This Week:

Quote of the Week

Website of the Week

Cracks in the Armor

Killing Ourselves Silently, Part 3: Individualism and Suicide

Greetings,

So much to say, so little time. This week's final installment on suicide is a lengthy one, so next week my intention is to invite you along on a "Stroll Through the News With Nygaard," which is an occasional feature I do to give myself a chance to comment briefly on a broad range of topics. Each of which would be worthy of a feature in itself. But, as I said, so much to say, so little time.

A concerned reader asked if I have some personal reason for writing this current series about suicide. No, I don't. I simply see the issue as a good opportunity for illustrating some points I have been wanting to make having to do with perception vs reality, individualist thinking vs social thinking, and so forth. And I always like to call attention to little-noticed social issues so readers are better prepared to think about them and hopefully take some action.

That's all. Just the usual radical analysis and rabble-rousing. That's all for now. Looking forward to strolling with you next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

"Compounding the tragedy of loss of life, suicide evokes complicated and uncomfortable reactions in most of us. Too often, we blame the victim and stigmatize the surviving family members and friends. These reactions add to the survivors' burden of hurt, intensify their isolation, and shroud suicide in secrecy. Unfortunately, secrecy and silence diminish the accuracy and amount of information available about persons who have completed suicide— information that might help prevent other suicides."

-- Surgeon General David Satcher, in his Call to Action to Prevent Suicide, 1999

Website of the Week

The National Strategy for Suicide Prevention is a collaborative effort of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and Health Resources and Services Administration. It grew out of a Call to Action to Prevent Suicide issued by Surgeon General David Satcher in 1999, and was formally launched in May of 2001. Their website can be found at http://www.mentalhealth.org/suicideprevention/default.asp.

The NSSP website is a good source of basic information about the social phenomenon of suicide, plus it has lots of links to groups concerned with suicide. This is generally a good place to go for those who would like to know more about the subject than Nygaard Notes has already told you.

Importantly, this site includes a page on what to do if you or someone you know has thoughts of suicide. I recommend that you read it now, so you have some ideas should you suddenly be confronted with an opportunity to help someone in need. These things almost always happen when you are not expecting them, so it's a good idea to think about it when you are not in the middle of a crisis, like now (I hope).

If you don't have time for anything else, memorize the following telephone number: 1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433). In case of an emergency, they can help you.

Cracks in the Armor

Although I have taken a couple of weeks "off" from reporting on the progress of the so-called War Against Terror (WAT?!) in order to pursue my suicide series, I will have much more to say on the subject in the coming weeks. One of the more exciting things to happen here in Minnesota will be announced on this coming Monday, the Martin Luther King Holiday, when the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild will declare the formation of a statewide coalition to address civil rights and civil liberties violations in the post-911 United States and Minnesota.

At Monday's press conference, which will be held in front of the Federal Courthouse in downtown Minneapolis (forecast: Snow and cold!), the coalition will announce that it is joining forces to call for: the repeal of the "USA PATRIOT" Act; the rescinding of the rule permitting government eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations; the rescinding of the executive order for military tribunals; an end to corporate favors under the guise of national interest; the release of the identities of all detainees and the reasons for their detention; an end to profiling based on race, ethnicity, religion and national origin; Minnesota to refrain from adopting the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MEPHA); and an end to limitations on the Freedom of Information Act. This is a great list, and it is only a partial one.

Many organizations and individuals have already signed on to the effort, including the Minnesota chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the local Anti-War Committee, H.E.R.E. Local 1, the Minnesota AIDS Project, the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union, the Minnesota State Bar Association Human Rights Committee, and numerous individual leaders from various communities. According to the NLG, "Organizations and individuals who join the Guild in signing the action statement assert that the protection of equal justice is patriotism, and commit to formation of a coalition to protect the core principles of our democracy, civil rights and liberties for all people."

Encourage whatever groups you are a part of to sign on to this effort or, if you are a prominent individual, consider signing on to the effort yourself. Call Caroline Palmer at (612) 978-1936 or Peter Brown at (612) 824-6533 for more information.

By choosing the MLK Holiday as the date to announce the coalition, the NLG not only wishes to honor Dr. King's legacy, but also to remind people that Dr. King himself was subject to the same sort of investigative techniques that have been recently legalized by our government in the wake of September 11, including illegal surveillance, illegal break-ins, and disinformation campaigns.

While the official response to the attacks of 911 has been one of virulent reaction in line with the corporate agenda, the bright side is that such an extreme response would likely not be perceived as necessary if our "leaders" weren't afraid of something. That "something" is us. In the coming weeks I will report on some of the hopeful seeds sprouting in America from the soil of the New McCarthyism. Offering your time, energy, and money to them will not only help to build a movement toward a new society, it will do wonders for your emotional health. Now is the time. Stay tuned.

Killing Ourselves Silently, Part 3: Individualism and Suicide

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I wasn't surprised that people are surprised when they learn that twice as many Americans commit suicide as are killed in homicides. Why am I not surprised?

Suicide can only be dealt with on the social level, as a social problem. Our media, and the internalized American ideology of individualism that each of us carries around to a greater or lesser extent, focuses us on individuals and their actions. Since the perpetrator of each individual suicide is by definition dead, there is no Bad Guy to punish, making an individualistic response very problematic (if it has any meaning at all). As a result, there is very little reporting on the phenomenon of suicide. The dramatic exception, of course, is so-called "assisted suicide." Since there is an identifiable Bad Guy in this case, it is newsworthy, while the far greater danger of "unassisted" suicide is not.

The Effects of Individualism

American society is a very individualistic one, as I never tire of pointing out. (See Nygaard Notes #s111-114 if you don't believe me). This aspect of our national psychology has many real-world effects. In health care, for example, we tend to devote our attention and resources toward dealing with disease on an individual, case-by-case basis. We spend enormous amounts of time and money researching how to treat or "cure" people who are diagnosed with a disease. At the same time, we often resist taking action to address the social causes of the diseases that we are trying to "cure," such as environmental toxins, stress, diet, and the various lifestyle choices that are promoted by our corporate culture. The ironic result is that we are getting better at treating many major diseases, while more and more people are afflicted with them.

In the realm of crime we take a similarly individualistic approach. We devote enormous resources to identifying and apprehending those who have committed what we call crimes. But, again, we resist taking action to address the social factors that we know contribute to the incidence of crime in a society, such as economic justice, gender equity, the strengthening of social and community ties, and so forth.

In the realm of foreign policy, it is the American Way to expend astonishing amounts of resources on our capacity to respond to problems after they occur, the most astonishing being our military capacity. Spending astonishing, or even modest, amounts on redirecting our economy and institutions toward a more sustainable and cooperative stance in the world is so unlikely that I feel like some kind of wacko even bringing it up. A decision to devote resources to such a re-tooling would involve questioning the very premises of our society, something which no society is very likely to do; even less so the richest and most powerful society in the history of the world.

Some of our "opinion leaders" seem to think that Americans have a hard time even understanding a social issue unless it is individualized, with the result that it is rare to see reporting in the news that is based on statistics or public-health initiatives. When journalists pitch such stories to their editors, they are often told to "put a human face on it." This is why the reports we do see often begin with the story of an individual, with the relevant public-health or social program relegated to the background. A great example is the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) of January 2nd, reporting on prospects for federal farm policy in the coming year. The first sentence reads, "This is the time of year that Minnesota crop farmers like Kevin Paap and Gene Sandager meet with their lenders to get financing for the next planting season."

From the individualistic point of view, one is expected to see victims and perpetrators. (Sometimes they are one and the same, which results in the pathetic exercise known as "blaming the victim," as in "He's unemployed because he is lazy," or "She's an addict because she is a sinner.") Thus, when Americans see suffering, they immediately look for the Bad Guys, so they can kill or punish them. The Bad Guys might be cancer cells, or they might be burglars. Maybe they have helped someone to commit suicide.

The same thing can be seen in the formulation of our nation's foreign policy. Knowing that we have a problem with drug addiction, we go after Manuel Noriega, or some unnamed "Colombian drug lords," or others who we are told are "kingpins." In the same way, when we see the innocent victims of September 11th, almost instantly a Bad Guy is identified and we set out to get him, Dead or Alive. America's leaders are the Good Guys, by definition. To think otherwise is to render oneself irrelevant, if not dangerous.

Macho Individualism

The need to identify a Bad Guy and bring him to justice is connected to the macho, achievement-oriented nature of American society, which says that we need to see results, and we need to be able to measure those results. This macho ideology pushes us towards an oversimplified, dualistic conception of whatever problems and solutions we are considering. In our response to September 11th the need to oversimplify is overwhelming and obvious: The Bad Guy is alive, or he's dead. He is at large, or he is in custody. We are winning, or we are losing. You're with us or you're against us. Up or down, left or right, right or wrong. This is no way to understand a problem, and certainly no way to address it. A feminist, process-oriented approach serves better, especially with large and complex problems.

Let's see, where was I? Oh, yes, I was explaining why Americans are focused so much more on murder than on suicide, despite suicide taking twice as many lives. Is it pretty clear by now?

As I was saying at the beginning of this piece, suicide, by definition, has no Bad Guy to bring to justice. The Bad Guy is dead. So, the only real way to deal with suicide is to take a social approach that focuses on prevention. In the short term, this might include a public health program that focuses on such things as improving access to mental health care, better training for health care practitioners, enhancing chemical dependency and addiction resources, and efforts to increase the awareness of suicide among the general population. Readers are likely unaware that we actually have a national public health initiative to prevent suicide already in place in this country. That underscores how difficult it is to get much publicity for such initiatives, and consequently how difficult it is to generate support in the American political culture for them. (See this week's Website of the Week for information on this important collaboration.)

One of the big reasons that public health programs get so little news coverage is that the measure of the success of such initiatives is...nothing happens. We don't get sick, we don't become disabled, we don't kill ourselves. Since most of us don't commit suicide, it's hardly "news" when more of us don't (Imagine a headline like ("Dog Bites Man!" or "Garbage Collected Again!") The only way to report it is to look at statistics and other broad measurements, and where's the "human face" in that? That's a large part of why there is so little reporting on suicide, and why I am not surprised that everyone is surprised that it's a bigger killer than murder in this country.

I absolutely support serious short-term measures aimed at reducing the incidence of suicide in our country. At the same time, I am aware that ultimately, the fundamental answer to suicide is to reduce the alienation and inequality in our modern societies that contributes so much to the anomie and "excessive individualism" which are the main causes of suicide. Encouraging readers to imagine such a sea change is part of the reason for the existence of Nygaard Notes.

Bob Marley once sang "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds." Despite the sometimes overwhelming power that our information systems—media, schools, politicians—have to set the overall public agenda, we still do have the freedom to find and read real alternatives. The work of all people of good will is not only to use that freedom, but to make it meaningful by acting together with others based on the truths we freely discover in the process. This is what democracy is all about, and our efforts toward emancipation are all the more important now, as we enter a new period of McCarthyism in the wake of September 11th.