Choosing Death : There are Books on How to Do It, Notes that Explain Why It was Done, but Even the New Suicidologists Can’t Explain the Impulse to End It All.

“THIS IS MY FINAL LOG ON. . . .”

The words flashed across several Silicon Valley computer screens around dinner time one Sunday last April. Messages left on computer bulletin boards can be pretty strange sometimes, but this one had an urgency that rang terribly true to nearly everyone who read it. The note was brief, saying only that the sender had a loaded rifle and was going to kill himself. The sender typed in his name--Richard Martinez--and then logged off.

Within 20 minutes, Palo Alto police began fielding calls from worried members of a local computer club who had received Martinez’s message by modem. Police rushed a SWAT team to Martinez’s apartment building and spent nearly four hours trying to establish contact with him, first by phone, and then, in true Silicon Valley fashion, by computer. Just before 10 p.m., police kicked down the door of Martinez’s apartment and found the 19-year-old dead, sprawled across his bed with a high-powered rifle at his side.

In some respects, Martinez’s death is the quintessential California suicide, a deadly cocktail of quiet desperation and a loaded gun, garnished with a high-tech twist--the first electronic suicide note local police had encountered. But stripped of its novel elements, the Martinez death is soberingly commonplace--that of another Californian who died by his own hand, in the belief that there was nowhere left to turn.

Ask Californians what the state’s biggest killers are, and AIDS, homicides and traffic fatalities would ride high on most lists. Few would include what is consistently among California’s leading causes of death: suicide. The figures are both surprising and disturbing. Each year, there are more suicides than homicides in California. In 1989, the last year for which complete figures are available, 3,832 people died by their own hands, compared to 3,270 who were murdered.

While AIDS deaths and homicides have justifiably attracted the attention of state health officials, suicide remains California’s great stealth killer. Some might argue that, unlike disease and accident victims, people who commit suicide “choose” to die. But the overwhelming evidence of researchers and mental-health professionals suggests that most suicidal episodes are short-lived and that many suicides can be averted if the immediate crisis is resolved. Many suicides, in short, are preventable.

In California, the force behind suicide prevention is a small cadre of overworked mental-health professionals and a loose confederation of volunteers who staff the nearly 40 telephone “suicide lines” (sometimes called “crisis lines”) operating through-out the state. Many of these lines are going through a crisis of their own, competing with less unsettling causes for a shrinking cut of state and local funding. A program run through the state’s Department of Mental Health has trained 10,000 service professionals in crisis intervention over four years, but like many state-funded projects these days, it faces an uncertain future.

Part of the problem is that suicide remains largely a taboo topic, despite its prevalence. Almost everyone knows someone who has committed or attempted suicide, and most honest people admit to having considered--however briefly--the notion of ending it all themselves. Still, suicide is usually discussed in furtive whispers.

It’s is not so much a regional or national problem as it is a human one. At its heart, suicide is an attempt--many would say a failed attempt--to grapple with the basic riddle of human existence. Shakespeare posed the question as “To be or not to be?” These days in California, the question may be framed a bit differently, but its essence remains the same--To log on or to log off?

SUICIDE STRETCHES BACK TO ANTIQUITY, BUT THE IDEA OF SETting up a network to prevent suicide is a recent phenomenon. Los Angeles, in fact, can rightly claim to be the birthplace of the most successful model of suicide intervention, the telephone hot line. The first suicide hot line in America was established in L.A. in September, 1958, with one phone line and a staff of five fielding calls on the fourth floor of an abandoned tuberculosis hospital on the grounds of L.A. County General Hospital. The L.A. Suicide Prevention Center (LASPC) quickly became a model for several hundred crisis centers and phone lines established across the country during the 1960s and ‘70s.

“The early days of the LASPC were like being in a covered wagon during pioneer days,” recalls Dr. Edwin Shneidman, who founded the center with Dr. Norman Farberow. “Every day seemed like high adventure.”

The center remained an autonomous service until 1988, when funding problems and management disputes led to its being absorbed by the county’s Family Service Agency. The center currently operates out of a low-slung building in mid-Wilshire that it shares with other Family Service divisions. By the standards of most suicide-prevention centers in California, the LASPC’s digs are practically tony. San Francisco’s suicide-prevention center, for example, is located above a tattoo parlor, where visitors walk into a lobby festooned with photos of floridly painted body parts.

Even though suicide observes few boundaries of any sort, states west of the Mississippi have had higher suicide rates than their Eastern counterparts ever since figures were first compiled. Currently California’s suicide percentage ranks 12th in the nation--not as bad as several sparsely populated Western states, including Nevada, Montana and Wyoming, but one of the leaders among densely populated states. One factor is the prevalence of guns. Firearms are by far the most lethal means of suicide; there aren’t many “attempted suicides” when a gun is involved. Men are far more likely than women to use a gun in a suicide attempt, and because of that, men are nearly four times more likely to complete a suicide than women, even though females attempt suicide--usually with pills--three times as often as males.

“Sometimes you really have to wonder how much the easy availability of guns affects the suicide rate,” observes Charlie Newman, a medical examiner for the Santa Clara County coroner’s office who has investigated scores of suicides in his 19-year career. “I’ve had cases where you walk in on someone who’s shot himself with a gun, and lying beside him is the box they just brought it home in, with the sales slip dated that day. Sometimes that’s how we determine the time of death. You find yourself saying, ‘Let’s see, if he bought the gun at 5, and we found him at 8, he must have died somewhere in there.’ ”

Another factor in the West’s higher suicide rate may be what author Howard Kushner calls “the frontier myth.” In his book “American Suicide,” Kushner, a professor of history at San Diego State University, points out that the West was settled largely by pioneers who believed that their personal lives could be transformed as easily as the land could be tamed. “The opening of the frontier symbolized an attempt to recapture everything that was thought to be authentic,” Kushner notes. “But the frontier doesn’t work. The cowboy keeps moving West because as soon as he’s settled a town, he’s destroyed the conditions that made him heroic in the first place.”

The restless pioneer and the nomadic cowboy embodied the spirit of the American frontier, which required a questing hero seeking transformation and reunion with lost love objects through repeated migration. Such characters still ride the mythic frontier, repackaged in contemporary films such as “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” For its part, California has become an international symbol of opportunity and almost limitless possibility, a place where even the signs marking dead-end roads--”Not a Through Street”--imply there’s a way out if one looks hard enough. Some have come to California to discover that personal transformation often cannot be realized through migration alone and that some dead ends are truly that. For some, this discovery extinguishes the very hope that had led them on their journey in the first place.

California is also home to the most powerful suicide magnet in the Western world, the Golden Gate Bridge; more than 900 people have leapt to their deaths since the bridge opened. The symbolic power of the Golden Gate is a strong draw, located about as far West as one can go, in a city Jack Kerouac once described as possessing an “end-of-land sadness.” Aesthetics also seems to play a role in Golden Gate suicides. Five times as many people have committed suicide from the Golden Gate as from the comparatively frumpy Oakland Bay Bridge several miles to the east. Even allowing for the Golden Gate’s easier pedestrian access, it’s clear that many bridge jumpers feel compelled to infuse their deaths with a meaning they could never give to their lives.

TRYING TO PUT TOO FINE A point on the “why” of suicide is risky business. In the end, there are as many reasons to die as there are to live; the choice often has less to do with one’s circumstances than one’s attitude toward them.

“You don’t have to be crazy to kill yourself,” says Christine Aguilar, director of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center. “Most people who kill themselves don’t do it because they want to die. It’s because they have all of these problems that they think will never end, and it seems like the only way out. We try to turn them away from that tunnel vision and show them that there is a way out if they give themselves a chance.”

Life at a suicide-prevention center isn’t easy, but it’s hardly the grim waiting room of death some might imagine. The focus at the LASPC, and the thrust of the entire suicide-prevention movement, is on life, not death. As a poster hanging on the wall of the center puts it, “There’s No Future in Suicide.” A hand-lettered sign over one door reads, “Mental Ward,” and it’s clear that it’s as much a reference to the volunteers as the people they counsel.

Things get considerably more serious, however, when the phones start ringing. Often, a call will be handled by a pair of volunteers, one screening the call and making a quick risk assessment, another filling the role of counselor. Most of the good work is done in a small, glassed-in annex off the office, where five phone cubicles are backed together like confessionals. But the only higher authority Los Angeles County can offer is contained in the large Rolodex of referral services provided for each cubicle.

The LASPC handles between 1,200 and 1,500 calls a month from people in various states of distress, ranging from mildly depressed to acutely suicidal. Some of the calls are from third parties, worried about a seemingly suicidal son, daughter, friend or spouse. About 10% are chronic, or persistent, callers who are usually limited to one 10-minutecall per day. Many volunteers say that the chronic callers are among the most difficult to deal with because their lives seem to change so little from call to call, or even year to year. Just how taxing it is sometimes for telephone counselors was dramatically demonstrated last February when a former volunteer for the Sacramento Suicide Prevention Center confessed to having tracked down a chronic caller and slit his wrists and neck because, according to the volunteer, “he was sucking everything out of me.” The caller survived.

Most counselors manage not to get quite so involved in the lives of their callers. “How can you take control of the situation?” is a question that is posed in various ways to every caller. Sometimes it means getting the caller to check into a substance-abuse program--alcohol and drug problems figure prominently in many cases. Other times, it means changing a job, a relationship, an attitude, or getting professional help for depression or anxiety. Since callers’ identities are kept confidential, the center has no way of tracking what happens tocallers after they hang up. But center staffers keep track of the number of suicides reported by police and compare those figures to calls received; they estimate that only 1% to 2% of the people who call in eventually commit suicide.

For the LASPC, funding is always a problem. The center receives about 60% of its $150,000 annual budget from the county; the rest comes from foundations, bequests, fund-raisers and anyone the center can arm-twist into donating time or money. Nearly all of California’s suicide lines face serious funding troubles, particularly with the recent state-budget crunch.

In what a few years ago would have sounded like a bad joke, there is even talk of converting some suicide lines to 900 services, so callers pay some of the charges.

Volunteers at the L.A. center undergo a six-week, 60-hour training period before they answer a single call and are taught to make a risk assessment as quickly as possible for each caller. This generally involves determing whether the caller has a plan to kill himself, how specific the plan is, whether the means to carry out the plan are close at hand, and whether the caller has made a previous attempt at suicide. Callers judged to be in imminent danger are encouraged to check into a hospital or seek other professional help immediately. Only 5% to 10% of the calls are high-risk--when the callers have the means to harm themselves close at hand--but they are among the most harrowing calls for volunteers.

“I’ve had people nod off while talking to me--that’s pretty scary,” says Chuck Gubera, one of about 70 volunteers who staff the line. “And we’ve had guns go off on the other end a few times. As far as I know, only one person actually killed himself while on the line. But that could change with the next call.”

On this day, a call comes from a teen-age boy, distraught over his mother’s recent death, who says he just swallowed a handful of pills. Sometimes such calls turn out to be fakes, but this one sounds authentic; the boy’s speech is slurred and disjointed. As one of the counselors tries to keep the boy on the line as long as possible, another volunteer telephones the Los Angeles Police Department to have the call traced. Before the trace can be initiated, the boy wearily tells the counselor, “I really don’t want to talk anymore, OK?” and hangs up.

The two volunteers working on the call retreat to a conference area to talk over what had just happened. “You did the best you could. You kept him on the line a long time,” a volunteer says to the counselor handling the call, touching her shoulder in support.

“I know,” the counselor sighs. “I just hope I don’t read about this in the paper tomorrow.”

For several minutes, there is only glum silence in the room--and a kind of end-of-land sadness.

DR. PARVIZ PAKDAMAN REACHESinto a file cabinet and pulls out a bulging manila folder six inches thick. The folder lands on the desk with a thud that sounds conspicuously hollow--or is that just because I know the file is jammed with suicide notes?

“I acquired these from a colleague who had been collecting them for several years,” explains Pakdaman, a medical examiner for Santa Clara County coroner’s office. “This is just a partial file; there’s more that I haven’t had the chance to include yet. I was interested in seeing if they’d shed any light on why people kill themselves. Some of them go on for pages and pages.”

It’s hard to make too many generalizations about the notes in Pakdaman’s folder; some are long and disjointed, others are as succinct and lucid as any letter. The shortest note in the collection is only nine words and reads like some sort of mad Haiku:

“This is a private matter.

No cops.

No propaganda.”

Quite a few notes describe the pain, depression, marital strife, career problems or sickness that precipitated their writers’ suicides. (“The life of a sick person is not for me. . . . This depression is severe. I do not see a way out.”) But an equal number dwell on practical matters, such as where the safe-deposit keys are located or what bills still need to be paid. One note comes with an attached personal check for $15.76, made out to the water company. Another note grapples with life’s only two certainties, briefly reflecting on the nature of death before leaving detailed instructions on money still owed the IRS and the state of California. Another note, totaling six pages, concludes: “Final Thoughts: The Buick has an alternator wire that is broken.” Many notes apologize for being a burden on survivors. An elderly woman, who died of carbon-monoxide poisoning after she locked herself in the garage with the car engine running, had taped this note to the front door:

“Mailman--Please call the police. There is a suicide here in the garage. Front door is not locked.”

Suicide notes are left in only about one-quarter of the cases, and they often raise more questions than they answer. Still, they offer tantalizing clues to anyone trying to unlock the riddle of suicide. The co-founders of the LASPC, Shneidman and Farberow, were among the first researchers to study suicide notes in a systematic way. In a novel experiment launched in 1949, they compared more than 700 suicide notes gathered from the L.A. County coroner’s office with a control group of simulated notes--dubbed “pseudocide notes”--written by non-suicidal people in the same demographic groups.

“The major difference was that the real suicide notes usually left very explicit instructions and directions,” Farberow recalls. “Many of them gave detailed instructions on who gets the car and the jewelry. The pseudocide notes gave more reasons why.”

The suicide-note study, and others that followed, began to contradict commonly held beliefs about suicide. For instance, it had long been assumed that most people who talked about killing themselves never went through with their plans, but one Shneidman-Farberow study found that three-quarters of the suicides they tracked followed a previous attempt or threatened attempt. (Further studies have indicated that four out of five people who commit suicide talk about it in some way before they die.) Shneidman dubbed the emerging field of study “Suicidology” and helped set up a national association devoted to studying it--the American Assn. of Suicidology (AAS)--as well as an international group based in Vienna.

Today the AAS has about 1,300 members, and suicido-logy has become a small, but largely unpublicized, mental-health discipline unto itself. Like any discipline, it has developed its own jargon: A suicide attempt is called DSH, or Deliberate Self Harm; psychological tests to detect the extent of self-destructive behavior have names such as the Beck Hopelessness Scale and the Reasons for Living Inventory. A recent AAS-sponsored symposium featured discussions on suicide among the elderly, youth suicide and the effect of heavy-metal music, suicide among gays, supporting the survivors of suicide and the effects of euthanasia on the suicide rate, “rational suicides” and the development of “suicide machines.”

“It’s easy to get mixed up with all sorts of garbage when you talk about suicide and trying to prevent it,” Shneidman says. “But it all comes down to finding out where that person hurts and addressing those needs. The rest of it is peripheral.”

“There’s never one cause of suicide,” Farberow adds. “It’s always a multitude of factors that go into someone trying to take their life. That’s why studying it is a real challenge.”

Those who have devoted the better part of their lives to studying suicide say that the more they study it, the more elusive any “answers” become.

Perhaps Tolstoy’s comment about families can be extended to include those who take their own lives as well--all happy people are alike, but an unhappy person is unhappy after his own fashion.