The Night Without End

In her new book, "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide," Kay Redfield Jamison lists the measures desperate souls have taken to end their lives. "The suicidal," she writes, "have jumped into volcanoes; starved themselves to death; thrust rumps of turkeys down their throats; swallowed dynamite, hot coals, underwear, or bed clothing; strangled themselves with their own hair; used electric drills to bore holes into their brains..."--well, you get the idea. Throughout history and across cultures, few impulses have been as persistent and resourceful as the drive toward self-annihilation. Jamison, a clinical psychologist, has spent much of her adult life trying to treat this impulse. But her interest, as she writes, is not purely clinical. At the age of 28, during a severe bout with manic-depressive illness, she swallowed an overdose of her medication, lithium, along with an anti-emetic to help her keep the lethal dose down. She was saved only by a devoted colleague.

Twenty-five years later, in the tidy study of her Washington, D.C., home, Jamison looks up from behind her short pale blond bangs and cites a litany of alarming numbers. One in 10 college students and one in five high-schoolers seriously considered suicide in the last year. During the Vietnam War, more young men died of suicide than in battle. Though overall U.S. suicide rates have held steady since the '50s, suicides among teens and young adults have tripled. And in the public debate about guns, often overlooked is the fact that firearms are more often used in suicides than homicides. "I got so upset about how little we do to combat suicide," she says. "With the recent advances in biology, we know a tremendous amount about suicide and who is at risk. But that doesn't translate into public policy."

Jamison first went public about her own battles with manic depression in 1995 with "An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness." The book, a frighteningly evocative descent into despair, sold 300,000 copies and made Jamison something of a celebrity poster child for mental illness. During the book tour, she says, parents would approach her with photographs of children who had killed themselves; college students would stop to talk about their own suicide attempts. She was struck by the swaths of pain left behind, and the reticence that hung over even the mental-health community. Her own family, in which suicide ran like a dark streak, rarely discussed mental illness. "Night Falls Fast" comes as an efflorescence of info, a fascinating compendium of medical and anecdotal epiphanies: most suicides take place in spring, not winter (probably because of the effect of sunlight on certain neurotransmitters); Dorothy Parker, during convalescence, proudly flashed blue ribbons over her bandaged wrists, like bracelets. Mostly, though, the book argues to consider suicide as a product of mental illness--a biochemical disorder--rather than a reaction to life's bad turns. "Most people whose spouse leaves them don't kill themselves." Among those who do, she contends, the vast majority suffer from depression or manic depression. "Life events," as they are called in psych jargon, only serve as the triggers.

With two highly personal books behind her, Jamison seems ready for a change. She dropped her clinical practice after "An Unquiet Mind," and her next project will be a joint study with National Geographic, looking at animal behavior. After 20 years of studying "suicide and madness," she says, "I told my publisher, 'I need a break'."