Suicidal thoughts by Bill Kay

It’s amazing how a little close examination can unpack a vast number of unexpected facets of many everyday phenomena.
Take suicide. I don’t mean to belittle it by calling it everyday, though I believe that someone, somewhere on the planet, does kill themselves every hour, let alone every day. It’s always there, a part of our existence that for most people is not much more than an object of mild curiosity. No one wants to encourage suicide, especially in anyone we know, and I guess we all support measures to reduce the number of times it happens, either through making people less inclined to do it or through preventative measures such as removing or limiting the equipment or circumstances that allow suicide.
The odd snigger about suicide being illegal in many parts of the world – a piece of crass legal pedantry - and that’s about it for most people. Yet a Google search yields more than 69 million results, so there is a major suicide industry encompassing medical, legal, academic and sociological considerations. You can get help to do away with yourself, and to have second thoughts, as well as interminable analyses of whether second thoughts do any good.
I was made to think about suicide by a lengthy but tetchy exchange between a prosecutor and an expert witness this week in the murder retrial of Phil Spector, the millionaire record producer responsible for the Wall of Sound in the 1960s. Spector’s defence is that the victim, a small-time actress called Lana Clarkson, committed suicide when she was shot in the mouth by Spector’s Colt 38 revolver.
Naturally the prosecution is working hard to discredit this suggestion. There is no proof either way – no suicide note, no declaration of intent to kill herself, and no fingerprints on the gun.
We have had intense examination of the crime scene, and minute measurement of where and how far Clarkson’s teeth and blood flew. Someone removed and wiped the gun, so its location gave no clues.
That leaves room for endless theorising over whether Clarkson was in a suicidal frame of mind – again, nothing conclusive so both sides are straining at every shred of evidence in their favour.
The latest expert to take the stand had written learned papers on the chances of an impulsive suicide. If impulsiveness was likely, that would help the defence as they would not have to show a lengthy history of suicidal tendencies by Clarkson.
Listening to the cross-examination, I realised that I had had an oversimplified view of the thought processes leading up to a suicide attempt. The simple distinction is between someone, like my mother-in-law, who plans the event, researches poisons or firearms or length of drop from buildings or bridges, thinks about it long and hard and – at the appropriate moment - takes a rational decision to go ahead, and the impulse suicide who happens on a lethal dose of pills or a loaded gun or a convenient method described on the internet and decides to do it there and then.
But life, and death, are more complicated than that. Interviews with failed suicide attempters suggest a an in and out, up and down process that might go on for days, weeks, months or years. It might or might not involve acquiring plenty of information. It might involve screwing up courage, not amassing enough and going on with normal life until the next time.
The Spector trial exchanges highlighted San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a famous suicide site. The witness said that there was a proposal to raise the parapet from its present four and a half feet, which sounds ludicrously low in view of the history, to around eight feet. This might not be insurmountable, but it would at least force would-be suicides to think a little longer about what they are contemplating. Apparently a proportion will be sufficiently deterred, physically or emotionally, to give up and go home. It will save lives.
But much of the courtroom discussion centred on whether someone who takes the trouble to travel to the bridge can be said to be impulsive. No one lives on the bridge, so every would-be suicide has to travel there. Most live within Marin County, the territory which includes San Francisco. But many come from other parts of America and even from other countries, after journeys that must take days if you allow for getting to and from airports – even more if you include the need to book and buy a plane or train ticket, or drive from the US east coast.
Can such long-distance travellers be impulsive suicides? Surely they have all planned their deaths, whether or not they succeed? But that doesn’t take account of the up and down process leading to an attempt.
Quite a few are in effect tourists – with a special interest, certainly, and with varying degrees of purposefulness and determination. Some may just want to see the site, imagine what it’s like, how easy it is at a practical level, where you might have to park your car, all the mundanities that can get in the way. And, while going over all that minutiae, some say to themselves ‘This looks easy, I think I’ll just go and do it.’ And they do, hence the value of a higher parapet. Others visit several times before making a final decision to go ahead or not.
So, like most human activities, it’s messy. But are all these people impulsive or are they planners?
In one sense it’s an academic question, literally. All that really matters is whether people die. We know that people have an infinite range of reasons for wanting to kill themselves, and there have been many studies of the biggest risk factors – depression, excess alcohol, loss of job or marriage or house and so on. Unfortunately these cannot be eliminated by edict or they might have been already (though being locked in a job or marriage can be as much a reason for suicide as losing them unwillingly, I’d have thought).
Court cases can easily get bogged down in tiny disputes, and whether Lana Clarkson killed herself on the spur of the moment is just such an issue. For what it’s worth, as a non-expert who has attended only a few days of a trial which began at the end of last October, what I’ve heard of the blood and teeth evidence suggests to me she did not pull the trigger – but I could be totally wrong. Like many 40-year-old actresses whose career was probably on the slide, she seemed to be emotionally volatile, so in the small hours of the morning with a load of drink inside her and a loaded gun to hand, who knows what might have happened. And the Spector side argue that the bloodstains on the jacket he was wearing show conclusively that he could not have been near enough to fire the gun.
The jury will decide, but I have had a free lesson in the nature of suicide that has taught me that it is a far more complex business than I had really appreciated before. And if you are ever tempted, just lie down and count to 100. With any luck the feeling will pass.