Suicide Time

June 11, analysts have found, is the most common date for suicides. Tuesday is the most common day of the week; 11:00 a.m. the most common hour. This year there is no fatal conjunction: June 11 is a Saturday.* But surveyors of the civilized scene (primitive people rarely, animals never kill themselves wantonly) view with alarm a rising tide of self-murder.

Statistics on suicide are, from the nature of the deed; never complete. Fear of God and the insurance companies, desire for burial in hallowed ground and insurance payments to heirs, constrain many a suicide to disguise his act. Commonest disguise is to "fall" or "jump" from a high place, an act for which the New York Times has suggested the ambiguous, legally safe portmanteau word "flump" (TIME, Sept. 7).

Before he sailed from Montreal last week for an inspection of Europe's cancer situation, Dr. Frederick Ludwig Floffman, Prudential Insurance Co.'s peripatetic consultant, prepared for The Spectator (insurance weekly) an analysis of the acknowledged U. S. suicides of 1931.

In large U. S. cities last year 6,725 did away with themselves, a ratio of 20.5 per 100,000 of urban population. Dr. Hoffman figures "not less than 20,000" suicides in the entire country.* The only times that the 20.5 ratio has been exceeded were 1908 (21.5), 1914 (20.9), 1915 (20.8). The lowest rate since 1900 was 12.3 in 1920.

Madison, Wis. last year had the highest rate which Dr. Hoffman could recognize-- 44.8 per 100,000. Next were Sacramento (44.3), San Diego (44), Cedar Rapids (41.8).

For great U. S. communities:

Suicides Rate (per 100,000)

Brooklyn ....................... 401 15.3

Manhattan & Bronx .... 889 28.3

Chicago ......................... 618 17.9

Detroit ............................ 300 18.3

Los Angeles ................. 345 26.2

Philadelphia ................. 330 16.8

Canadians, more rural than U. S. residents, are less self-destructive. Average rate for the Dominion's large cities was 14.9 per 100,000. But Victoria last year rated 20.8, Saskatoon 22.3, Vancouver 23.6.

Vienna is the most suicidal city on earth--58 per 100,000 (1930 figures). Next rank Hamburg 51.1, Shanghai (foreign settlement) 46.6, Berlin 42.2, Brussels 40.9. Havana 38.3, Budapest 35.7, Leningrad 35.3, Warsaw 31.

Four times as many men as women commit suicide, except in Spain where the ratio is three men to one woman. In Spain more married men than bachelors kill themselves. Elsewhere the bachelors are more often self-destructive. Frenchmen and Italians are less suicidal than Norwegians, Swedes or Germans.

Dr. Louis Israel Dublin of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. finds that thin men are more inclined to suicide than normally built men, fat men more than thin ones.

In England and Wales, where suicides' occupations are registered, analysis indicates that hotel and pub keepers are most susceptible to suicide. Next come chemists, druggists, lawyers, doctors, insurance solicitors, shopkeepers. Least susceptible are locomotive engineers, clergymen, railway guards, insurance office workers, printers, iron workers.

The average woman's greatest tendency to suicide comes, if she lives so long, between 80 and 84. Other bad periods: 20 to 30, 50 to 54. The average man's comes between 65 and 69.

Methods. Japanese suicides gouge their bellies (harakiri) or hang or drown themselves. Roman officers used to place the haft of their swords on the ground and fall upon the upturned point. Gaius Petronius cut his wrists before company. Nero's other exquisites got into warm baths before they cut theirs. The warm water was to prevent the final chill of death. The Greeks drank hemlock. Chinese spite their neighbors by drowning themselves in the neighbors' wells. Other Chinese methods: over-smoking opium, sucking in a sheet of gold leaf to clog the windpipe.

Modern methods listed by psychiatrists of Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania, who are currently studying suicide problems, include hanging, drowning, inhaling gas, jumping from high places, cutting throat or wrists, piercing heart, shooting, poisoning. Doctors and chemists prefer poisons, policemen and soldiers firearms. Inhaling the carbon monoxide from a running motor's exhaust is an increasingly frequent method.

Women usually primp themselves for death, men rarely. Jews are less self-destructive than Roman Catholics; Roman Catholics less so than Protestants.

Example. One suicide stimulates another, say students of the matter. Comments Dr. Hoffman: ". . . The suicide of Mr. Eastman in Rochester, N. Y. was followed soon after by the suicide of a banker in Kentucky. No one can tell how much the increase in the Rochester suicide rate last year influenced Mr. Eastman to end his own life, the Rochester rate having increased from 15.5 in. 1930 to 20.2 in 1931."

Causes. At the American Psychiatric meeting in Philadelphia last week Dr. Gregory Zilboorg, member of the brief Kerensky Government of Russia, asserted that a "death drive" exists in many "if not a majority" of normal individuals. There "must be something about those individuals (within them) that leads them to solve their problems by means of self-inflicted death--something besides despair, financial straits, failing health. . . ." The "death drive," as he interprets it, is very often the result of an unconscious desire to punish oneself severely.

Professor Edward Adam Strecker (neuropsychiatry) of Jefferson Medical College and Dr. Edward D. Hoedemaker examine the attempted suicides taken to Philadelphia General Hospital. They find that many patients were clear-minded and philosophical in their efforts to end life. George Eastman was an example of an indubitably level-headed suicide. Long-standing poverty is seldom a cause. When a very poor person kills himself, vice, crime or love are involved.

Dr. Ruth Eldred Fairbank of Johns Hopkins studied 100 would-be suicides, and the stupendous medical literature on the subject. A feeling of failure or frustration motivated most of these cases. Impulsive panic sends many toward death. Warning signals are: "I am an empty shell," "I am guilty," "I am afraid of going crazy," "There is no hope for me," "It's no use going on." Stubborn personalities, who lack plasticity in their makeup, are susceptible to suicidal ideas. Suicide is apt to reduce the resistance to suicide among survivors or descendants.

Presidential elections, threat of war, champion contests in major athletics, any widespread cause of public excitement produces a falling off in the number of suicides.

Prevention. "The only possible cure of suicide is prevention," advises Dr. Fairbank. "A suicidal patient must never be left alone." One attempt at suicide or frequent talk of suicide is usually followed by suicidal effort. In hospitals the "plungers are especially difficult to take care of."

"The suicide evil is the most sinister specter of our national life, next to murder, which marks the U. S. as the most murderous nation on the face of the globe,'' wrote Consulting Statistician Dr. Hoffman for this week's Spectator. "There is the most urgent need for the organization of a national society for the study and prevention of suicide based on sound principles of voluntary service to render aid and advice to those in desperate need."

London's Anti-Suicide Bureau, founded 1906, is the prototype of the organizations which Dr. Hoffman wishes reproduced in the U. S. Vienna has an Advisory Centre for Those Weary of Life. Berlin has a Suicide's Aid Society. Odessa--boldly disregarding the imitativeness of would-be suicides--has an anti-suicide museum filled with knives, poison bottles, contraptions and death notes left by thoroughgoing suicides. The museum also contains grateful letters from those who have been guarded or dissuaded from death.

When Dr. Hoffman deplores the lack of an anti-suicide agency in the U. S., he ignores (because he thinks it "poorly equipped") the National Save-a-Life League, founded 1907 by Dr. Harry Marsh Warren (TIME, Dec. 7). Dr. Warren and his aides let soul-laden people (2,240 last year, 1,355 so far this year) talk themselves out. Clients include "businessmen, doctors, lawyers, judges, ministers, college students, unfortunate girls, wealthy men and women, actors, editors, bankers, executives of large concerns, society women and club men."

With disbursements of only $36,326.46 (last year) the Save-a-Life League gives money to the indigent, gets employment for some, gives luncheon tickets "to unemployed, respectable, middle-aged women, unaccustomed to asking for aid," lodges men at the Salvorium (its rest home at Hastings-on-Hudson). Said Dr. Warren last week as morbid June 11 ap- proached: "We pray with them when they come, and we give them a Bible when they go."

*Last time June 11 fell on Tuesday was 1929, next will be in 1935.

*There were close to 12,000 murders, 35,000 motor car accidents.

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