Head injuries and suicide: It's not just for football anymore.

Now, playing baseball "with abandon" is connected (in the NYT) to suicide.

“There is no way to say [Ryan Freel's] neurodegenerative disease was the cause of his death or the tumultuous 10 years prior to his death,” said Dr. Bob Stern, a neurology and neurosurgery professor and a co-founder of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy....

The B.U. Center’s examination of athletes has focused on football, and research published earlier this year indicated that of 35 deceased players whose brain matter was inspected, all but one showed signs of C.T.E. Several were suicide victims. One of the most prominent players, Dave Duerson, had attained the third stage of C.T.E.

Stern said he was initially skeptical that a baseball player would develop the disease. Then he learned during the investigation not only about Freel’s history of collisions with outfield walls and other players but that his first of several concussions unrelated to sports may have occurred at age 2....

“I don’t think baseball is going to become a high-risk activity for C.T.E.,” he said. “I don’t think parents should immediately say: ‘That does it. My kid should not play Little League.’ ... [But] we need to pay better attention to our brains. Try to take the head out of these activities."

Will parents overreact and take their kids out of sports? That would be stupid. I assume sports also alleviate depression and some of those sedentary kids, plunging their brains into computers and televisions, descend into suicide. The message is only: Don't get your head knocked hard.

"He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes than she could wear in a lifetime and it was pointless buying any more."

"She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument."

Man jumps to his death over the 7th floor railing in a mall in China, in the midst of an argument with his girlfriend. I'm reading the comments at that link and others, and I'd like to note the absence — or near absence — of post-suicide observations about bullying. Why no attacks on the girlfriend? Where's the sympathy of the poor bullied man who lost his life? I'm not even seeing the usual sentimentality about suicide. I'm seeing snark in the form of This is why I don't go shopping with my husband.

Note that the couple were not married, and I wonder what kind of Christmas shopping has one person simply buying presents for herself? I know there's that thing of shopping for others and then not resisting buying something for yourself too, but this is not that. And I know there's the very common practice of a couple shopping together to buy each other presents, perhaps to wrap and exchange in front of the rest of the family. Again, this isn't that. I suspect this has little to do with Christmas and more to do with a man who was in the process of buying sexual access to a woman who was upping the price and putting him into debt.

"Animal rights activist, 31 of her dogs found dead in garage."

"Cops said they believe 62-year-old Sandra Lertzman, of Moreland Hills, Ohio, committed suicide but aren’t sure how long she and the animals were dead inside a running vehicle before they were discovered."

What if anti-bullying campaigns...

... encourage suicide?

David Sedaris writes about the suicide of his 50-year-old sister.

He seems to have practically no information about why she did it, and the story is very much about the diminishment of the (still large) family. The sister, Tiffany, had been estranged from the rest for years. (She left a will: "In it, she decreed that we, her family, could not have her body or attend her memorial service.") So this is about the permanent loss of someone who really already wasn't there.

Each of us had pulled away from the family at some point in our lives—we’d had to in order to forge our own identities, to go from being a Sedaris to being our own specific Sedaris. Tiffany, though, stayed away....

“Why do you think she did it?”...  How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one that I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?

“I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

I'm impressed by Sedaris's willingness to go ahead and say — in so many words — how could you do this to me? I'd like to think that in some circumstances, it could help the would-be suicide to see things from a different point of view. This is about my family... my ancient tribe.

"I come from 7 suicides, perhaps more."

Said Mariel Hemingway, who's in a new documentary called "Running From Crazy," the trailer for which I've embedded below:

The granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, Mariel has had to contend with a lot during her life. While millions celebrate her father as one of the all-time greatest writers, Mariel has struggled with the history of mental illness in her family.

Note the headslappingly bad error in that passage, which is in USA Today, where they seem to be running from editing.



There's some New Age-y spirituality in that, but it seems to be mostly about a wholesome experience in the mountains and earnest* physical exercise. What would you do if substance abuse, depression, and suicide seemed to "curse" your family? Just to call it a "curse," which MH does, is to give it a spiritual quality, as if one — like Scalia — believed in the Devil. If you think something is engrained in your genetic structure, it might be preferable to conceive of that thing as a separate entity that you could fight.

***

That Scalia business got me to download "The Screwtape Letters," and searching for "suicide," I came up with this, as the devil Screwtape talks about how to use love to turn "an emotional, gullible man" away from God:

[F]eed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that ‘Love’ is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, ‘noble’, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides. Failing that, it can be used to steer the patient into a useful marriage....

I love the happenstance of "novelist" appearing in that passage, but no one would put Hemingway at the 5th rate level. Even Hemingway haters. Here's a Hemingway quote:

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.

That chimes with Mariel's less-well-put thoughts on walking the hills.

***

*  No pun intended. Noticed only on proofreading.

The face of the cop, in the aftermath of the suicide by cop.

The cop looks into the death scene, into the car named — too aptly — Infiniti. In his arms is the baby of the woman the police shot. We are shielded by pixelation from having to see the expression on the baby's face.

"Castro pleaded guilty to 937 counts, including murder and kidnapping, in exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table."

Then hanged himself in prison.

Martin Manley's suicide website.

Yahoo took it down, his sister thinks it should be put back up — that photo at the link is not the sister, btw — and the group known as Anonymous has put the whole thing up.

So I went over there (to the link at the line) and read some of Manley's suicide website. Some. Not all. It's quite long. Multipaged. You'd think someone that chatty wouldn't be so impatient with the way life is not over yet. So why did he kill himself? I still don't know! And I skimmed a few pages, including "Why suicide?"

Some people are afraid a website like that will encourage suicide. It encouraged me to wisecrack that if I had to read this whole thing, I'd kill myself. But that's just it. You don't have to read the whole thing. And you won't be lured into Martin Manley's little world of suicide. I don't think. I predict, if you browse around over there, before you figure out what his point was, you'll get bored and click back into the real world, the world where life goes on, and you can always think of something better to do than check out early.

"On M*A*S*H you never heard the lyrics to the theme song. (But, doesn't everyone know them anyway?)"

Said Auntie Ann, reacting to my implication that the lyrics — heard in the movie — were omitted from the TV show because they were about suicide. Actually, I don't know whether taking the words out was a kind of censorship or whether — more likely — they were rejected because they didn't set up the story for an ongoing series of episodes. It wasn't like "The Beverly Hillbillies" or "Green Acres," where the song fills you in on how these characters got into this situation.

And I'd be surprised if even 50% of audience for the "M*A*S*H" TV show knew the lyrics from the movie version. That TV show became much bigger than the movie. The movie came out in 1970, and the TV show was on from 1972 until 1983, back in the days when people didn't have VCRs, so it wasn't easy to go back and check out a movie you'd missed. But even if it had been easy, I think people became very attached to Alan Alda in the main role and wouldn't have enjoyed seeing Donald Sutherland horn in on it. And the main character in the movie is the Elliot Gould character, Trapper John. [OR: He was equally important.] These barriers are hard to cross. I loved the movie, and I didn't want to see the actors that I knew replaced by the warmer, fuzzier TV personalities.

On the subject of TV themes played without the lyrics, do you know the words to the theme whistled on "The Andy Griffith Show"? Here's Andy singing them. [ADDED: The words are about fishing. Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if it turned out that theme was also about suicide?]

"Comedian Amy Schumer says that Comedy Central steered her away from making a suicide joke on her TV show."

"This prompts Emma Garman to wonder whether suicide is the last taboo in comedy. But Michelle Dean suspects Schumer’s set-up just wasn’t funny enough."

More here, with examples of suicide humor in pop culture, including:

Oh my gosh, you can’t consider suicide humor with Joan Rivers, who began making jokes about her husband Edgar almost immediately after he took his own life. She has continued to so, and it was a theme of her roast.  Not too long ago, she made Terry Gross almost speechless with her comic references to it.

And let me add the original movie "MASH." On the TV show, they used the theme music without the lyrics, which were:

Through early morning fog I see
visions of the things to be
the pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see...
that suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please....

It goes on. Read the plot summary if you don't know sequence about suicide:

Walt Waldowski, the unit's dentist... tells Hawkeye that he suffered a "lack of performance" with a visiting nurse and now believes he has latent homosexual tendencies. He wants to commit suicide, and asks advice on a reliable method. Hawkeye, Trapper and Duke suggest that he use the "black capsule," a fictitious fast-acting poison. At a farewell banquet that apes The Last Supper, Walt takes the capsule (actually a sleeping pill) and falls asleep in a coffin. Hawkeye persuades Lt. Maria Schneider to spend the night with Walt and cure him of his "problem."

I think suicide is an especially apt subject for comedy, and not just because it's a release to be frank or even mean about something serious. I think it's helpful as a deterrent to the suicidal logic that says this will punish those who hurt me or everyone will see how sad I was and feel so sorry for me. If suicide is sacrosanct, it leverages that logic. I know, no one wants to hurt the family and friends of those who have already committed suicide, but on that reasoning, we should never joke about car crashes, cancer, and murder.

"To live intensely, as he wanted, would speed up the illness and shorten the life available."

"In 1901 at forty-one, now ill beyond any denial and forced to live in the warm climate of the Black Sea, Chekhov married a lively and successful actress who worked in Moscow. The frequent trips from the hot south to the freezing capital were, his doctor observed, the worst-case scenario for his sickness. And indeed so many of Chekhov’s characters seem to make the worst possible, if not suicidal, choices."

Threatening "a Gandhian fast unto death"...

... over the end of the telegram.

"Did doctors in a country that bans abortion under any circumstances manage to terminate the pregnancy without violating the law?"

Yes, because there was a delivery through Caesarean section, and even though the baby died soon after, the motivation of the doctors was to save the woman's life, not to kill the baby.

Sidney Blanco, one of the high court judges who ruled against Beatriz, said that “if they intervene and only Beatriz survives” because the fetus could not be saved, then it could be that her doctors “were not committing any crime.”...

Beatriz said her doctors would have terminated her pregnancy regardless of what the [Salvadoran] high court ruled, expressing a confidence that they would value her life over that of an unviable fetus.

This is a very old moral principle. I've seen it in the context of discussions of doctor-assisted suicide, where the idea is that the doctor — though ethically prohibited from killing the patient — may give pain relief, even where the consequence of the medication will be that the patient dies, because the point is to relieve the pain and not to end the life.

Ah, yes, here it is:

The principle of double effect; also known as the rule of double effect; the doctrine of double effect, often abbreviated as DDE or PDE, double-effect reasoning; or simply double effect, is a set of ethical criteria which Christians, and some others, use for evaluating the permissibility of acting when one's otherwise legitimate act (for example, relieving a terminally ill patient's pain) will also cause an effect one would normally be obliged to avoid (for example, the patient's death). Double-effect originates in Thomas Aquinas's treatment of homicidal self-defense, in his work Summa Theologiae.

"We’ve been a pretty youth-oriented generation."

"We haven’t idealized growing up and getting mature in the same way that other cohorts have."

Efforts to explain why Baby Boomers are killing themselves at what is supposedly "an alarming rate."

“There was an illusion of choice — where people thought they’d be able to re-create themselves again and again,” [said Barry Jacobs, director of behavioral sciences at the Crozer-Keystone Family Medicine Residency Program in Pennsylvania]. “These people feel a greater sense of disappointment because their expectations of leading glorious lives didn’t come to fruition.”...

Baby boomers... have struggled more with existential questions of purpose and meaning. Growing up in a post-Freudian society, they were raised with a new vocabulary of emotional awareness and an emphasis on self-actualization. But that did not necessarily translate into an increased ability to cope with difficult emotions — especially among men.

Beyond banning large cups for Cokes... ban large bottles for Tylenol.

That's the suggestion in "A Simple Way to Reduce Suicides."

We need to make it harder to buy pills in bottles of 50 or 100 that can be easily dumped out and swallowed. We should not be selling big bottles of Tylenol and other drugs that are typically implicated in overdoses, like prescription painkillers and Valium-type drugs, called benzodiazepines. Pills should be packaged in blister packs of 16 or 25. Anyone who wanted 50 would have to buy numerous blister packages and sit down and push out the pills one by one. Turns out you really, really have to want to commit suicide to push out 50 pills. And most people are not that committed.... 

Why haven’t we seen more blister packages? One reason is money. Manufacturers would have to redesign packaging, and the blister packaging would cost more compared with loose pills in a bottle. The other main reason is that some consumers — notably people with arthritis — might find it challenging to open the packages.

But if we could save one life... the life of the insufficiently committed... suicidal but too lazy to poke enough pills out of the blister packs...

You know the type. For them, life is not worth the trouble. And then suddenly killing yourself is also a lot of trouble. What's more trouble? Living or these damned blister packs?

"[I]n a hypothetical state with no guns and no religion, we’d expect a suicide rate of 17 (per 100,000)..."

"In a state where everyone had guns, and no one practiced religion, we’d expect a suicide rate of 39. If everyone were religious, but no guns: 11. Everyone religious, everyone owns a gun: 21. From a political perspective, there’s really something for both the left and right to like here."

"A far-right French historian has killed himself at the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris after declaring..."

"... that more radical action was needed in opposition to same-sex marriage in France."

Dominique Venner, 78, walked into the building at 4pm and put a letter on the altar before shooting himself through the mouth, according to local media reports. Hundreds of visitors were immediately evacuated from the site, which is the most visited Catholic monument in Paris.

The motive for the suicide and the contents of the letter were not immediately clear, although Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right Front National, tweeted her "respect" for Venner and said his death was an "eminently political" gesture.

Disgusting. You can't stand on traditional Christian values and commit suicide (and desecrate an altar). That's completely incoherent. Despicable.

"Will the United States keep these detainees alive for 12 years against their will?"

"If 12 years sounds too long, then what is an appropriate amount of time to keep a prisoner alive by tube feed? Is this torture?"

It's suicide prevention.

"Brown University student mistakenly linked by amateur sleuths on a social media site to the Boston bombings"... drowned.

Sunil Tripathi, 22.

On Monday, Reddit general manager Erik Martin apologized for the "dangerous speculation" that "spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties." In a blog post, he specifically apologized to the Tripathi family "for the pain they have had to endure."