Localized Irritant I: Suicide & You

(Written 13 September 2007...but it still rings as true now as it did then, at least in my head)

I'm currently sitting in Fort Worth Texas, working on research for my graduate school writing sample. Okay, not really – I'm reading news on the BBC's website, because I have a penchant for procrastination.

The BBC is a pretty reputable news source - inasmuch as any government-sanctioned, industry-run news source can be in this day and age - but I'm telling you, the demographic they sell to are some seriously fucked up people. First off, the British paparazzi is one of the most ruthless organizations in the world: they can and will dig up dirt on anyone, anywhere, and at any cost. Give those guys two weeks in the Middle East, and not only will they be able to tell you where Osama is, who he's been schmoozing with and who he's fucking, but they'll already have concocted a sensational story in which he's actually Anna Nicole's baby-daddy. But the British public are even worse for feeding into this: they're a nation of very twisted voyeurs who get off even more than most Americans I've met on stories of human suffering and the debasement of their fellow man. As a result, I've been slowly eating my way through stuff run by the BBC, and they're constantly the same kinds of stories: death, murder, rape, suicide, death, celebrity titty, death, suffering, celebrity mental breakdown, death, death, death. It's a little much for me.

But this actually isn't a story about the BBC or its questionable journalistic ethical integrity, I just tend to get on a roll with this sort of stuff sometimes. This morning, I read the latest in the "suicide" category of news items. The story is a bit dated (March 23rd of this year) but the context is still relevant. For those who question my integrity, this story can be found at www.bbc.co.uk by looking in their archives under "chat room", as well as at a variety of other sites, including www.thisislondon.co.uk, which is the site I will be referencing particularly.

Apparently a fellow in the UK by the name of Kevin Whitrick became Britain's first case of "cyber-suicide" after logging into a chat room, turning on his webcam and proceeding to hang himself with electrical wire for a live audience. Sad bits: he was 42, had two 12-year-old daughters, and had been struggling with depression after being involved in a serious car accident last year, as well as coping with the death of his father as well as his own divorce proceedings. As per usual, the folks around him didn't notice a thing, though the lady who worked the convenience store across the street from his flat said he was very nice when he came in every night to buy eight cans of Boddington's. When Whitrick took the plunge, shocked chatters contacted police, and he was pronounced dead at the scene, during which time the site moderators closed off the camera feed.

Important things to note: the website in question, called "Paltalk" hosts a wide variety of chat rooms ranging from the starkly religious to the conventionally political, from the sicko celebrity to the sultry and steamy. One of the rooms hosted by Paltalk was ostensibly an "Insult Room" in which, according to the London Evening Standard, participants are encouraged to "have a go" at one another (that's British for making fun). I took a look at Paltalk a few minutes ago and wasn't able to locate any such chat room which means one of two things: a) I didn't look hard enough because there are several thousand chat rooms hosted there and I don't have that kind of patience, or b) the room was shut down, which is pretty likely considering. Either way, I've heard of these sorts of chat rooms before, and I'm sure you have too.

Okay. So this brings me to the good bit.

I think we can all agree that suicide is bad. It's horrible that anybody feels like they have to cut their mortal coil off at the bud, because there aren't too many people who deserve to feel that way. But the other thing is, in my personal opinion, it's pretty selfish to wax yourself, because you don't have to take responsibility for the kind of havoc you wreak on the people around you (believe it or not, there are people who give a shit). It's the ultimate guilt trip, right? Especially those fuckers that leave a note saying "It's not your fault"...that's the cosmic, mortal version of the "It's not you, it's me" speech that people in relationships give one another when they're trying to say "It's not me, it's you", but they want to soften the blow. And that just covers people who go quietly into their rooms, down a bottle of sleeping pills and a handle of Jim Beam, and leave the world as unobtrusively as possible. As for everybody else - the skyscraper leapers, the "I'm taking you down with me" psychotics, the subway jumpers, and in fact the webcam performers - it gets elevated to new levels. At that point you're actively involving other people - people who don't even know you - in your little drama play. Think how the subway operator feels when she wipes out some idiot at seventy-five kilometers an hour because he leapt off the platform, or the guy who nearly gets flattened by somebody swan-diving off a fifteenth-story balcony. Think about what it must be like to see some guy hang himself - live and in living colour - and because you're sitting behind a computer screen there's nothing you can do to prevent it. Worse, you thought the cat was kidding because he brought up suicide in an INSULT CHAT ROOM, so you goaded him on, thinking you were participating in some bizarre "Punk'd" facsimile. How would you feel?

Pretty fuckin' bad, I'd imagine.

Apparently, the people who commented on the article at ThisIsLondon agreed with me. The difference, of course, is that the commenters were all ready to line up and crucify everybody who was in that chat room that night - some comments even called for legal action against the other chat members.

Okay, I want to address this first, and then we'll look at some gems from the comment list.

Here you have a 42 year old man - an electrician by trade, so you assume he's got some brains. He's got two 12 year old daughters whom he professes to adore (according to his family and friends). Okay, his father died - that sucks. And his wife left him right afterwards - that was a pretty bitchy thing to do (which is thoroughly overreaching, I know, but I'm giving this guy the benefit of the doubt). And he was in a car accident (I couldn't turn up anything reliable about the accident itself or what happened to him - but if he didn't lose his dick in the wreck, and if he still had enough ambulatory agency to be able to break his ceiling and hang himself with electrical wire, his injuries couldn't have been that extensive). Plus, the guy is probably a functional alcoholic (eight cans of beer every night?), which is no good in and of itself. So the cat is pretty unhappy, which nobody is going to hold against him because he's had a rough year.

So what does he do?

He goes on the internet. To a chat room, where he can talk to people he doesn't know. A chat room which, I gather, was clearly demarcated as one in which "fighting" or "flaming" or whatever is allowed, and in fact is encouraged. He then proceeds to tell everyone in said chat room that he's going to off himself. This is akin to cutting yourself shaving and then taking a swim in the Great Barrier Reef: a feeding frenzy will quite obviously ensue.

I can say for myself that if I was in that chat room, I would have serious doubts as to whether this guy really meant it. I mean, what kind of person who is struggling with depression and having suicidal thoughts goes deliberately into a jackal's den like that? What would somebody like that hope to gain?

The answer, my friends, is justification.

If you've already decided more-or-less beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're going to make the Big Move, you usually don't tell everybody about it. Generally speaking, people who tell other people that they want to die are looking for some kind of support - they call it a "cry for help" I think. They want to hear that their life is worth something: they want to be validated externally because they can't find internal validation for whatever reason. Kevin Whitrick was obviously kind of like that - so why did he go to the one place where we was absolutely guaranteed to get the opposite kind of attention? It strikes me that the only reason somebody would deliberately go somewhere to get mocked and belittled before killing themselves is that they needed one last push in the "right" direction, one last justification for their decision, one last shred of proof that the world is, indeed, a cold and lonely place where no one understands their pain and other people exist only to stomp out the last vestiges of hope that have been sputtering within their breasts and holding off the inevitable blackness of existence. It goes back to what I said about suicide being a pity-party: woe is me, the world hates me, I'm justified in ending it all.

So where do we put the blame for this? I'd tend to put it on Kevin Whitrick, myself, because it's his life and his decision to end it, regardless of the other factors at work. If he had nothing else to live for, he had his daughters, and that should have been reason enough to find other ways - any other ways - of dealing with his problems. But here in North America, and obviously in Westernized cultures the world over, it seems to me that we have this amazing capacity to turn everyone into a victim. Have you ever noticed this? The rising prevalence of "victim criminals"? They don't call it that, but when the rapist is just a rapist because his father raped him, and his father raped him and so on back through the annals of time, and when the serial killer is a serial killer because mommy didn't love him like she should have because mommy was a crack whore because she was underprivileged and "fell through the cracks", and the kid who goes to school with a shotgun is a victim of the faceless media that told him to listen to Marilyn Manson and watch The Matrix and that's why he was violent, where do we put the blame? Who gets to take responsibility? See – everybody's a victim and nobody's at fault.

So instead of looking at this situation for what it is: a guy who was terminally fucked up and offed himself on camera after placing himself in a situation in which he was almost guaranteed to not be taken seriously, instead of looking at why Kevin Whitrick and so many other people like him are driven to suicide when suicide as it exists today was a relatively non-existent phenomenon prior to maybe a thousand years ago, instead we back into a corner screaming "Not me, it's not my fault, I'm not part of the problem, I'm not partaking in a sick, wrongheaded culture that spawns depressive suicide, it's not my fault that the Kevin Whitricks of the world feel so isolated and fucked up that they have to hang themselves, nope, not me...it's THOSE GUYS OVER THERE."

And who, in this case, are those guys over there?

"For all those people who watched this tragedy I hope you are proud." - Paul Rust, UK

"Those people egging him on are disgusting - I hope they feel ashamed." - Mia, England

"My thoughts the room should be closed and the people who had @ on need banning..." Lesley, Saint Paul USA

"The fact that those people goaded him into killing himself is unbelievable. Regardless of whether or not they 'thought' he was acting even joking in that way about suicide is not acceptable. Those people that encouraged him to go ahead and kill himself should be held just as responsible for his death as if they were there and assisted him with it! Those people have something seriously wrong with them in the first place...they need more help than a 'support facility' can offer." - Jenn, USA

"I can only hope that the rest of their lives they will feel responsible for the death of this poor man and find it hard to live with themselves." - Linda, Lynn, MA

I could go on and on because there are lots more comments just like this, but I think you get the idea. Basically, the prevalent opinion seems to be that it was not, in fact, Mr. Whitrick who was responsible for his own death, but instead a bunch of people located all over the world who were speaking with him via a specially-designed insult chatroom when he turned on his webcam and killed himself (I'd like to make special mention of the term "KILLED HIMSELF" here). Certainly, had Mr. Whitrick entered the insult room and found the kind of caring and supportive environment one would obviously look for in an insult room, his terrible decision might have been averted. Certainly, in mocking Mr. Whitrick's assertion towards suicide, the denizens of the insult chatroom were behaving completely out-of-character and in a manner for which Mr. Whitrick must have been totally unprepared. And yes, Jenn USA, they should be held totally accountable as though they were there assisting him, because without their "goading" Mr. Whitrick would doubtless have returned to his life and found the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel - perhaps even accepting Jesus and foregoing his alcohol addiction in favour of the children he professed to love. We can only hope that the hardened murderers of the Paltalk network will take this opportunity to reevaluate their life decisions and even, as Lynn MA suggested, "have a hard time living with themselves". If we're really lucky, they might even become so depressed over their "responsibility" for Mr. Whitrick's death that they might take a page from his book and off themselves too. They could start a whole chatroom on that very topic, in fact: "I killed Kevin Whitrick and now I want to die". Might want to disable webcam availability in that room, though.

Get your shit straight people. Take some responsibility for your actions, and hold other people responsible for theirs. I wasn't in that chatroom that night, so I can't say for sure what went down. But the scenario seems pretty goddamn fishy to me, and the minute we decide to start shutting down websites and handing out judgment to people for behaving in a way entirely accordant to the standards of the situation, well, what does that make us? I'm sorry Kevin Whitrick is dead, but I'm more sorry his two daughters will now grow up without a father. And as far as the people on the insult board at Paltalk go, I'd be willing to bet that they're already heaping enough largely-undeserved guilt on themselves as it is, without you fucking moral puritans advocating their crucifixion.

It all comes back to addressing the disease rather than the symptom. Instead of blaming all the worlds' problems on cosmetic issues, we need to get to the root of the issue: next time something like this happens, because it will, let's look at how we can prevent more fathers from hanging themselves with electrical wire rather than who we can blame for his personal decision.

And that's how I spent my morning. There will be more of this to come. I'll try to make the next one a little more light-hearted. Thanks for reading friends...I don't know about you, but I feel a hell of a lot better.