'Suicide chic' among the young

is target of mother who cares

By Donna Landry

Washington Post

Francine Klagsbrun doesn't find suicide romantic.

She is quite aware that writers and painters who took their own lives Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and Jackson Pollack among them have become cult figures in recent years, elevated to nearly mythic status by such popular and romantic books as A. Alvarez's best-selling."The Savage God" (in which the author describes his own suicide attempt) and Geoffrey Wolff's "Black Sun" (whose subject, Harry Crosby, a '20s' poet of the decadent school, shot his mistress and then himself).

Klagsbrun is not concerned with the gifted and violent few for whom dying becomes, as Sylvia Plath described it, "an art, like everything else." Her book "Too Young to Die.' is, unlike other recent works on the subject, neither history nor eulogy, but a textbook for suicide prevention.

Suicide is a subject whose "time has come," says the Houghton Mifflin book jacket for "Too Young to Die.” And suicide among the young has reached new heights, says Klagsbrun: The rate for 15to 24-year-olds rose, by 10% between 1974 and 1975, and is now twice as high as it was 10 years ago and three times higher than 20 years ago.

Suicide is the third major cause of death among the young accidents rank first, then homicides: Among college students, suicide ranks second, behind accidents.

A higher incidence of suicide at this time of year may be linked with post-Christmas depression, say some psychiatrists. An article in the Dec. 24 issue of the National Institute of Mental Health's newsletter warns that the holiday season is "a time for. good comradeship and gaiety. For those to whom no joy occurs there is disappointment, a feeling of 'Why am I not having any pleasure?' Loneliness is apt to be particularly painful at this time of year . . ." And Dr. Calvin Frederick, former chief of the NIMH suicide branch, goes on to list possible symptoms of suicidal depression in the manner of Klagsbrun's book.

"Most of the books about suicide were written by experts for experts," Klagsbrun says. She speaks quickly with the clipped accent of a native New Yorker and Brooklyn College graduate. "They're full of jargon and hard to understand. None of them tell you what you should do." She bobs her head and gesticulates to emphasize her point.

One wonders why Klagsbrun-in her 30s, married to a psychiatrist, mother of one should decide to investigate a subject rarely discussed, usually hushed-up as embarrassing, somehow obscene.

"I try to keep up on what's happening with kids," she says, "and here the suicide rate was shooting up but nobody was writing about it, except in a way divorced from real life.”

Has she, like Alvarez, considered suicide? "Like everyone else, I've thought of it," she says, "but never seriously. But I remember what it was like to be an adolescent having feelings of ugliness, the fears that you have when you're young, feeling unloved. And some kids have gotten a rotten deal at home," but, she hastens to add, “I don't want parents to read

this book and feel guilty. We have enough of that already."

She had worked as an editor at World Book and Encyclopedia Americana and written books for young people before, including a "guide" to psychiatry and a biography of Freud, so a simple, straightforward, here-are-the-facts-andcase-studies approach came easily.

Anticipating queries as to the value of bringing suicide into the open the obvious question in response to a book such as hers she responds with some indignation. "It's ridiculous that people think talking about something that may be already on people's minds is going to make them do it. Just being able to talk about it may help them to get it out of their thoughts."

Motives behind suicide attempts are as varied as the lives of the attempters, but Klagsbrun finds “a feeling of worthlessness, of being unworthy of people's caring or love" to be ca common preoccupation among those bent on self-destruction. And she links the suicidal drive with alcoholism and drug abuse other, slower forms of self-obliteration.

"Suicides tend not to verbalize their feelings," says Klagsbrun: "For some of them, it's the only way they think they can show the rest of the world that they have the power of life and death 'I can do what I want,' they are saying. This is the ultimate act of oneself."

An obsession with self may be the result of having too many options, says Klagsbrun. "After the restrictiveness of the '50s, we went overboard with freedom. Everything has changed so quickly that we haven't caught up yet. You didn't used to have to decide if you were bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, you just were." And so there is a lot of anxiety, especially since young people don't have the old kind of strong family ties anymore. Their parents are often too preoccupied with their own problems to notice or help.

Today, with everything so experimental, I would rather have the old-fashioned Jewish mother, who says, 'Why don't you eat your lunch, have some soup, it's good for you.' We need more humanity in the world."

Convinced that detection and therapy for those with suicidal inclinations can prevent unnecessary deaths, she says, "There may be a hard core of people, whom nothing can help, but there must have been some time when they gave signs, asking for help, and those signs were ignored."

Besides feelings of worthlessness and depression, she cites threats of suicide or talk about wanting to die, sudden changes in personality such as running away or becoming violently angry and sudden turning to alcohol or drugs as possible signs.

Perhaps, says Klagsbrun, she is adamant about the need for suicide prevention because she "can't at this point" bring herself to believe in any sort of afterlife. "Some young people picture death romantically," she says, “as joy and happiness and being with whom they want to be, and it's "West Side Story.' But I'm a strong. believer in this life you have to really try to live up to your potential

There is no place in her scheme of things for Suicide Chic, or for the esthetic preoccupation with death

which Keats immortalized in "Ode to a Nightingale" and which suicidal poets and painters have found irresistable ever since. Klagsbrun insists, "Art doesn't necessarily have to end in death. I look at Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, and I think, "They could have accomplished so much more if they had lived.' "

Besides, she says, "These young people who commit suicide are not artists."

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