currently reading: nothing, i'm in between books atm
books finished:
Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves by Jesse Bering
books bought:
My Year of Rest & Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
books received:
The Souls of Yellow Folk by Wesley Yang (e-galley)
Hey you,
I was disappointed by Suicidal (out 11/5 in the US) – not because it was bad but because I had such high expectations for it. With every chapter I read I thought, "Well, the next chapter will definitely be more interesting," and I kept that up until eventually I reached the acknowledgements. (That's one of the problems with ebooks.) I think Bering relied too heavily upon the work of a very small group of researchers whose ideas about suicide are far from an established consensus and presented them as, basically, fact. These researchers I am talking about are mostly social psychologists, and social psychology is a field where you have to tread lightly, kick the tires, read the studies for your. I took a social psychology class my sophomore year of college, so like four years ago, and almost everything I learned has been either disproved entirely, unable to be replicated, or thrown into serious doubt. (Like Amy Cuddy's famous power posing study, which was taught everywhere and then in 2015 was thrown into doubt when a group of psychologists failed to replicate it. The resulting fallout is really an interesting story about questionable research techniques and academia and misogyny and public shaming.)
I don't know what I wanted from this book (a reason to live, probably) but it raised a lot of questions I just didn't care about. How has suicide survived evolution? Can animals commit suicide? Is there a cohesive theory of suicide? Is suicide moral?
I think there are people who would find these questions very interesting but I am not one of these people. And of course, the answer that Bering comes to is the same for all of the questions:¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Fair enough, I guess.
I also thought parts of the book were overly sentimental, which would've been annoying enough had Bering not disparaged meaningless cliches in the introduction. There was this bit, for example:
In the end, I think, we can philosophize about the ethics of suicide... But love isn't philosophy. And when we truly love someone, we would do anything to persuade that person that suicide is not, in fact, the only option. The truth is, we'd hold that fallen person's hand through Hell on earth.
We are their other option.
It made me think of another passage, this one from Adam Cayton-Holland's Tragedy + Time (out 8/23), about his little sister's suicide, which I think is the more realistic:
We were all so over it. It was constant vigilance and it was trying. That's the thing no one tells you about depression. How exhausting it is to those around the person suffering. How all-consuming it is, and how selfish. There's not a lot of "how are you doing" coming out of someone who is really depressed. Their gloom is the focus. Their misery is all that gets discussed. And you get sick of it. There's only so much of someone else's despair you can take.
Maybe it's not more realistic, maybe I'm just a pessimist, maybe they're both right. Sorry for the relentless misery but it's all I read this week.
Your friend,
Smalls