Book Preview: How Not to Kill Yourself

Title: How Not to Kill Yourself 

Author: Clancy Martin

Date: 2023

Publisher: Penguin Pantheon

ISBN: unassigned

Length: un-finalized

Quote: The author and publisher request that early reviewers not quote until the book is printed.

This is one of those previews of a final-stage manuscript that writers and publishers sometimes share before the book is actually published. Sharing "galleys" has never been easier; you just paste them into some sort of publishing software and e-mail them here and there. 

So what do I think of the book? First of all, it's for a niche market. This is not a basic health and safety book with a sense of irony, nor is it a snarky novel you'd want to read on the train. This book is what it sounds like, a very serious piece of Alcoholics-Anonymous-style peer counselling for and by the people for whom planning and attempting suicide seems like a sort of addiction. 

These are not people living with the prospects of more unpleasant ends, surrounded soldiers deciding to kill themselves rather than be tortured, old people deciding to euthanize themselves rather than waste away in nursing facilities, the dying Keats writing about being "half in love with easeful death," this writer considering whether to try another long shot at scraping up extra cash or just let myself freeze in between paid jobs. (It's not actually easy to freeze or starve to death in Virginia but, rather than do things that go against my conscience, I've been both cold and hungry before; I'm hungry as I type this. Clients and sponsors, like corporate employers, are mortal and a client's medical bills are putting my day job in mortal danger.) Martin realizes, as many people don't these days, that people facing reality problems do not have what Martin calls "suicidality" as a mental illness. They enjoy living and want to get on with it--if they can. They simply realize that, in this dangerous world, they may not have that choice any more.

What Martin describes living with is, instead, a kind of chronic depression that spoils the good times in life and aggravates the bad ones. Possibly it's inherited; Martin's father was schizophrenic and Martin remembers being fascinated by the prospect of death as a child. It's not the same thing as unhappiness, though both men created plenty of that in their lives. Martin's father died, possibly by suicide or murder, pleading with his children for a fifty-dollar bus ticket so he could be released from a mental institution; Martin describes waking up in hospitals, losing jobs, losing families, signing a contract that specifically forbids him to mention his failures as a father. Sometimes, he says, while writing this book, he felt that he wasn't suicidal and had no right to write it, but he remembered having felt that way before and then attempted suicide again.

For suicidal people like Martin this book may feel like a brotherly arm around the shoulders. For me it was a frustrating read. Martin mentions the feeling, common among suicidal people, that standard mental health services--just lock them up, keep sharp objects away from them, try a few different medications, while the patients learn to lie and say credibly that they feel better because they feel worse in the institutions than out--don't help anything. Serotonin boosters aren't recommended for the suicidal; Martin mentions an experimental treatment with lithium that didn't help him either. Martin also identifies as an alcoholic, and finds some relief in approaching his suicidality as an addiction, but he's been known to backslide into those addictions and also use of street drugs.

So what does help? When I was in high school, adults thought prevention was the best cure. They gave us stories and movies about people like Martin, Go Ask Alice and similar, and pounded into us the idea that any use of drugs for anything less than life-threatening was opening a gateway to a slippery slope down which one would inevitably slide into the miserable life of a useless, burnt-out "junkie," a.k.a. "scag" or "waste." Martin is, by his own account, one of those people, barely salvaged, barely surviving. You want there to be a cure; you want Martin to have pulled his life together--he has written novels, he's no longer subject to adolescent hormone surges--but there's not. He's learned some ways to talk himself out of attempting suicide, like reminding himself that he doesn't want to spend any more time in mental hospitals, but he admits he might feel suicidal again tomorrow.

My interest in the interaction between physical and psychological health is tantalized by this book, and disappointed. Martin may have tried any of a number of little things that make a difference in depression--like just eating a healthier diet (though it's hard to find really healthy fruits and vegetables to live on these days, and a diet of rice, garlic, onion, and what you raised in your own isolated rural area may still disappoint you if the electric company flew over your rural area spraying glyphosate). He mentions eating lots of things that are not healthy fruits and veg, which may be significant, but he says nothing about whether he's tried a health food diet, as recommended in Potatoes Not Prozac, and been disappointed. 

Some depressive people are helped by avoiding trigger foods (most typically cow's milk products or simple carbs, but chemical additives can be triggers too) or chemicals in the environment (yes, obviously glyphosate, but not always and not only glyphosate--before filters, lead and other toxins from motor vehicle exhaust, causing people to feel like moping indoors in fair weather and complain of sick headaches when rain concentrated those toxins at human face level, was a widespread problem). Martin doesn't mention self-testing for any of those things either. 

He does, of course, mention several things that work for him: going for a walk,  or any kind of outdoor exercise (more about this in Potatoes Not Prozac); talking to friends; giving up thrill-seeking, trying to become comfortable with routines and wait time and frugality; staying sober. 

Not having access to firearms is a common-sense lifesaver for people with suicidality. The position of this web site as a whole is that continuing to whine for federal firearms bands should be prosecuted as a serious misdemeanor, punishable with fines and prominently displayed community service, but there are people who should not have access to anything that was designed or can be used as a lethal weapon. Those individuals probably should not be driving alone, either, ot working with chemicals, or operating machinery. Martin mentions more than once that he owes his life today to his not happening to have firearms at hand when everyday life seemed unbearable and he tried hanging himself.

And he's scholarly, presenting detailed discussions of what can be learned from the "suicidality" of writers and thinkers, from Seneca to Yiyun Li. Carolyn Heilbrun doesn't meet his criteria for "suicidality," but he gives some consideration to Arthur Koestler's wife, who helped the dying author end his life and then, rather than live the rest of her life being perceived as having murdered him, ended her own life too. Martin is more interested in recent and obscure writings about suicide than in what might be considered the academic canon of people like Nietzsche, Hemingway, and Plath, though he mentions their writings. 

But why doesn't he seem even to be looking for a cure, that's what I want to know. He needs to stay alive in order to find the cure for "suicidality," to be able to take some pleasure in life other than seeking thrills that may include self-harm. He needs to discover the quiet joys of, well, contentment and quiet joy. Maybe that's the whole purpose of Martin's existence, right there.

How Not to Kill Yourself is recommended to the suicidal and those who work with them. Since those people are a minority even among depressive patients, I can't even ask my depressive sister whether this book has anything to offer her; she's not in the suicidal minority of depressive people. Suicidal patients will have to judge this book for themselves. I didn't expect, nor did I find, a full-length book about the suicidal mind to be a very pleasant read, but I did find it informative about the relationship between a restless impulsive personality, thrill seeking, drug use, and suicidality.