UMKC philosophy professor Clancy Martin on his new book How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind
The philosopher himself and the cover of his latest book. // Courtesy photos
Author and professor of philosophy at UMKC Clancy Martin’s newest book, How not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind, is available March 28, published by Pantheon. The book is a comprehensive study of suicidal ideation from various worldviews.
The book relies upon the author’s own personal narrative as well as extensive primary and secondary research to explore the thinking patterns behind repeated suicide attempts. Martin’s mission is to destigmatize suicide with the book. His other publications include Love & Lies, Bad Sex, Scalper, and How to Sell.
The release of Martin’s new book will be celebrated with a free book discussion with Angela Elam, former producer and host of public radio’s New Letters on the Air, at the Kansas City Public Library Plaza Branch Thursday, March 23, at 5:30 p.m. How not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind was inspired by Martin’s 2018 Huffington Post essay, “I’m Still Here.”
Martin joined The Pitch staff for an interview about the process of writing on such an emotionally charged subject and the reception his work has received.
The Pitch: I admire your vulnerability in the book talking about your own personal history and your own attempts with suicide. How did it feel for you to write about these events? Was it cathartic?
Clancy Martin: Yeah, that’s a very helpful question. It went through a few different phases. I’ve written some fairly personal stuff before. I was a little bit worried about it, but I was not too worried about it. And then, summer before last, I had this really, really rough couple of months, and I was getting so depressed that I was afraid it was going to be as bad as my very worst depressive episode, which was back in 2009. And I started to think, I wonder if it’s writing the book that is doing this, and I was wondering if I was going to be able to keep on working on it.
And then, happily, it passed, and it passed quite quickly. And then, in the past three, four, or five months since I’ve been finished with the book, it’s strange. It seems like it has been cathartic. It seems like it has been strangely healing, which one might hope for.
When people come to me for advice on how to deal with suicidal ideation, or depression, or the various anxiety things that students and other people write to me about—people who have survived suicide attempts write to me, or people who are thinking of suicide write to me very often —one of the things I generally do tell them is to try writing about it.
And usually, it is helpful, and I was expecting it to be to be helpful. But for a little bit, I was worried about whether it was, and then it turned out to be so much more helpful than I expected. So that was a very nice surprise.
Now, the other aspect of it, of course, is thinking about my mom, my wife, and most especially, my children reading it. My eldest daughter, she asked me for a version quite early on before it had even been properly edited. My other children, two of them are reading age, where they would read a book like this. They’re 18 and 16. The 18-year-old is not that much of a reader, but the 16-year–old is a very, very avid reader. And I am worried. I’m worried I will need to have a talk with her before she reads it. I needed to have a talk with my eldest daughter. And I still don’t know if my eldest daughter has read the whole thing or not. I mean, she’s 28. She’s extremely busy with her own life. So, if she has, she hasn’t told me that she has. But I was like, before I give this to you, honey, I want to warn you in advance of some things that are in here. Some that don’t really pertain to you at all, but that will make you worry, and some that do pertain very directly to you, and especially you when you were much younger. And so there was that aspect of it that of course I still feel very vulnerable about, and I’m probably going to feel very vulnerable about this book when it comes to my children for the rest of my life.
But, these are also aspects of my personality and aspects of my history that I feel vulnerable about to my children for the rest of my life. I think partially because my mom, she’s a real scrupulous rewriter of history, you know, if there’s any part of our family history that she doesn’t like, she just rewrites it and she just comes up with a new narrative, and that’s the narrative she’s committed to. And I think in part for that reason, that just has driven me crazy all my life, that I really have always tried to be, with my children, as open as possible about my own failings.
You can never be open with your children about everything, because there are some things that you just could never let them know. Like if you’re having this worry about them, say, if it involves them and their self-image, of course, you can’t be honest with them about that stuff. Because you have to be very careful how you navigate that territory. But when it comes to my own failings, I just really feel like it’s better to let them know as much of the truth as possible.
Do you think that the book would be as effective, or would it even exist, without your own personal experiences included?
It definitely wouldn’t exist. How the book came to be was, I had an editor write me some years ago, and he was working for a magazine called Epic, which is a magazine founded by Joshua Bearman and a partner of a friend of his. Joshua Bearman was the guy who wrote the article that became the movie Argo. But anyway, he used his Argo money to start this magazine, Epic. His idea was, we’ll hire various writers that we like, and we’ll pay them for long form journalism pieces. But part of the deal is we’re going to take these pieces straight to HBO. So, they contacted me and said, Will you write an essay for us? And I said, Well, I’d like to, you know, it was a time when I needed the money, but I’m not really long form investigative journalism person. And they said, Well, what about a piece of long memoir? That’s the kind of thing you do. And then I said, well, there is something I haven’t written about, and it would be fun to write about, which is my stays in psychiatric hospitals. And they’re like, Yeah, that sounds great.
So, I started writing about my stays in psychiatric hospitals. And then my editor had someone very close to him attempt suicide, and he said to me, you know, I noticed every time you’ve gone to the psychiatric hospital, it’s because you’ve tried to kill yourself and failed, and that’s how you wind up there. Maybe you could say something about this. And I was like, you know, that’s a really good point, I should have been writing about that all along.
So then, I wrote that essay, and then it came out with Epic and Huffington Post. It got a lot of attention. And then I started getting these emails from people, pretty much always a version of the same email, which is like, I was Googling how to kill myself, and I came upon your essay, and I read it, and I decided not to kill myself. And you know, as a writer, you get something like that, and you’re like, wow, I did not expect that. And it really makes you feel like, okay, I’ve actually written something worth writing.
So, when the essay got as big as it did, my agent was like, Can you turn this into a book? And meanwhile, I have these people emailing me and so on. It’s like, yeah, it’s maybe it is something that I should turn into a book. And part of it too, was some advice that a person I really respect gave me some years ago, shortly after my first novel came out. He said, Clancy, you should try to write something that tries to help people. And then it stayed with me all this time. I’m doing this writing, but am I doing anything other than entertaining people? Am I doing anything to actually help people? So, I mean, it’s kind of a vague, glorious goal. I know. But it’s still stayed in my head, like, Wouldn’t it be great to write something that actually could help some people? So, that was this opportunity. So, yeah, I don’t think the book would have come to be without my personal experience.
And then, in terms of the very important question of would it be as good or would it be worth reading without my personal experience? I think that the most important thing, and the best sort of scientific evidence that we have on this subject agrees, is that there’s no better medicine for chronic suicidal ideation, passive suicidal ideation, and repeat suicide attempts, as talking about it. Sharing stories about it, even reading about it. The key is that you’re not reading something or talking in such a way that you inadvertently or sometimes deliberately romanticize the subject, which has happened a lot, and it’s very dangerous.
I warn about it a lot in the book, but there’s a thing called the Werther effect, which is when you kind of glamorized suicide and you write or tell romanticized stories about it, more people kill themselves. There’s an opposite effect called the Papageno Effect, after Mozart’s character Papageno in The Magic Flute. And the Papageno Effect is like if you write about this, and you write about it from the perspective of survival, surviving suicide, and why suicide is actually a bad idea, and how a suicide attempt comes to be and the whole psychology that goes into a suicide attempt, suicide rates actually goes down. The media, all of us as writers, we have the astonishing power to reduce the suicide rates. But for me, the only way to do that effectively is to say, this is how it feels to me, this is what it’s been like for me, this is why I’ve attempted it.
I’m very grateful. I know that there are other people out there who have this same habit of thinking. And if I can say, hey, I know what it’s like to have that habit of thinking, I totally understand. And, you know, maybe neither one of us has to feel that way, or even if we do have to feel that way, maybe we don’t have to make attempts. Maybe we can feel that way and not make attempts. And that’s like our victory over this habit of thinking that we happen to be cursed with. That’s totally worth doing.
It’s awesome to hear about the very real responses you’ve gotten.
I think of this one kid. He’s so sweet. He’s the kid writing me from England, and I can’t remember, he was 16 or 17 years old. And he was writing to say that he had changed his mind on account of my story. Because he was young, he tried to make his email sound very literary. He’s obviously also a very bright kid, but you could just hear how much pain he was in, you know, and we still correspond back and forth.
And there’s this other correspondence. I mean, I’ve got dozens of them. But one correspondence comes to mind, she just wrote me the other day. She’s been writing me for a couple of years now. Her latest near attempt was when her grandchild came over with her daughter, and it was obvious that her grandchild had been beaten badly by her son-in-law. And this put her in such a place of despair that she’s like, I just can’t handle this world anymore, Clancy. So we emailed back and forth through it.
They’re just all different people, you know, and people from all over the world. When I’m emailing with one of these people, it makes me feel a little less like the world is such a bad place I’ve got to get out of it.
It’s a funny thing as a writer, isn’t it? Like, you write something, and half of it is in your head. You don’t imagine anyone ever reading it. Then if someone comes to you and they’re like, Oh, hey, I love your piece, that’s a weird feeling.
I really love the book’s goal of discussing suicide “honorably.” Why do you think that our society is so quick to label suicide as an immoral act? Or, what do you think are some of the most influential factors that have led to this attitude?
That’s such an important question. You know, I have an op ed coming out on this question in the Wall Street Journal in a couple of weeks about destigmatization and the taboo of suicide. And it’s just so important, because there’s all this shame that’s associated, and sinfulness and immorality and selfishness, all these things that are associated with people attempting suicide or dying by suicide. Very often families won’t even tell friends how a family member who died by suicide.
It’s really harmful in so many ways for survivors, it’s really harmful for the people who are thinking of it because it keeps them from talking to others, which is the best medicine they could avail themselves of. It also makes them feel even worse about themselves and makes them think that there’s something wrong with them, which makes them all the more likely to actually do it. Also keeping it in the dark, like almost anything we keep in the dark, gives it a kind of allure that it otherwise wouldn’t have if we were just all being open about it and talking about it.
And it’s sad to think that so recently, even depression, people wouldn’t talk about in very recent history. As Susan Sontag teaches us, even cancer, people wouldn’t talk about. They somehow viewed it as a thing that people should hide and should be ashamed of.
The stigma and the taboo exists throughout the world, but it has different permutations in different cultures. And, in our culture here in the United States, it’s just very much a part of our Judeo Christian Protestant heritage. And, you know, the funny thing is that in the Bible there are a lot of suicides, and there’s no prohibition against suicide. A number of people in the Old Testament take their own lives, and it seems to be morally praiseworthy when they do. And then in the New Testament, of course, Judas kills himself. Now, nobody’s saying that he does it for morally praiseworthy reasons—he’s Judas, after all—but he takes his own life and it’s notable that Jesus did not get involved with that, other than being betrayed by Judas.
What happened was, there were a few different groups in the first and second century BC, who were such artic believers in the afterlife, that they started committing suicide so that they could get there faster. And then St. Augustine learned about this and was like, This is not what God had in mind, not at all. And then St. Augustine, who was one of the greatest philosophers in the history of the Judeo-Christian tradition, very convincingly argued against it, and then everybody after St. Augustine bought his view that that suicide was a sin. And then, they consequently couldn’t be buried. They desecrated the bodies of suicide, sometimes they punished their families, sometimes they seized their family’s assets.
You know, until very recently, suicide was a crime in this country, it’s still a crime on the books in some states, even though it’s happily never enforced as a crime anymore. But you can still sort of see a vestige of it in the 72-hour holds that they have. They have a 5150 hold that they can put you on when you make an attempt. And then they can prolong that as long as they like, once you’re in the system, it’s totally up to your psychiatrist. So, although they call it a 72-hour hold, that’s more like a guideline than it is a guarantee. If they think that you’re still possibly a danger to yourself, they’ll just renew that sucker on you, and you have to get a lawyer involved to get released.
So, that’s how it came to be. And I guess I already said a little bit about the damage that it does. I think one of the most important things we can do when we are talking about suicide, or writing about suicide, is insist that this is one more kind of mental and behavioral health problem that is suffering from an unjust and unreasonable stigma, like so many mental and behavioral health problems of the past have suffered from these stigmas. And then, before that, many other ailments and illnesses have suffered from stigmas that have interfered with us making broad progress in understanding the condition and also interfered with us making progress in helping the people who suffer from it. Suicide is one of the worst problems that we have in contemporary American society. It’s the second leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds. And one of the principal reasons we’re not making more progress is because of the stigma, just because of the taboo.
You draw on a wide breadth of sources for this book, from poets and essayists to classic and contemporary philosophers, to stand-up comedians, to Tibetan monks. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your research methods for the book? What were the challenges of this process?
Well, it was very highly, highly unpleasant. You know, the literature is huge. And so, the first thing that I did was I tried to as exhaustively as I could go through the medical and psychiatric literature, because I knew that that was going to be, the hardest and the least fun part of it for me. So going through the psychiatric, the medical and psychological literature, looking to see what I could find that was relevant for the way I was approaching the project and reading all that stuff. That was that was the hardest part. It was interesting because I do have this obviously highly motivated interest in the subject. But that was the hardest and most burdensome part of research.
Then the next part of the research that was a lot more fun for me, and resulted in like 200 pages of the book, all of which were cut by my editor, I did the exact same thing, but I did with the philosophical literature. So it was days and days and days and days of reading from every philosophical tradition, not just the Western tradition with which I am more familiar, but also the African philosophical tradition, the Indigenous American philosophical tradition. I mean, I now know about the philosophy of suicide as it is described by 17th and 18th century adventurers who were visiting Indigenous tribes in the Arctic. That literature happily is there, you have to go looking for it, but it’s there. So, that was a lot more fun, because, you know, I love that stuff.
Then when it came to the literary sources, because there was no possible way to read everything that has been written about suicide, I had to be more selective, but it was much easier because I have all my own favorites. I wanted to know what Audre Lorde has to say about suicide because I love Audre Lorde. I wanted to be sure that I had read everything that Anne Sexton has to say, because I love her. You know, Dostoyevsky, I already knew everything he had to say, but I went and reread everything that he had to say, and Shakespeare. These are all people that I just absolutely love. So, it was good to go through that.
When it came to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, I had more challenges because some of the people I wanted to talk to and wanted to get their thoughts on this subject don’t write or speak in English, they only write or speak Tibet. So there I ran into some obstacles, and I made some progress. One person who I was able to talk to through a translator has since died. And fortunately, in the past couple of years, he recognized that this was becoming an epidemic and expected the epidemic to get worse as a consequence of the aftereffects of COVID. And happily, in the past couple of years while I was working on the book, he had a fair bit to say on the subject. So, he was he was very, very helpful to me. There’s a great, great, great lama, one I very much still want to talk to, but wasn’t able to get to. He’s still alive. And I hope to get to talk to him about the subject and get his insights on the subject. Next year, probably. One of his teachers is also a teacher of mine.
There’s a wonderful entire chapter on Akutagawa, that my editor—she’s very sneaky—she says, Well, let’s take this and move it into the appendix. I was like, Okay, well, I can’t bear it, but we can move it into the appendix. She moved into the appendix, and then after she moved it into the appendix, she’s like, Oh, Clancy, I’ve got this problem. The book is still way too long. We’re gonna have to cut some of these appendices. I especially mourn the chapter on Akutagawa. I love that chapter. And I love his work, but what can you do?
How does your teaching influence your writing, and how does your writing influence your life as a teacher?
I will tell you that my teaching has had the most profound impact on my writing. When I was first teaching myself to write, I was really writing for an audience of other writers. I was really thinking of my heroes and writing with those heroes in mind. And I don’t do that at all anymore. When I’m writing now, I am writing with my students in mind. And they, my students, more than anyone else, have taught me to be the kind of writer that I want to be.
There are many different ways to achieve the incredibly difficult process of being the kind of writer that you want to be and everybody has to find their own way, but for me, it has been my students teaching me how to slowly, painfully learn to be honest and clear about material and including psychological material about myself. That can be very difficult, intellectually, to explain, and can be very difficult also psychologically and personally to explain, and sometimes can be very delicate. So, it’s all thanks to my students.
Now, how does my writing impact my teaching? I never assign my writing to my students. I have this separate area of, you know, textbooks I’ve edited, that’s a completely different thing. But my own writing, I just don’t assign it to my students. When I co-taught a class with a friend of mine, I think we may have assigned an essay of mine one time that he really wanted to assign, but I just don’t do it, because I, you know, I just feel weird about it. It just feels weird. I don’t want to assign my own writing.
Now, that said, I can’t help but be aware of my own writing, particularly when it comes to the things that I’m most passionate about. So, when we’re talking about end-of-life decision making, for example, in my class “Money, Medicine, and Morals,” I always make a point of, in that class, taking a day to talk about suicide. I will I always open with, Okay, listen, you should know, I’m not in any danger right now. But your professor has attempted suicide before. And then tell them a little bit of my history without telling them too much, you know, because I don’t want it to be about me, I want it to be about them. But however, I have consistently found that if I lay my cards on the table a little bit, personally, that’s the only way they’re going to feel comfortable enough to open up. And if I go into class, and I say, Who here has attempted suicide, you know, nobody’s going to raise their hand. But if I go, tell them a little bit about my own past attempts and say, if you want to, you can Google me and you can read stuff that I’ve written about and if you have more questions, email me and let me know. Then I say, Okay, now that I’ve laid my cards on the table, is there anybody who wants to talk about a friend who made an attempt or someone who wants to talk about an attempt of their own, and, you know, it’s like, basically, every hand in the classroom goes up.
And to me, that, again, is a time when I feel like this is why I love my job. This is why this is a job worth doing, because they may not have ever previously had an opportunity to talk about this stuff before, much less to talk about it in an environment where they can look around and see oh, I’m not alone with this, I’m surrounded by people my own age who feel the exact same way I do. And when they realize that, they realize there’s nothing wrong with them, and this is a perfectly natural way to feel. And you don’t have to be scared. And you can accept it. And rather than acting on it or running away from it, making it worse by running away from it or hiding it in some scary place, give it some air and then suddenly, it becomes less heavy, it becomes less dangerous.
I quote her in the book, like Meghan Markel said, I knew if I didn’t talk about it, I would do it. I don’t know if this is true for everybody, but for me, talking about it is how I how I keep myself from doing this. And the psychological literature on this is very, very clear. Fears discussed are fears diminished. And you can see your students making progress for themselves in the classroom, and also accepting each other, which are also really nice things. That’s what college is really about, you know, more so than, what, finding a job?
Is there anything else you want to use this space to discuss?
People are not sufficiently recognizing this: We used to call it the 15-to-24 group. Now it’s more like the 10-to-24 age group, for whom suicide attempts, suicidal ideation, and suicide itself is a crisis like we’ve never seen before right now in this country, specifically in that age group, also with minority groups, and in LGBTQ+ kids. 40% of transgender people attempt suicide. That is a crisis. I just want to make sure that we mention this so that people are aware that we’re not doing anything about it as a society right now. Kids are going to the emergency room. They’re sitting in the emergency room for 48 hours, then being released. Never see a psychiatrist, never see a trained mental health professional who could do anything for them. And yet, in Missouri, for example, we have one of the best dialectical behavioral therapy programs for helping teens with suicidal thinking, which is the single best program for helping with suicidal ideation that we know of in the world. So, we can do something about it, we must do something about it, and we’re not doing something about it.
