Revisiting some old work...
Image: Vanitas, Phillip de Champaigne, 1671. Public domain. Wikimedia commons.
It’s not the usual course of events, but I did a thesis while still an undergrad. What follows is a portion of that thesis, which concerned suicide prevention. It seemed like the right time for this post, because I already told you all about my experience in police journalism, which inspired the thesis, and I’d like to show you my chops as a writer since I’m asking you to pay me to do it.
For me, one of the major takeaways from journalism was that cops handle a lot of death. You can agree (or not) with how they do their jobs, but they take a lot of bodies to the morgue because they are often called even when someone dies of old age. A now-retired peace officer once told me that cops were called “garbage-men with guns” because they spent so much time taking body bags to the local morgue. It wasn’t a term of endearment.
It got me wondering what could be done to make that a bit less of a universal experience. Below are the results of my thinking. Some of the people who read this thesis dismissed my theory. Now, some years later, the suicide rate has exploded, the podcasters are trying to do their part, and new research seems, to me, to have demonstrated that my thesis was correct.
Here it goes.
Abstract
This thesis shall explore the ascendancy of suicide in the United States from the 1970s to the present to gain a broader understanding of suicide among college students. Drawing on Emile Durkheim’s magnum opus Suicide, which asserts that societal breakdown, or "anomie," drives suicide rates, I will argue that anomie continues to drive suicide in the Unites States. To combat this increase in suicide, I contend that the atomization of society continues to be a major factor in suicidal ideation, and integration of social services like law enforcement and psychological counseling which exists on college campuses could reduce suicide rates if it were applied on a societal level.
Self-reflective statement
For two years, I was a researcher for an online organization called Fatal Encounters, which built and maintains the country’s most accurate and comprehensive database of police-related deaths. From my research, I learned that such deaths do not always follow the dramatic gunfights or car chases that make headlines. Some are not even homicides, and some are never covered by media. Instead, many "custodial deaths,"[1] as they are termed in some jurisdictions, were suicides. Many involved the mentally ill. Typically, the deceased should have been a subject of intervention long before becoming a danger to him or herself, but the necessary resources did not exist. Needless to say, it became difficult to write about such a high number of potentially preventable deaths. I left Fatal Encounters when I realized that I had become a muckraker, focusing so much on the bad in the world that I never saw the good. President Theodore Roosevelt famously used the term to describe the yellow journalists of the 1920s:
In "Pilgrim's Progress" the Man with the Muck Rake… typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing… But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil (“The Man with the Muck Rake”)
This passage was obscure to me, particularly its final words, until I finally realized that agonizing about the destruction of past lives did not improve my own life, or the lives of others. But I still had a heart for issues like suicide. While I began to look for lofty things again, I did not drop the muck rake. Suicide among college students, the demographic with which I am most familiar, became the subject of my thesis. This led to the query that focused this study: What is an accurate picture of student suicide in the United States compared to the general population, and what can be done to ameliorate the problem?
That’s a very difficult question to answer. My research indicated that it may even have been the wrong one to ask, given that college students commit suicide at half the rate of the general population. But asking the wrong question turned out to be the best thing I could have done. After I left journalism, I became a volunteer member of the Trauma Intervention Program (TIP) of Northern Nevada, which provides immediate, on-scene emotional support to anybody whose experience of loss, including the suicide of a loved one, leads to contact with first responders. I am happier being present for our clients, in the aftermath of their loved ones’ deaths, than I used to be when studying the cause of past deaths.
TIP volunteers develop and maintain our skills through monthly meetings, most of which feature guest speakers who represent agencies and services that our client may need to make use of. A recent speaker was a university police chief, who advised that he was a member of an on-campus team of school police, psychologists and administrators who meet weekly to track and provide aid to students undergoing emotional crises. Nationwide, it’s not compulsory for such meetings to occur on a regular basis among city cops, private-practice psychologists, and local government officials to help average citizens, but it sounded like a solution that local-level civil servants could emulate. I had found something lofty, so I fixed my eyes on it with solemn intentness. Thus, this project was born.
[1] In the parlance of some law enforcement agencies, a custodial death is any death that occurs in the presence of a law enforcement officer, including any suicide or fatal accident that an officer may happen to witness. Of the approximately 1400 data cards I completed, hundreds were suicides.