The Berlin Syndrome

Politically, West Berlin is a free-world showcase. Psychologically, it is the undisputed capital of what Germans call Selbstmord--self-murder. Locked deep in East German territory, the city of 2,200,000 reports an average of 20 suicide attempts a day, three successful. Last year 932 West Berliners killed themselves, mostly by hanging, sleeping pills, gas and drowning. The city's suicide rate of 39.5 per 100,000 persons is almost double that of West Germany and probably unmatched anywhere else in the civilized world.

Nonetheless, says Dr. Klaus Thomas, head of a West Berlin psychiatric clinic that has treated more than 12,000 would-be suicides, Berliners, and other Germans for that matter, have no particular "German suicide personality." In a computer-aided study of 10,000 patients who have passed through his Berlin Suicide Prevention Center, Thomas found few unusual characteristics. Most (53%) of the patients were troubled by problems of sex and marriage. One in twelve patients were men of the cloth, but that was no great surprise to Thomas, an ex-Lutheran pastor. "Everyone else turns to the clergy," he says. "But to whom does the clergy turn?"

The main reason for West Berlin's suicide rate is simply that it has an enriched supply of the factors that go with Selbstmord. More than 21% of the population is over 65; many are aging war widows who see little left to live for. Moreover, Thomas observes, the city's geographic and political isolation seems to reinforce the pyschological isolation of the would-be suicide. Indeed, many Berlin suicides are young West Germans who have come to the city specifically to be alone--a situation that weighs heavily around Christmastime, a high suicide season in West Berlin. The Wall, Thomas notes, has only enhanced the divided city as a concrete image of "the pre-suicidal syndrome in the person." Nowhere else, in short, is a troubled personality more likely to turn into a suicidal one.

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