She took another sip of gin and finished the note to Tom. "And remember, I will always love you—Helen." Below her signature she scrawled, "Don't forget to give Dick his vitamins," and her eyes welled with tears at the thought of how sorry they would be and how sad it all was. Then she pinned the note carefully to her black cocktail dress, took a handful of pills, turned on all the lights, and composed herself on the sofa. As the darkness swept over her, she was thinking: "What if he has to work late?"
TOM came home in time, and Helen became an "attempt" instead of a coroner's statistic. Did she really want to die, or was she just making a gesture? Helen does not know now, and her ambivalence is typical; experts on suicide believe that most acts aimed at self-destruction, whether or not they succeed, are really attempts to reach out for others —ill and awful ways of crying, "Help me!"
"There is only one truly serious philosophical problem," wrote Albert Camus, "and that is suicide." In other words, what is it that makes life worth living? Religion's answer to that question today is still powerful, but far more muted than it used to be. Most men take their answers from the self-evident pleasure of being alive and, even in despair, from stubborn hope and a dimly realized sense of duty to the miracle of life. Camus' own answer was that revolt against the apparent meaninglessness of existence is noble, and that to revolt is to live—suicide is submission. He did not submit; he died in an auto accident in 1960. "It is essential to die unreconciled," he had said, "and not of one's own free will."
Such admonitions have not prevented the suicide rate from rising. It is the tenth cause of death in the U.S.—in 1920 it ranked 22nd—and it is estimated that more than one in every 100 Americans now living have tried to kill themselves at one time or another. The overall rate is 10.8 suicides per 100,000. In the age group from 15 to 19, the rate is 4 per 100,000, up from 2.4 a decade ago, and is the third-ranking cause of death (after accidents and cancer). Among college students, presumably because of the stress of work and the strain of readjusting values, suicide ranks second as cause of death and is about half again as frequent as in the non-college population of the same age.
The Deadly Springtime
Citizens of other countries are doing themselves in even more frequently. According to the latest available figures, the U.S. rate was surpassed by Hungary (26.8), Austria (21.7), Czechoslovakia (21.3), Finland (19.2), West Germany (18.5), Denmark (19.1), Sweden (18.5), Switzerland (16.8), Japan (16.1) and France (15.5). England's suicide rate is a little above that of the U.S. Far below them both are the rates of Italy (5.3), Ireland (2.5) and Egypt (0.1), although such figures are often misleading.
Accuracy of reporting varies widely. Besides in those parts of the world where suicide comes under strong religious censure, there are compelling reasons for relatives, doctors and coroners to report it as an accident or a heart attack. Not necessarily for religious reasons, the same is often true in the U.S. But certain patterns can be seen.