On any given day, say a Thursday, Martin Clancy wakes up in his home in Kansas City, opens his email and finds between one and ten messages from people he doesn’t know at all telling him that they are thinking about suicide. He answers each and every one. “I have to do it! It is an immense responsibility and it is a bit overwhelming,” he admits. What turned this 56-year-old philosophy professor (he teaches at the University of Missouri), father of five children from three different marriages, into a kind of international suicide prevention agent, permanently on call, was his book, How Not end it all (Gatopardo), a tome of almost 500 pages in which he explains, in a surprisingly non-tragic tone, the ten times he tried to take his own life. And in which he offers arguments and methods not to do so.
“I consider my case to be a bit comical; In fact, it would seem completely ridiculous to me if I hadn’t met and spoken to people who have tried it repeatedly,” he admits at one point in the book, in which he details all those attempts, which began when he tried to jump in front of a moving bus. at six years of age. There’s also the time he took pills and whiskey at age 16 and lay in the snow, waiting for the girlfriend who had dumped him to find his frozen body. The time he jumped out of a moving car. The year in which, having left his doctorate and with a jewelry business that allowed him to finance his acute addiction to cocaine, he dedicated himself to almost daily caressing the revolver that he put in his mouth more than once. When he tried to hang himself and when he tried to bleed out in a bathtub.
If he tells all this, it is because Clancy, in addition to being a survivor, is a student of the suicide’s mind, who makes a skillful mix of approaches in the book: from philosophy, psychology, religion and literature. It is based on the conviction that talking about the issue prevents other people from taking their own lives. This is called the Papageno Effect, the opposite of the Werther Effect (suicide by contagion, which was coined after the wave of voluntary deaths produced by Goethe’s work in 1774). In Mozart’s The Magic Flute, three children ensure that Papageno’s character does not take his own life by giving him alternatives to death and it seems proven that disseminating information about prevention has an effect.
Clancy believes that those who have lived with suicidal ideation since childhood – “until a year ago, I never had a day in which I didn’t wish I would die or that someone would come and kill me, which is the main fantasy of suicidal people,” he says – have a “superpower” when talking to other people in a similar situation. “That is something one of the founders of 988 told me, the prevention telephone number in the United States [in Spain it is 024]. When you get through a trial, you can talk to someone who is thinking about it, you gain the kind of insight and intimacy that even mental health professionals don’t achieve, because they are preoccupied with other things. It’s like what they say in Alcoholics Anonymous: Why do people who have been sober for 30 years still go to meetings? Because this is what keeps them going, helping other people.”
In the book, the story of his alcoholism is intertwined with that of his suicidal ideations. And, in fact, one of the theses of the essay, drawn from Buddhism, the religion that the author now professes, is that suicidal thinking is just another form of addictive thinking. “I rely on Freud and Schopenhauer. The instinct of self-extinction is one of the three sources of suffering, the desire not to be ourselves. And suicide is still an extreme manifestation of that. It also manifested itself in my alcohol addiction, and now I have other types of addiction. The addiction to my phone, the addiction to distraction.”
Alcoholics Anonymous and the detoxification programs of the so-called “12 steps”, for the 12 stages that must be completed until you consider yourself rehabilitated, are also very present in the text. Clancy’s father, an almost unlikely character, a Canadian from a good family who competed in the Olympic Games, became rich and bankrupt several times and spent decades rubbing shoulders with luminaries of the counterculture (he claimed to have slept with Shirley McLaine, whom he would have met in a spiritual retreat organized by Timothy Leary), I used to tell the author that AA is the kind of institution that is fine if you like living institutionalized.
It is also true that Clancy Sr. had reasons to detest AA: his wife left him for his sponsor, the man in charge of guiding him on the path to alcohol abstinence. That would become the author’s stepfather, who brought seven children to the marriage, in an unstable home not exempt from violence. One of those stepbrothers committed suicide as a teenager, becoming the first of many people close to him to take their own lives.
Clancy continues to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and considers it part of his “spiritual nutrition in a Nietzschean sense,” but he also believes that the institution, as his father would say, should emphasize “harm reduction” and not so much its strict notion of sobriety. “Sobriety is a very poorly defined word. A person could be a drunk without drinking or he could be completely free of his addiction and still drink from time to time. We will always be addicted to a series of things, and the goal should be to make them less harmful. “That may include psychiatric medications.”
Right now, she confesses, one of her daughters is fighting addictions. “While I’m in this Uber, she is at home suffering and it breaks my heart. Also, I know that one of the reasons she goes through this is because it comes from the environment that I helped create” – in the book he tells how his ex-wife denied him the chance to see his two older daughters when he passed by. a self-destructive period. “This causes me immense pain. The only thing I can do is be honest with her. My friend Deepak Chopra says that addiction is when what you want most is what you need least.”
In the essay he often uses examples of celebrities who took their own lives. Because when that happens, the news has a very great impact both for those who have been able to contemplate that possibility and for those who have great difficulty understanding the mind of the suicidal person. The text analyzes the circumstances that led people like David Foster Wallace or Anthony Bourdain to kill themselves and asks if other deaths due to overdose, such as that of Amy Winehouse or Philip Seymour Hoffman, were not ultimately a form of slow or slow suicide. suicide by degrees, when one self-destructs until there is nothing left to destroy.
“Talking about celebrities helps a lot, especially because of the stigma. Before I had a hard time understanding the first truth of Buddhism, which says that life is suffering. Until my wife, Amie, explained to me that she was misunderstanding it. She does not mean that all life is suffering but that everyone suffers. Do you think that Brad Pitt does not suffer, that Anthony Bourdain did not suffer? Taylor Swift might be going through suicidal ideation right now, I don’t know. It helps to think about it because when we hear about someone whose child has committed suicide, we tend to think that they did something wrong. “You could be the most wonderful person on the planet, with the most wonderful life, and still have these thoughts.”
It is estimated that almost 15% of people have had suicidal ideations. Almost always in silence. What to do, then, when someone rightly breaks that silence? “My reason for living is my wife and my children. Many people tell me: what about me, I don’t have any of that? I always tell people who write to me that the person who needs them is me. If you start thinking about people around you who need you, you will find them, even if you are not in a romantic relationship, even if you don’t have children, siblings… some of the people who have helped me the most in my life are the people I have known in my psychiatric hospitalizations.”
He wrote the book for them, he says. Although his stints in psychiatric hospitals were “of no help,” he often imagines someone waking up, as he did several times, after a stomach pump or resuscitation, feeling doubly a failure—for having attempted suicide and for failing to do so. having achieved it–, that he finds his book and feels a little more understood.
The telephone number for suicidal behavior is 024. It serves people with suicidal ideation and their loved ones.
