The Coming Wave of Pandemic Suicides?

During a news briefing on March 23, 2020, President Donald Trump said:

People get tremendous anxiety and depression, and you have suicides over things like this when you have terrible economies. You have death. Probably and — I mean, definitely — would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about with regard to the virus.

Trump followed this with a comment the next day at a Fox town meeting, when reflecting on what would happen in the US if the coronavirus shutdown continues:

You are going to lose a number of people to the flu, but you are going to lose more people by putting the country in a massive recession or depression. You are going to lose people. You’re going to have suicides by the thousands.

There is some confusion here between "depression" (with a mental health or clinical meaning) and "Depression" (an economic term from the 1930s). At various points in Trump's comments, he appears to have been predicting the society, in the midst of a financial depression, would become mentally depressed, and people would begin killing themselves out of despair.

Spanish Flu 1917-1920

What can we learn from the lessons of the misnamed "Spanish flu"?

The Spanish flu proved to be peculiar for several reasons, most noteworthy of course due to the high morbidity (as many 500 million were infected) and mortality (around 50 million deaths). It also came in waves. In the US, there were four such waves: first in spring 1918, again in August 1918 (epidemiologically the most devastating of the four), yet again in winter 1918/1919, and a final return in early 1920. Finally, the disease was unlike most flus in that it decimated even the traditionally more robust segments of the population (ages 20-40), taking the lives of many within 3 days of showing symptoms. Psychiatric Times.

Classically, during the pandemic of 1917-1920, it was not the downturn in the economy, nor the flu itself that impacted the suicide rate. It was the impact of the deaths, survivor guilt, and the underlying isolation that those battling the flu felt that "caused" suicides.

Specific examples turn up in the literature.

The Spanish flu virus "traveled west and south, arriving at Camp Grant, Illinois, on Saturday, September 21, 1918, with 70 hospital admissions," noted The Military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919.

Ten days after the epidemic struck, hospital admissions began to fall but pneumonia took hold, and Camp Grant's daily death toll began to climb. It reached double digits on October 1 with 14 deaths, then 30 the next day, 46 the next, and 76 on October 4. The mortuary was designed to handle only four deaths a day. On Friday, October 4, with more than 100 bodies in the mortuary camp, officials negotiated with local undertakers to take the bodies at $50 each, but when someone produced a flatbed truck to remove the dead, the Army quickly provided more dignified closed trucks. The number of dead broke 100 on October 5 and reached a horrifying high of 117 deaths on October 6. The last day the Camp Grant death toll exceeded 100 was October 9, but the decline was too late for its commander. Col. Charles B. Hagadorn, a West Point graduate and career officer who had served in Russia and the Panama Canal Zone, was acting camp commander when influenza struck. Although Camp Grant's sickness and death rates were no worse than other camps and better than some, fellow officers later told reporters that Hagadorn had been showing the strain of the epidemic. Troubled as more than 500 soldiers died of pneumonia under his command, on October 7, he committed suicide with a pistol shot to his head. In the end, Camp Grant suffered 10,713 influenza victims, including 1,060 deaths in a population of 40,000. Source.

One individual case is used to illustrate this.

James Niven (12 August 1851 – 30 September 1925) was a Scottish physician, perhaps best known for his work during the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918 as Manchester's Medical Officer of Health. Following his retirement in 1922 he suffered from depression and committed suicide on 30 September 1925 at Douglas on the Isle of Man. A dramatization of the Spanish flu period in Manchester was transmitted on BBC television as Spanish Flu: The Forgotten Fallen on 5 August 2009 and again on 25 September 2012. On 17 March 2020, "The flu that killed 50 million" documentary was televised, and Niven and his work featured heavily.

The emotional stresses during historical influenza epidemics are impossible to measure in statistical terms, but the suffering of bereavement from the sudden loss of loved ones cannot be ignored. The mortality toll of the 1918–1920 pandemic was not only high but also involved an unusually large proportion of victims between twenty and forty years of age. One consequence was a markedly high number of young widows and widowers and the orphaning of small children.

A significant rise in suicides was reported from several countries across the globe. In the U.S., an increase of one unit in excess flu mortality (one more death per year per 1,000 population) increased the rate of suicide by 10 percent. That statistic takes into account the possible confounding role on the suicide rate of World War I casualties (which proved not to be significant) and the decline in alcohol consumption between 1910 and 1920 (which acted to lower the incidence of suicide). Many suicides can be related to mental disturbances resulting from the fear of contracting the disease (a stricken person could be dead in three days) or stress of infection with the flu itself. However, the unbearable loss of a spouse, children, or close relatives also contributed, as did a fall in social integration due to school closures, cur-tailment of public events, and so on. Source.

In my book Suicide Clusters (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), I pointed out that the suicide rate and the occurrence of suicide clusters was so high, Sigmund Freud held the first modern youth suicide prevention conferences in 1920, in Austria.

The documented connection between viral pandemics and psychological stress dates back more than 100 years ago, when Karl Menniger linked the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic with changes in psychiatric complications. The influenza virus most commonly affects the respiratory system, but the burden on neuropsychiatric diseases are under-recognized, he said.

A major study was conducted in 1920 in the United States to determine the impact of the influenza pandemic of 1918 on subsequent rates of suicide. Researchers concluded that the pandemic caused suicide to rise.

Historical demographer Svenn-Erik Mamelund, PhD, in his 2003 paper, "Effects of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19," pointed out that Spanish flu survivors reported sleep disturbances, depression, mental distraction, dizziness, and difficulties coping at work, and that influenza death rates in the United States during the years 1918-1920 were significantly and positively related to suicide.

COVID2019

What will be the legacy of the novel coronavirus of 2019-2020?

Dr. Shailinder Singh who is a psychiatrist working in a psychiatric emergency room in a New York City hospital told ABC News:

This is an unprecedented event for the vast majority of people. It is certainly reasonable to expect the risk of suicide increasing secondary to the economic and social fallout.

One of the solutions for the pandemic -- social isolation -- could prove disastrous for deaths by suicide.

"Social distancing and isolation are triggers for people with mental health issues," said Singh.

Add social distancing to the availability of guns, and a perfect storm is being created for a future wave of suicides.

The FBI reported a 73% increase in background check applications for gun purchases in March 2020, compared to March 2019. Guns are more lethal than any other suicide method, and the United States has the highest percentage ownership of guns in the home.

Stay tuned. We could face some rough times ahead. In the meantime, remember all who have passed this way.

Designed and carved by Tene Waitere, a cenotaph was erected in New Zealand at the Te Köura marae, or meeting place, in memory of Maori who died in the 1918 pandemic.

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National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

1-800-273-8255

Mass Shootings Are About Suicides

One major issue not being explored in all of the talk of guns is the clear evidence that the school shootings, the workplace shootings, the theater shootings, and all of the other forms of mass killings hitting the news are really all about suicides.  

Some suicidologists find that almost 100% of school shooters are suicidal. And what is the easiest metaphor for most people to understand about the way to prevent suicides - and approach school shootings? If you are a parent and you are told that your child is suicidal, what is the first thing you do: Remove the guns, knives, and other dangerous weapons from being available to the impulsive, the angry, the mentally unstable, the vulnerable suicidal/homicidal individuals, which they might use to kill themselves and others. 

Why don't we think more globally about that regarding the suicidal people shooting up schools, malls, workplaces, and theaters?

Homicides are sometimes referred to as suicides turned outward, suicides as homicides turned inward. Sigmund Freud, despite his fall from grace during the rise of feminism in the 1970s and the notion that some of his theories are sexist and outdated, had some interesting insights that inform any examination of the interplay between murder and suicide. His conceptualization of suicide was as the murder of one’s self. Freud’s granddaughter, non-Freudian feminist Sophie Freud, Ph. D., whom I studied under at Simmons College, said it well in her appropriately named “The baby and the bathwater: Some thoughts on Freud as postmodernist,” in The Journal of Contemporary Human Services (1998). She observed that Freud’s extensive work on the unconscious, however flawed, helped students of psychology to see that “surfaces mirror only one aspect of human motives, and that each visible aspect of human behavior carries within it, its very opposite.”
            Exploring the thin line between homicide and suicide, the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger — founder along with his father, of the well-known Menninger Clinic and author of Man Against Himself (1938) — extended Freud’s thoughts on suicide as “murder of the self.” Menninger would write: “Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide.”
            Menninger, in his Man Against Nature, formulated what has become known as the “Menninger triad” for looking more deeply into suicidal thoughts and behavior. He found that suicidal individuals may share three aspects: (1) they wish to die (suicide), (2) they wish to kill (homicide), and (3) they wish to be killed (victim-precipitated homicide, or more commonly known today by the confusing terms, “suicide by cop” or “blue suicide”). This is best illustrated in cases of murder-suicide.
            Murder-suicides in the 1970s-1980s were regarded as a form of domestic violence, as this was a period of heightened gender-based awareness. For example, women committing murder-suicide tend to kill their children and then themselves. Men tend to murder their spouses or partners, and then complete their own suicides. As Patricia Easteal demonstrated in her 1993 study, Killing the Beloved, one third of spousal homicides in the U.S. and Canada end in suicide. Today, murder-suicides are no longer seen as being one-dimensional, as just about domestic violence. They are examined in terms of dominance, politics, and the result of triggering the suicidal-homicidal confusion in the impulsive, despondent, depressed, and angry individual. ~ The Copycat Effect, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Suicide clusters of the 1980s would be replaced by the school shootings of the 1990s, almost all conducted by suicidal male youth.

One of the earliest modern school shootings began a pattern that would be repeated over and over again. On February 19, 1997, at Bethel Regional High School in Bethel, Alaska, which had been a hotspot of suicide clusters a decade earlier, a school shooting occurred. When student Evan Ramsey, 16, was feeling suicidal in 1997, he went to two 14-year-old friends and asked them what he should do. The boys said that if he was going to kill himself, he should take some people with him. On February 19th, Ramsey did just that, killing a star athlete, Joshua Palacios, and wounding two others, with a 12-guage shotgun. Then Ramsey went to the administration office and shot and killed the principal, Ronald Edwards.

In the 21st century, a realization these mass shootings are about suicides, which present themselves first as homicides, would be a helpful realignment of examining the epidemic in which we find ourselves.

            

Bucky Fuller and Sophie Freud

"Love is metaphysical gravity."

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Picnic shelter, Southern Illinois University, where I received my BA in 

anthropology/zoology, was built by Bucky Fuller and his students.

Once in a blue moon, all of our lives are touched by great individuals and memorable humans. I have felt that has happened to me many times. I use to be very careful about what I considered to be extensive name-dropping, but upon reflection, I am honored to have met and learned from so many notable people. And these folks are known by their works, which are remembered when we say their names. 

Personally I have known some distinguished researchers and chroniclers in cryptozoology, including Bernard Heuvelmans, Ivan T. Sanderson, Roy Mackal, and George Haas, as well as first-rate Fortean thinkers like Miriam Allen DeFord, Bucky Fuller, Patrick Huyghe, Mark A. Hall, Jerome Clark, Bob Rickard, Jim Brandon, Robert Anton Wilson, Vincent Gaddis, Brad Steiger, and John A. Keel, to name but a few. The same goes for the synchromystic and twilight language writers and theorists (see here), most of whom I have met and, if they are alive, am still corresponding with them regularly. (Then there are the women and children who have enriched or are still in my life, but that's for another time.)

I feel my decades here on Earth have been specially blessed and touched by hundreds of incredible Homo sapiens. I have gained so much from all of these people.

How strange it is for me to reflect on the fact that Ivan T. Sanderson and R. Buckminster Fuller (who like me was born on July 12th) actually both wrote letters on my C.O. behalf to Decatur's draft board in the 1960s, supporting our special Fortean view of the world?

Norman Foster's Dymaxion #4 was built and then revealed during 
the fall of 2010. Photo: (probably) Nigel Young.

The nearly completed Dymaxion #1, outside the Bridgeport factory, July 1933.
Fuller's three-wheeled 1933 Dymaxion had a fuel efficiency of 30 miles 
per US gallon, carried 11 passengers, and 
reached 120 mph. Photo: Buckminster Fuller Archives.

Should I be surprised, years later, I retain a deep fascination for Fuller's architectural designs and his forward-looking innovations as insights into the twilight nature of things from that fool on a hill?

Meanwhile, in the field of understanding the mysteries in the behavior of women and men, there is one educator whom I appreciate above all others: Sophie Freud, the granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. Between the fall of 1976 and the spring of 1978, I attended Simmons College School of Social Work in Boston.

Simmons use to be a women's college, and their graduate school in social work reflected those old roots. I was one of only 17 males among the 100 students in the MSW Class of 1978. For whatever reason, Professor Sophie Freud picked me out to be her special project. At 29, I was an older, highly experienced student and I found her interest in me fascinating. It truly was a mentoring relationship, restricted to the halls of the social work school, but she had a way of finding me in the library and talking to me often about how things were going. I also became the student newspaper editor, and she volunteered as the faculty representative, even penning some movie reviews for the newsletter.

The synchromystic link with Freud continued when I was picked to receive the 1992 Simmons College School of Social Work Alumni Recognition award for writing my book Suicide Clusters (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987). I arrived at the ceremony only to discover I was sharing the day with Sophie Freud, who was being honored for her years of teaching with a Faculty Recognition award.

Her ideas, by extension, were very Fortean and holistic, even as she screened them through a Freudian view of the world. As I noted in my book The Copycat Effect (2003: page 137),

Sigmund Freud, despite his fall from grace during the rise of feminism in the 1970s and the notion that some of his theories are sexist and outdated, had some interesting insights that inform any examination of the interplay between murder and suicide. His conceptualization of suicide was as the murder of one's self. Freud's granddaughter, non-Freudian feminist Sophie Freud, Ph.D., whom I studied under at Simmons College, said it well in her appropriately named "The baby and the bathwater" Some thoughts on Freud as postmodernist." in The Journal of Contemporary Human Services (1998). She observed that Freud's extensive work on the unconscious, however flawed, helped students of psychology to see that "surfaces mirror only one aspect of human motives, and that each visible aspects of human behavior carries within it, its opposite.

The standard biography of Sophie Freud notes, of course, she is the granddaughter of Sigmund Freud (above). She was born in Vienna, Austria, and emigrated via France and Casablanca to the United States in 1942, at the age of 18. She attended Radcliffe/Harvard, and then Simmons College School of Social Work. 

Freud practiced as a social worker mostly in the field of child welfare and child (parent) guidance ~ as I did, and received her Ph.D. from the Florence Heller School for Social Welfare in 1970. She then spent the next thirty years as a social work educator, chairing the Human Behavior Sequence at the Simmons College School of Social Work and taking an active part in their doctoral program. She continues to give talks through the United States, Canada and Europe, even as she nears the age of 90.

Sophie Freud is the author of books reflecting her interest in understanding her remarkable relatives.  They are Three Mothers and Other Passions (NY: NYU Press, 1991), and Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family (NY: Praeger, 2007).

Sophie Freud's mother, Esti Freud

Sophie Freud keeps a cluttered collection of books and memorabilia (above), 

just as her grandfather Sigmund did (seen below) on his desk and in his office during his life.

A recent article notes the achievements of Sophie's offspring whom she had with her former husband, George Loewenstein, as well as other Freud relatives:

Sigmund Freud is, of course, a household name. Also well known are Anna Freud, his youngest child and the only one of his children to become a psychoanalyst, and his grandson, Lucian Freud, one of the foremost figurative artists of the current day.But the sprawling Freud family also includes many other accomplished offspring in the fields of finance, media, politics, entertainment, academia, writing, fashion and social work.
Great-grandson George Loewenstein, for example, Carnegie Mellon University professor, is a leading authority and researcher on decision-making, currently writing a book on the role of emotions in economic behavior.
His oldest sister, Andrea Freud Loewenstein, is a novelist and literary critic, author of "This Place," "The Worry Girl: Stories From a Childhood," and "Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women." His other sister, Dania Jekel, runs the Asperger's Association of New England. Dania Jekel's daughter, Laura A. Jekel, is a graduate student in the Carnegie Mellon music department. And Dr. Loewenstein's wife, Donna Harsch, is a history professor at Carnegie Mellon, specializing in 20th century Germany.
Sigmund Freud and his wife, the former Martha Bernays, had six children: Mathilde, Martin (the Loewensteins' grandfather), Oliver, Ernst, Sophie (who died at age 27) and Anna.
Martin Freud's wife and daughter, Esti and Sophie Freud, wound up in the United States. Most of the other Freuds fled to England from Vienna during World War II, so most subsequent generations are British. They include:
• Clement Freud (son of architect Ernst, brother of Lucian), broadcaster and Liberal Party politician who was knighted upon retirement from Parliament, married to actress Jill Freud, who is the former June Flewett, the inspiration for C.S. Lewis' Lucy Pevensie in "The Chronicles of Narnia."
• Matthew Freud (Clement's son), public relations mogul, head of Freud Communications, married to Rupert Murdoch's daughter, Elisabeth, formerly married to Caroline Hutton, who then married the Earl of Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales.
• Emma Freud (Clement's daughter), broadcaster and cultural commentator, life partner of scriptwriter Richard Curtis and chief script editor of his "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Notting Hill" and "Bridget Jones's Diary."
• Esther Freud (Lucian's daughter), novelist, author of "Hideous Kinky" (which became a film starring Kate Winslet), as well as "The Sea House," "The Wild," "Peerless Flats" and "Love Falls."
• Bella Freud (Lucian's daughter), London fashion designer whose work is favored by celebrity clients, weekly columnist for the Sunday Telegraph.
• David Freud (grandson of Martin and son of Walter, Sophie Freud's brother), London investment banker who helped to raise 50 billion pounds for firms such as Eurotunnel and EuroDisney, Tony Blair's adviser on welfare reform, former journalist for the Financial Times, author of "Freud in the City," an inside look at high finance in the go-go '80s.



Source: Freud's offspring lead noted lives by Sally Kalson / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 16, 2012.

by Loren Coleman ©2012