose his son in a custody battle, have his power taken away. John List was very deeply in debt and couldn't allow his family to find out about that, the house was about to be foreclosed on. And he wrote in this very low-key note explaining to his pastor, “This is where the bodies are, this is how I killed my family. I had to do it for these reasons. I know that people won’t understand, please understand, goodbye.” And left and was eventually found and incarcerated after disappearing for a couple of decades.
But it seems to me that in these cases, specific to the case of the successful white, American male, that there’s something that seems to happen where the thing that the structure that your life seems to be built around, the power that you have, the people that you're in control of the social position that you have, if that's going to be taken away. That you lose your sense of identity and you just, it's suicide or murder seems like, within an irrational society, the only rational response. Because if you're not this person who's in charge of these other people, then who are you?
And maybe you have absolutely no idea that, of course, individual pathology is a big part of this, but I'm very ready to hold the rest of America accountable for that, especially if we're talking about the fifties and sixties being terrible and being the crucible during which we created these ideas about, who are you as a person? Well you're the power that you have and the people that you're in control of and the social capital that you accrue. And if you don't have that, then you just barely even need to kill yourself because you don't exist anymore.
Mike: One of the suicidologist I spend a decent amount of time with for my gay suicide article said that one of the things that separates depressed people from suicidal people is this feeling of the walls closing in. There are people who just get depressed, and they're really depressed, and they're bummed, but they don't leave the bed and that's fine. And then there's people that get really depressed and they think there's no way out. It's only going to get worse. I feel trapped. It's the sense of being trapped is a predictor of suicide, separate from the depression itself.
Candace: Yeah. I think that sense does apply to a lot of people who are suicidal, whether they're depressed or not. I don't think you need to pass through depression first to reach that point, because depression doesn't always come before suicide. There are other mental illness issues, but also just other life issues. For a long time, the community sort of maintained that 90 plus percent of people who died by suicide had a diagnosed or diagnosable mental illness. And I think part of that effort of putting that big number out was to create this direct correlation and also say, we need to get more help for people who are struggling with mental illness. Essentially it should be on par with physical illness. You should be able to cover your therapy bills with your insurance, you know, which is still a huge issue for many people. So I think that's important, but it's interesting how that statistic has actually changed.
I think the most recent study that the CDC did said that only 54% of people who died by suicide had been diagnosed with a mental illness and the suicide rate has actually gone up a lot in the country in the last couple of years. I've always bristled a little bit at that 90% statistic and then maybe it's because I sort of think of everything through the lens of my friend who was outside of a lot of that. He may have had the beginnings of a mental illness or depression or something that kind of swayed him, but I think in most cases, he was adolescent and thought very impulsive and reacted to this big influential thing in his life rashly and had access to a gun. I don't want to simplify it by saying, oh, maybe he was depressed or struggling and whatever, which I don't really think is the case, even though part of me feels like I don't, I can't really speak on that because I certainly don't know what was going on in his head. I think it's sort of, not only does it simplify, but I think it sort of allows us to just put the mental illness label on it, which is the same thing we do with mass shooters. I think it's so easy to just put that label on it and not face the other issues that may be leading this person to do such a violent act.
Mike: Or it's like crazy people got to be crazy. Ding-dong, and we’re finished.
Sarah: Right. Exactly. And allows the self-described mentally well, whatever the fuck that demographic thinks it is, to opt out of it. Yeah.
Mike: I've been interviewing a lot of stigma researchers.
Sarah: Is that a field? Stigma-tology?
Mike: There's a journal. I interviewed the editor of the journal Stigma.
Sarah: Oh, that’s so great.
Mike: He’s been working on this for 20 years and he told me, so he works on mental illness stigma, right. That calling people crazy is like a form of stigma. Unlike a lot of other minority statuses, if you have mental illness, people can't see that in you. Right. It's only you who has to decide how to disclose. It's like a parallel for gayness, right? This issue of do I tell people that I have clinical depression or not? It's like a source of stress because you think people are judging you. Can they tell, can they not tell them that stresses you? Anyway, he said there was decades of advocacy on classifying mental illnesses and getting the medical community to see mental illness as a disease. Because you wanted to take the fault away from people, right. Or this bullshit, just cheer up and you won't be depressed anymore.
Sarah: Take a walk and look at the sunrise.
Mike: Yeah. Right. But he said, in doing that, one of the unintended consequences of that was that getting this disease definition of mental illness in some ways backfired because it actually encourages discrimination because if you're an employer and somebody is applying and that person has clinical depression, you think, oh, well it's a disease, i.e.. they're never going to get better. So I don't want to hire them, I don't want to rent them an apartment, I don't want to get into a relationship with them because it's a disease that is incurable and it's totally out of their control and it's never going to go away. So I don't know if he is of the opinion that they shouldn't be thought of as diseases or if this is just an unintended consequence but calling something a disease makes it seem incurable and can actually fuel discrimination.
Sarah: Or Unlive-with-able, that you cannot have a regular day, that your life has in continual crisis mode. Even if it is chronic depression, it's something that you're just mentally scabrous about every minute of your life and that there's no kind of possibility of having a routine. I also think that just regardless of, even if something is objectively or subjectively bad or good, we are just terrible as a society at recognizing and accepting differences. We’re like, but can't everyone be the same and then the people who work here live all the same as each other because that's the ideal situation. And it's like, why is that ideal?
Candace: Exactly. Of course, people don't want to be stigmatized, but also people just want the fucking insurance to pay their medical bills. You know what I mean? A lot of times it's just, come on, I'm depressed. And that's a real thing. And I don't want to pay $150 every time I go see a therapist, which is their absolute right.
Mike: It also speaks to the extent that we like to focus on acute causes rather than chronic causes. It's easy to be like, Courtney Love drove Kurt to suicide because it's this acute, one thing I can point to, right. Whereas something like he had access to guns, he had something in his family. It's these long standing things that are in the air and in the water that you can't explain as easily.
Sarah: Right? Well, Candace, you have a metaphor in your book about this that I really love about using Chernobyl.
Candace: Yeah. That was interesting. Someone else had done a study specifically about media-related suicide contagion and how when you think of someone like Kurt Cobain who had these suicides. You know, he had two great uncles that died by suicide, and other people in his life. A lot of people who die by suicide do have other suicides in their life. So it's sort of this model set up and you can think of it as almost as a contagion, like catching a cold or something, like that to put in very simple terms - which is not really the case - but it can move person to person within a community.
But when you think of a celebrity, there's this middle messenger that is the media and this researcher compared it to Chernobyl. This huge natural disaster happens, right, and anyone within the vicinity is potentially affected, but the only people who emerged from that with cancer are people who are already vulnerable in some way. There may be people who are affected by this sort of media related contagion, but it's because they already have a proclivity for this, or they already are vulnerable in some way, because not everyone who was a fan of Nirvana and read these articles, went out and shot themselves. Some people did. So I think that in the community it is interesting, they really push for better media guidelines and more responsible reporting, but they also say if it happens, there's other stuff percolating, there's other stuff going on.
Mike: How has all of this changed your view on your friend's suicide? Like how do you think about it differently now?
Candace: It's interesting. I think I grew really frustrated when I was doing the research, and I found that study saying oh yeah, there wasn't any crisis at all. There's just this one guy in Seattle and overall everything's great and the media did a great job. I just want to sometimes scream and yell well, clearly not, this affected my friend and how do we know? There could have been people all over the place and we just don't have those statistics.
But I think when I looked deeper into that, I realized that it was very convenient for me to be able to attach my friend's suicide to this big cultural phenomenon that made it easy a) to blame Kurt Cobain for it, but b) to feel like I was connected to this big thing that happened. And I think that for a long time, I felt really like I had been touched in some way by this huge cultural phenomenon. It was really special and unique in some way, it was sort of my way of coping with it in that way. And to realize that having done all this research and knowing how much suicide affects so many people, it certainly doesn't feel unique anymore, but also that there wasn't really a phenomenon. There were clearly other reasons and a gun hiding under somebody's bed is a much bigger reason than reading an article about Kurt Cobain.
Mike: Do you think copycat suicides are sort of overall a myth because it sort of exists, but it also it's much more these other it's like the frosting, but there's this huge cake underneath it.
Candace: Exactly. Like I said, it's a catalyst, but it's so infrequent. It is a concern and if we talk about it and it makes people do more responsible reporting, then that's great. I think about my friends sometimes and I'm like, well, if he didn't do it that year, would he have just done it two years later, or five years later? I'll never know. It is a thing, and it isn't just as much as anything else that may be a factor in someone's suicide narrative.
Mike: Maybe this makes me a terrible person. I always get really annoyed when I see media folks putting out the suicide crisis hotline now, because I think that like suicide crisis hotlines are bad, but it's weird to me how we as journalists are really comfortable advocating for social change on this one fucking thing. I think people having lots of guns is bad too, but you never see articles saying, call your Senator about their gun control issues, here’s the number to call. Or, hey people who can't afford mental health treatment, what is it like 70% of homeless people have some sort of untreated mental illness. That is also bad, but I don't see articles saying, Hey, here's a number where you can donate to homeless crisis services. We don't have the same articles saying, we are social actors, let's try to make the world better kind of framing and less we're talking about suicide. And then all of a sudden, it's okay to try to make the world a better place. I think we should do this with lots of stuff. I think the suicide crisis hotline is fine, but there's 20 other things.
Sarah: Call your Senator to talk about Jugg science and how it shouldn't be used in trials.
Mike: Yeah. I get that you don't want to say, the minimum wage should be raised because there are economists on both sides of that issue, blah, blah, blah. But there's many issues that are just as clear cut as, kids should not be killing themselves. And the media says, we don't know.
Sarah: We're just the messengers.
Candace: I think the reason behind that is because there's just like this sort of new awareness that a suicide crisis is often a very short-lived thing. And if someone can get through that immediate crisis, they're usually okay, at least for now. So I think people are just more aware of how immediate and urgent that can be. And because there is a life at stake in a very immediate way. And so I think that's part of the reason, but it's actually interesting. I went to this one lecture with a woman who was talking about addressing suicide from a public health crisis. And she used this great metaphor. It's called the upstream metaphor and I think it's used in various public health crises. The whole thing is okay, you're hanging out by a river, and you see someone floating downstream screaming for help. So you go in and you get the person, and you bring them out.
And then a minute later you see someone else coming down the river screaming for help. So you go in and you get them out. And then all of a sudden there's two people, then four people, then six people and you are not able to save all those people. But then you realize the better thing to do is walk upstream and see where these people are getting in the water and stop them from getting in the water. And it's this whole public health thing of we need to change the language around suicide.
We need to help people before they get to that crisis state. Right. And if people are getting the mental help that they need, and they're more aware of it and the dialogue is just out there and more familiar to them. And so I think that putting the phone number in and just having it all over the place, I don't even know if people are consciously doing it or if it's just a thing we do now.
Sarah: I'm often struck by the realization that as a nation, we don't have that many numbers that we can call. We have 911 for medical emergencies or if a black Congressperson is canvassing in a neighborhood in Oregon. So we have medical emergencies, criminal emergencies, fire. We have suicide hotlines. And then you can call your Senator or various elected representatives and talk to an intern or an answering machine or whatever. But there aren't that many direct lines of contact between us as citizens and the emergencies that we have, or that we see and ways that you can try and get help for something without potentially making yourself vulnerable to a bill that you can't pay for it.
It feels like a lot of the help we need is stuff that as private American citizens, we just can't afford and we know that nobody can afford, or it's going to bring the cops and they're probably going to make more trouble. And it's interesting that in the absence of having necessarily trained operators on a suicide hotline, what that is offering, potentially one of the things that it seems to offer is non-judgmental contact with a human being. You can talk to someone who's not part of your life and say, I want to end my life and I guess that you can talk to a human.
Candace: And someone who you never have to talk to again. And so you don't need to be worried about being judged because you don't have to face that person the next day.
Mike: I use the people sitting next to people on airplanes for that.
Sarah: People on airplanes sit next to me for that.
Mike: They’re like, what brings you to Cleveland? I'm like I was born on a Wednesday, I never felt love from my parents. Just go straight in.
Candace: One of the things we didn't talk about is the 27 Club.
Mike: I was going to ask about that because I remember when Kurt Cobain killed himself, 27 seemed unbelievably old. And now 27 seems incredibly young to me. Like he's just a whippersnapper.
Sarah: He's a tiny baby.
Candace: I know my first experience with the 27 Club was when our local music store called Strawberries Music and Video, which I think was like an east coast chain, they had their section of posters and there was this cartoony poster that said the 27 Club. And it had Jimmy Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain.
Mike: Speaking of glorifying suicides, that's not a great idea.
Sarah: It's also glorifying dangerous drug use.
Candace: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I believe since Amy Winehouse has joined that club, but I can't figure out where it started. And right after Kurt died, the first interview that someone did with his mom, Wendy, is that she said, now he's gone and joined that stupid club. And I think that she was just talking about rock stars that died and not necessarily specifically rock stars that were 27 years old, but I don't actually know where the source of the 27 Club is.
Sarah: Or if people noticed that in the late sixties, early seventies.
Candace: Suicide definitely changes the way we look at a person's life. Because we start to look at it as if their whole life was leading to that moment. And I think we naturally sort of create a narrative out of it. And I'm guilty of that as well. And one of the things that I think really helped me was, I have talked to my friend’s family throughout this process and his mom at one point said to me that last year was the best year of his life and just talked about how happy he was and how he made so many more friends, new friends. And for a parent who lost a child to get to the point, to be able to say that was actually a high point for him really made me rethink how we think about the lives of people who have died by suicide.
I've read a lot of biographies about people who've died by suicide, and they're always written in this way as though the biographer is trying to figure out what happened. And sort of painting their life in such a way that it was all leading toward that point, but what happens if we think outside that box and we just think about this person's life as what it was, and not as a life that's leading to this like inevitable destruction.
Mike: Yeah. I remember after I told my parents I was gay, there was this two year period of every couple months they would be like, hey, when you dropped out of high school, was that because you were gay? They were going through the rest of my life and retconning and using the gayness. At one point, I think my dad was like, you quit the neighborhood soccer team when you were nine, is that because you were gay? And well, on some level, yes. But also, I also didn't like being on that soccer team for exactly the reasons that I had at the time. And it rains a lot in Seattle, and I don't want to play soccer in the rain.
There's one new reason, I did all those complex things for many reasons. There are a million reasons why you drop out of high school or quit a soccer team or play the trumpet and not the trombone. Any decision in your life has 15 million reasons for it, but we want to grasp onto this one thing and be like, oh, the suicide is this thread that runs through your whole life. Sometimes you do things in your life, not because you're depressed or you're suicidal, but just because like it's raining out or something.
Sarah: Oh yeah. Yeah. Speaking of romanticizing all of that, I spent all of high school with a Jim Morrison with his shirt off looking piercingly into the camera on my bedroom wall.
Mike: Yeah, me too, actually, because a), I liked his torso because it was like my subtle way of being a gay teenage boy. But also, yeah, I was also really into The Doors when I should have been into Nirvana. That was another band that I was really into.
Sarah: That's why we ended up here. That's the link.
Mike: I would say come as you are. Oh, sorry. Someone had to do one of those this episode.
Sarah: Better to burn out and then grow away, I know.
Mike: It’s terrible.