You're Wrong About - Kurt Cobain and “Copycat Suicide”

Episode Date: July 28, 2018

Special guest Candace Opper tells Mike and Sarah about how the death of a rock star changed the field of suicidology (which is a thing). Digressions include eating disorders, car crashes and the insane grimness of the term “family annihilation.” The cringe-worthiness of Mike’s teenage years reaches new depths. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

What would you like to do first? I was thinking that since Candace has been listening to the show. Oh no. Sorry. Condolences. For your hours. Michael! Welcome to Your Wrong About, a podcast that fills a void in your life when you're a mom

and don't have time to research all the things that you were obsessed with as a kid. And so your friend Sarah Marshall researches it for you. Or your friend Michael Hobbs does. My friend suggested a tagline this morning. He said we're debunk mates. That's amazing. Which is pretty good. Aww.

We sleep in our debunk beds. I'm Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. And I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm a writer for BuzzFeed and The New Republic and also The Believer. So we have a special guest today, Candace Opper. Candace, do you want to just tell us a bit about yourself? I'm Candace Opper.

I have published some essays in various places, Guernica, Lithub, Creative Nonfiction. But my big news is that I've been working on a manuscript for several years and it recently got selected by Cheryl Strayed to be published with a small press out of Arizona called Coray Press. It won their annual memoir contest. Oh my God! Congratulations! Can you say what it's about?

Oh, it's not Top Secret at all and it's very related to what we're going to talk about today. Yeah. The book is about my experience losing a friend to suicide when we were kids. He killed himself a week after Kurt Cobain and it was like very obviously a copycat suicide. Which is both unusual and normal. But it's also about obsession and how I over many years have been obsessed with the death of this person who I call a friend because I don't know what else to call him.

But I actually didn't really know him very well at all. And why did I get attached to this specific phenomenon, you know? So that's my very bad elevator pitch for this book, which I haven't. It's an elevator in a big building. Yeah. And this leads into very well into what we're talking about today, which is kind of Kurt Cobain but then also more broadly this phenomenon of copycat suicide and also adolescent suicide. Yeah, where do you think we should start, Candice?

What's a good place to kind of start this whole story? Well you guys usually start with your little what do you remember about this or what do you remember about that event, right? Oh yeah. See? I have been listening. Do you want to tell us your memories of the Kurt Cobain suicide, Sarah? Do you remember kind of I guess where you were and what you thought about at the time?

I had no awareness of it at all. It was a 94. I would have been five or six. That was the year of Tanya Harding and I do have memories of that. That was my formative Pacific Northwest news item of 1994. I don't think I have any memory of it all. What about you, Michael? You were a Seattleite.

One of the overwhelming themes of this show is that I was an insufferable teenager. In 94, I was 12 and I was already into music and I was in Seattle for the whole grunge thing. I was aware of it. But because I was insufferable, I was not into that music at all. I was really into Pink Floyd and like Led Zeppelin and all these other bands. So the whole time that history was happening around me, I was like, this is dumb. It's a fad.

It's going to end. Why are you guys into this? It's so stupid. And then this is like double insufferable. Five years later, when I was at the age when you're supposed to discover Nirvana, I discovered Nirvana and I was like, hey, I wonder what this band is. And I got really into it and I was like, oh my God, this guy is like a genius. And I got really sad about Kurt Cobain killing himself like five years after.

He killed himself five years after everyone else had already processed this. And for one day, I wore a black armband. Oh, it's like the anniversary. No. Oh, it was just because I had found out about it that I wanted to wear this black armband. Everyone at school was like, did like a firefighter die or something like, why are you wearing a black armband? I was like Kurt Cobain.

And they're like, that happened five years ago. What are you doing? And I'm like, isn't it sad though? And I never wore it again. So I was actually really bummed, but not at an appropriate time to be. What was your relationship to the Candace? Were you? How old were you?

So I was 13. I didn't care about Nirvana at all at the time. I was really into like listening to movie scores on tape, Jurassic Park and Dracula, Bram Stoker's Dracula specifically. Okay. That's what I was really into. And I think I had just kind of started to like dip my toes in the water with like Radio Head and Red Hot Chili Peppers and like some of this stuff.

Yeah, I guess I kind of like Pearl Jam is up, but I still, Nirvana was like way too rough around the edges for a 13 year old Candace. Right. So I remember when getting the news about Kurt Cobain dying because, you know, they found his body three days after he actually died and the news had kind of come to us later in the day. My best friend Liz at the time, she was on like some school field trip and she called me like frantically from her hotel room.

They were like in Boston, I think. And she called me frantically like Kurt Cobain died, he killed himself, you know, freaking out. And I was like, is that the guy from Nirvana? Like I sort of vaguely knew who it was, but she was like really panicking about it. And I just remember kind of being like, yeah, okay, it wasn't a thing to me at all. And then I remember going back to school because that was like on a Friday night, going back to school the following week.

And there were some kids who were in mourning like dressing, you know, in all black or something as people were making a big deal about it, like the sort of grungy kids. Then we heard some rumor about some kid who had to go get his stomach pumped because he had taken a bunch of pills. And I was like, are you kidding? Like that's so stupid. Like who cares about this dumb rock star, blah, blah, blah. And then a week later, this guy, Brian, who I was in school band with, he shot himself.

And we were on spring break at the time and we found out a couple of days later and sort of the news, the details of it came in shifts, you know, like we didn't find anything, everything out right away. But you know, I later confirmed it seemed like a rumor at a time, but he had like nirvana CDs by his body and articles about Kurt Cobain in his pocket. Oh, wow. I think when I heard that, I was like, what? Wow.

Okay, this is bigger than I thought it was or like, how does this possibly happen? Like, why is this person so influential? Like I didn't even really know that Brian liked nirvana, you know, and so then that kind of snowballed. Can you walk us through, I guess, just Kurt Cobain's like life, just kind of the broad outlines of him as a person and what led to the suicide? I mean, there's never any like one reason he killed himself, but sure, you know, just Oh, we're going to get to that.

So the formal scientific industry or study of suicide is called suicidology, which I learned while doing research and it's like a, you know, a sect of people who are psychologists and sociologists who like specifically focus on suicide and suicide prevention. So in that kind of world, Kurt Cobain is sort of considered like more or less a textbook suicide in that he had a rough childhood, he had a sort of tumultuous family life. His parents got divorced at a young age and they were really at odds with each other for a long time. He went back and forth living with his mom, living with his dad and his parents both,

you know, he had step parents that weren't really great and he just didn't really grow up in a loving environment. Also, his grandfather had two brothers who died by suicide. Oh, wow. That is almost always a factor in suicides is that there is another suicide in the family or suicide close to the person. Also there was an instance where he and a couple of friends, I think when he was in eighth grade, they were walking home from school or something.

I don't remember the specific details, but they found a body of someone who had hung themselves. I think it was somebody's brother that they went to school with. Oh my God. The story was that they just like were mesmerized by it and just kind of stayed there for like a half hour, an hour before they went and got anybody because they were just like stunned by it. Whoa.

I think that having those suicides as kind of examples in his life, not that it necessarily introduced the idea to him, but that it normalized it in a way. Well, yeah, is the explanation for that among suicidologists that there's a genetic component to it or is it just like you think of it as an option growing up? Both because I think that mental illness a lot of times has passed down genetically, but it's social as well and especially in places like Washington, you know, the suicide rate in these kind of big empty states is much higher because of the conditions of some people living there and the access to guns is really a huge factor in it.

Guns account for I think between 60 and 70% of suicides in America every year. Holy shit. Yeah. That high? Oh yeah. And what is the highest demographic for suicide in America? The highest demographic is white single men between the ages of I think like 55 and 75. It's also really high among Native Americans and it's really high among veterans.

I think it's like the third cause of death, often for people 15 to 24 years old. So what else makes Kurt Cobain textbook? He was really depressed for a long time, like he struggled with depression. Depression is diagnosed a lot more often now than it probably was in the 70s and 80s, you know? And so I don't think he was probably like formally diagnosed with it. Maybe when he was in his 20s he was, but he also suffered from physical illness. He had like really bad digestive and stomach issues for a long time that couldn't, no one

could figure out what was wrong with him, couldn't be diagnosed. And that spiraled him into heroin use when he was in his early 20s because, you know, I mean he was obviously in the music scene and he was surrounded by that culture a lot, but I think he found out pretty quickly that using heroin would subdue his intestinal issues and I think that was part of the reason why he got hooked. Oh, so he was self-medicating. Yeah. He went to several doctors.

Like it was not for lack of trying to figure out what was wrong, but no one could figure out what was wrong with him and, you know, there's a good chance that his digestive issues were just like roped into his psychological issues, which is often the case. You know, I think that he kept using heroin for that reason for a long time and suicide is often higher among people who are drug users as well. So he was a gun owner, he was depressed, he was a heroin user, he had a physical illness. One of the things that the media likes to come back to a lot is that he just couldn't cope with his fame.

Right. That's a narrative that people really like and that's a narrative that was kind of the same one applied to Marilyn Monroe as well that she just couldn't cope with being a star. And when we make that argument, it feels like that's an argument that we make to kind of sew up, you know, the suicide of someone who seems to have it all. I'm doing your quotes and I wonder if like when people tie things up that way, if they're countenancing what fame was for that person, because it feels like we have this idea of like film, fame, it's a crazy ride and not everybody can handle it and sometimes people

die. And it's like, does that argument really address what fame is and does to the people who experience it at that level? No, I think it simplifies it a lot. I think how a lot of people react to that is like, why would you want to kill yourself if you're famous and all these people love you and you have all this money? They don't get it and I think it really simplifies the complicated reasons that someone would end their life.

It also is a nice contrast. If you're writing a lead for your story about a famous person killing yourself, it's like a person who seemed to have it all was actually suffering on the inside. It's like a way to emphasize the contrast and the counterintuitive narrative, which is always more interesting than like a guy who has a history of depression and owns a bunch of guns and uses a bunch of drugs and has been sad for years, ended up killing himself. Like that's a pretty predictable narrative. Right.

Kurt Cobain's suicide was the first celebrity suicide for a long time when it happened. Oh really? So the press had more tools to deal with it at the time? Even the fact that he's very popular among a demographic that's at high risk for suicide anyway also gives it extra resonance. One thing that I've always found interesting and maybe this is like a total tangent from your research is where did the conspiracy theory that Courtney killed Kurt come from? Like that's something that you still hear today in a Yoko kind of way?

And I just wonder where did that originate? Why did that catch fire? It just is weird to me. So Kurt, let's talk about like the last couple months of his life first. So he was kind of in a downward spiral for several months. So he died on April 5th, the previous month in March. He was on tour with Nirvana in Europe. And when he was in Rome, he had a suicide attempt in a hotel room with Courtney.

But it was sort of sold to the press as a heroin overdose. And he had written a suicide note and taken a ton of pills and had taken like a lethal dose of heroin as well. And he barely escaped that alive. They just told the press that he had an overdose and they canceled the rest of the tour and they went back to the States. You know, Courtney and all of his friends were doing conducting these interventions and trying to get him to stop drugs.

And you know, they had a baby at the time. You know, they had Francis Bean who I think had just turned two that winter. And so, you know, they were really trying to get him off drugs. And he was at a point where he had just gotten out of control and he just didn't want to hear it. He didn't want to talk to anybody. And he bought a shotgun. He had other guns, but I think that he had gotten them confiscated at some time when

Courtney had called the police and, you know, he had gotten arrested. So he bought a shotgun and so they were worried about his life as well. And then they finally convinced him to enroll, that's not the right word, to go into rehab. And so they I think she was recording or finishing up recording her album down in Los Angeles. So they went down there and he checked into rehab and this was like late March. And then he escaped like he just he was there for a few days. He climbed a wall, he escaped and he flew back to Seattle, but she didn't know where he was.

Nobody knew where he was. So she hired a private investigator. She hired him to try and find Kurt in Seattle because she was worried they couldn't find him anywhere. The details of his last few days alive are really PC because he was kind of just like maybe hanging out at his dealer's apartment and maybe hanging out with another friend and nobody really knew where he was. And he eventually went back home, but he was in the guest house.

So I think if people had gone to his house, they didn't find him there and he was like staying in the guest house, which is on the same property, but it's just sort of like, you know, a garage with a room above it. So this guy who was hired as the private investigator did not believe that Kurt committed suicide. And so he was the one, I think, who started the deeper investigation into his death because he thought Courtney had something to do with it. Even though she was the one who hired him to investigate this, it's a perfect cover

story. Yeah. Exactly. So I feel, you know, I didn't look too deeply into it, but I feel like this, this private investigator is the guy who kind of started that. I would have planted those seeds, planted those seeds. But then I discovered this other guy who seems like section to light based on just watching your face as you watch his videos.

Oh, is this the weird public access guy? Yes. Yeah. That's like a kind of a known thing in Seattle. Right. This guy like goes on public access TV and shows up at like, I think like city council hearings and stuff and will be like, why haven't you reopened the investigation? Why haven't the documents been released?

Why has XYZ been redacted? He's sued a bunch of times. Yeah. So I don't know if he still does public access, but for several years he had like a weekly show that was an hour long where he would just record himself talking into like a cam quarter about his private investigation into this matter. And he's a journalist or calls himself a journalist, although I don't know if that's just like, I'm a journalist.

You know, I say that to people in the journalism police haven't gotten me. So, you know, anyone can say it. He's evidently a journalist and he's investigating this and I mean, he's talked to lots of people, it seems like, and he has perpetuated this rumor for a long period of time. And I think he ran for mayor at some point in Seattle. Probably. Yeah.

Our mayor ballots are long, dude. Yeah. There's a lot of like weird, like the death cult socialist party. There's like weird shit toward the bottom of the ballot. So he was definitely toward the bottom of the ballot at some point, but he also just recently sued the city and the Seattle PD to re-release the photos or release for the first time. Like the photos actually have Kurt's body because he believes it was mutilated and that

he was actually murdered. And this was like this year that they just had the trial and they didn't do it because he didn't like file the right paperwork. And also didn't Courtney and Francis Bean file something saying, like, this is the photo. This is fucked up. Nobody wants to see these pictures. It's traumatic.

Yeah. Francis Bean made a public statement that was like, please do not release. Like she's been harassed the whole life about it. Like, please do not release these photos of my father. So he lost that battle, but he still wages the war. And so does he believe Courtney did it? Is that the horse he's whipping? Yeah.

I think that's the basis for it. And honestly, in most of these instances, I think it's just a bunch of people who hate women who's like trying to put it on Courtney. And that Courtney is a hated, a hated person, you know? It is weird. It's wildly disproportionate to the way that people feel about Courtney when it's like, maybe you don't like her music and maybe she was like a bad girlfriend. But like, I don't know, lots of people are bad at being in relationships.

Didn't Norman Mailer like he stabbed one of his wives and William S. Burroughs accidentally while an ebriated shot and killed one of his wives or girlfriends and with men do this? Like, well, when you're a creative genius, you just accidentally or maybe on purpose kill your female partner occasionally, that just happens. It's par. But if you're married to someone who commits suicide after a lifelong depression and struggles with addiction, it's like, oh, she did it. I think also, in a lot of cases with suicide, people just will find any way to believe it's

something other than that. Is there, like from a suicidology perspective, is there any basis for this idea? The idea that one person triggers another person's suicide? There's a couple different ways of looking at it. So, you know, like we were talking earlier about how Kurt had these suicides in his family and in his life, and that's like a different type of, you know, they refer to it as contagion than celebrity suicide. You know, because I think when it happens in your family or when it happens in your community

and especially with adolescents, it is absolutely an issue with like cluster suicides with adolescents that happen. In many, many cases, if there's one suicide in a school, there's going to be another, which is, yeah, it's just a dangerous, dangerous thing. And schools are getting much better at having like post-suicide protocol to deal with like, how do we stop a cluster from happening? But it does happen, unfortunately, kind of frequently. But this idea of like talking someone into suicide or driving someone to suicide, there's

less, there's not really much of a basis for that. That's kind of a myth, I think. And another one of the myths that the, you know, people in the suicide prevention community always bring up is that if you talk about suicide, it's going to like sort of give someone the idea. Someone who hasn't heard of suicide before? Yeah. In this country, I don't think that's an issue.

That's definitely a myth, because like talking about suicide often helps people deal with a crisis that they're potentially in. And with celebrity suicide, it's almost always blamed on the media and how the media represents that suicide. True. Michael, do you have a beef with the media that we should discuss? No, I'll let the expert talk about that. Speaking of Courtney, this is, you know, my knowledge of this comes entirely from Candice's

book. I feel like, you know, the legacy that we now know in the shorthand of Kurt Cobain's suicide is like, maybe Courtney did it, or, you know, obviously she didn't, but we associate her role and connection to that with the person who gets blamed for it. And I feel like what we don't remember is the attempt to stop a potential cluster suicide after in Courtney's role in that. Right, right. Yeah.

So two days after Kurt's body was discovered, and you may remember this, Michael, there was a big vigil in Seattle Center. Which I did not go to because I was a loser, yes. You hated it, yes. And I think there were between like 7,000 and 10,000 people showed up. You know, there was a vigil after John Lennon was shot, which was people just showed up somewhere. You know, it wasn't like an organized thing.

This was very, very much so an organized thing. And people were already thinking in terms of like, okay, we have a potential huge crisis on our hands because here is a rock star that people idolized and he just died by suicide in a very violent manner. And this could potentially be very influential to young people. So what can we do about it immediately? So they had this vigil in Seattle Center that was organized and like funded by one of the big radio stations there.

I can't remember some big Seattle radio station and the city of Seattle paid for half the cost of it. They had people who worked for the Youth Suicide Prevention Center in Seattle come and speak and they had Chris Nosellic was there and other people who like knew Kurt and when the community like came to talk about him and to talk about how he struggled and he was like really suffering, but suicide is not the answer, you know, it was basically like a huge public dose of suicide prevention. Let's get everyone all in one place and tell them this all at one time.

And I think the reason they specifically did that there is because one of the theories is that if there is going to be a contagion effect, it's going to happen where this person lived more likely than outside of there. Really? That's interesting for a public figure. That's interesting for a celebrity that that would matter. Right. And I have thoughts on that clearly.

But you know, that was their idea of like let's do this in Seattle and the most notable thing that happened there is that Courtney Love recorded word for word. She read Kurt's suicide note and pre-recorded it and she talked about him as well, but she read the entire note and they recorded it and they played it at the vigil. And at the time it was really like a revolutionary thing to happen in suicide prevention, but also just in the media for her to like make it public and make it public so soon. And this you got to think back, this was like before the internet, this was before people would just be able to Google that and find a picture of it online, you know what I mean?

It was really kind of monumental for suicide prevention. It was a way to show that he was struggling and that it was not a romantic way to go, but also she kind of tore him up for it. She kind of like improv throughout the reading like she was talking and just like she was mad and she was upset and grieving and crying and she was just being her Courtney Love like 100% Courtney Love like a sniffling snotty mess, you know? But like it gave people the opportunity to see like to make it more about her grief than to make it about better to burn out than fade away kind of thing, which he actually wrote

in the note. No way. And the spectacle becomes the person you leave behind as opposed to the person who gets to who exits. Right. Making these things public and just having her sort of tell people who are listening what they should think about it is really smart because it removes the opportunity I think for them to kind of romanticize it.

Is that considered a good public health intervention or was that considered a mistake, that vigil? It's now considered a good public health intervention. I think people were sort of scared at the time and ironically the weekend that Kurt's body was found was the annual American Association of Suicidology Conference happening. Oh, wow. And so all the Suicidologists were at one conference on the other side of the country. I think it was in New York and the woman who spoke at the vigil who worked at the Seattle Youth Suicide Prevention Center at the time, her name is Sue Eastgard and she gets this

phone call from her clinic and they're like, you got to get back to Seattle like today because this huge thing is happening. And she didn't even really know who Kurt Cobain was. I interviewed her a couple of years ago. She shows up at this vigil and all of a sudden there's like 10,000 people there and she's like, holy crap, like I had no idea that this was going to be what this is about but it's generally now looked at to be a really positive event because they were able to just like focus on suicide prevention and make it about that as opposed to romanticizing this person's

death. I guess it's like a public health intervention. It is a public health intervention. It is. And it was the first time anything like that really happened or happened like at the speed that it did. And now it's sort of, I don't know if it's looked at as a model but it's definitely looked at as a positive thing.

So is this where we get into the way that the media constructed the suicide and the media, like are there ways in which the media dropped the ball? Yes and no. So two years after Kurt died, a study was put out by four sociologists called the Kurt Cobain Suicide Crisis and they were basically assessing to see if there was a suicide crisis. They based their study in Seattle and according to the statistics like the suicide rate in Seattle for that April was actually lower than it was, much lower than it was the previous year.

Interesting. And their theory is that it was because of A, the vigil but also in general that the media did a better job than they historically had done dealing with suicide. Part of the reason is because a lot of publications in Seattle specifically reached out to this suicide prevention clinic to ask like, how do we report on this? How do we write about this? Media was actually reaching out and for answers on how to report on it. And so their theories are like, hey, the suicide rate was down, the media was acting smart

and they dealt with it really well. And there was one person named Daniel Casper who was at the vigil and went home and shot himself. And he's considered to be the sole copycat in the Kurt Cobain legacy. But it's hard for me to read that because I know that I had a friend who was very clearly a copycat but that's not the kind of thing that you're going to ever be able to find any information on. You know what I mean?

Right, because that doesn't show up in the statistics as like a copycat suicide. No, because the statistics don't get any more specific than the age, the gender of the person. You'd have like the cause, so if it were a firearm or asphyxiation or pills or something, you could access that information but you don't know the reasons why. You don't get like a list of reasons why or even more specific details. When I later went back and read the police report of my friend's death, sure enough, there were nirvana CDs and there was a magazine in his pocket and the magazine in his pocket, it was Entertainment Weekly and I read that article and it said very specifically what

kind of gun Kurt used, that he shot himself in the side of the head and those are the kind of details that the media is not supposed to include. You can look up specifics as to like the guidelines the media is supposed to use when they report on a suicide and one of the main things is don't include those specific details of like a death scene because to many people it can read as a how-to and it did to my friend who literally was like mimicking the scene. Oh really? Yeah.

One of the things I talk about in the book is that like there's this study saying like, oh this was great, the vigil was great, like the suicide rate was lower but you can't because they just did the study in Seattle and they were only basing on those statistics, it's like you can't know. So it's a very difficult thing to study. Can I ask, this is really interesting to me, I wrote an article last year about high rates of suicide among gay men which remain really elevated even though like gay marriage blah blah blah.

Yeah, marriage is going to lower a suicide rate. So I described in there a friend of mine who killed himself when he was 32, this is like 10 years ago and I described in not in great detail but two or three sentences, he killed himself in a pretty unique way and I described that in the article and I did get a couple emails that were like, look this is a how-to guide, it's extremely irresponsible to describe this which I hadn't considered when I was writing it because it didn't feel like a how-to to me and as a writer, like specificity is always more interesting than generics, right? So you don't just want to say my friend killed himself, you want to say like my friend grabbed

a Smith and Wesson 22 off the top shelf, like you want to say a specific thing. So I didn't think I was being a monster but I also, I get that like you don't want. You were being a well-intentioned non-suicidologist which is what so many of us are. And I've heard the same thing with anorexia, I'm writing this article about obesity right now and I've interviewed a lot of people that used to have anorexia and have struggled with eating disorders and a lot of them have said like one woman was telling me that when she hears diet ads on the radio, she gets suicidal and she wants to drive her car into a tree, like if she hears diet ads that are like lose 10 pounds in two weeks.

The specifics of it make her, literally make her want to kill herself or make her want to bring her eating disorder back and it's weirdly, it's the things that make it an interesting story that are also the things that make it really dangerous. And so in this article, when writing about like I'm writing trying to write this entire article without mentioning anybody's weight and without mentioning like how many calories a day somebody was eating or like any specifics about the amounts or the types of food they were eating because it might be a how-to guide for somebody struggling with anorexia. And I'm just interested in sort of how we found out that this was an issue or how we

found out that telling these stories was having this effect. Well, if you look back like through, you know, the 20th century in terms of how things were reported, it, there was a time when suicide was just considered very sensationalistic and people ate it up and loved to read about it. And it was often like, you know, back before suicidology formally started and there was like this investigation into like, oh, many people who die by suicide also have a mental illness before people were thinking of mental illness as an actual health issue and not like, oh, that guy's just off his rocker, you know, suicides were considered either rational or

irrational and to people's minds, it was sort of split down the middle. So irrational would have been like, if you're just in the loony bin, you know, and you kill yourself, then that's an irrational suicide. But if your wife leaves you and you lose your job and your car breaks down or whatever, you're just having a really bad week and you decide to jump off a building, that was considered a rational suicide. So, suicidology formally sort of came to be in the 1950s. That's when the first the first time people were actually studying people who had attempted

suicide and people who were like struggling with suicide crises. It was the first time they started to kind of develop, oh, these are the warning signs. These are the things you might see in someone who is having a suicidal crisis or is maybe thinking about it, you know, these are the things to look for. And they did like a really comprehensive study on like suicide notes and what what are the kind of things you'll find in a suicide note. Like it was actually like, I think one of the first formal studies they did on suicide was they had collected all these notes out of people's morgue files.

And then they sort of wrote down all they like documented all the tenants of it. And then they had a bunch of just civilians write what they thought a suicide note was going to be. And they compared the two. And the authentic notes were actually just very practical. It was like, you can find my will in this drawer, please. And like they they were very practical because they're often when someone is going through that crisis, they've already made the decision and they're just trying to like settle their affairs. And everyone who was faking suicide notes was just talking about like, whoa, is

me, you know, like. Right. Which why wasn't this brought up in Heather's, you know, if all of the teachers hadn't been so loopy, someone could have been like Heather's suicide note is actually quite unusual and seems. Yes, that's so weird. So typical suicide notes are more like a instruction manual, like in many cases. Yeah, not always, but in a lot of cases, it's it's the person has already made the decision. And so they're often like in sort of a state of calmness and just being very

kind of rational about what the logistics are going to be. This is an extremely dark story. But my friend that killed himself, he planned it more than six months in advance. And he told everybody that he was moving to California. Wow. Because that would give him a chance to say goodbye to everyone. So he told me I'm moving to California. We're not going to see each other as much.

And we sort of hung out the last time and it was like, it was a goodbye. And he knew how much of a goodbye it was, but he didn't tell anybody else. And he was one of these guys that had tons of friends. He was total social butterfly. I mean, this whole thing of like this fake contrast between like, how could someone who's so gregarious be so sad? But like, of course, it was the gregariousness that kind of made him feel alone. Right.

But I didn't know before that that suicides even could be that premeditated. He left a DVD with his favorite songs that he left instructions to play at his funeral. I mean, he planned this out like invading France. I didn't go to the funeral because I was living abroad. But I talked to some people that went and they said that it was really divided between the people that were just sad and the people that were sad and angry. If he had been planning this for this long, why didn't he tell somebody? Like, why didn't he get help?

Why didn't he look into medication or counseling or just telling us his friends what he was going through? And so a lot of people were just really pissed off, basically, that like, why would you go to this level of premeditation on a suicide and not try to not kill yourself? It was totally it was totally baffling to everybody. Yeah. Wow. To my knowledge, that's actually pretty unusual, like that some other plan for that long. Yeah, my my understanding is that's that's quite rare after his death.

I got really interested in gay suicide. And I ended up writing an article about it last year. And my understanding is that most suicides have at least an element of spontaneity in them. You're having a bad day or something. You know, your boyfriend breaks up with you or something like that. And you just sort of do it. And it's pretty quick that the deed is done. It's it's rare to spend months planning.

Yeah, there's often there's often a catalyst that will be like the final straw for people. But unfortunately, the catalyst is often blamed as like the reason why when it's typically many things like are building up and leading to that. So what are the most common catalysts? Is it money stuff? Is it relationship stuff? Those are at the top of the list. I think it depends on the location, actually.

You know, I feel like in a lot of countries when there's just like a big economic crisis going on among Chinese farmers, for example, you know what I mean? People are struggling so much. Their quality of life is so low that the suicide rate is really high in that case. You know, it's interesting talking about the media and like, you know, your question about like including details in an article you wrote and like, you know, clearly I agree that the media needs to be responsible on what details they include. But in a way, I almost feel like it's way more important for us to dedicate our energies

to like the bigger things that are huge suicide factors, which are like people not having access to mental health help and people having too much access to guns. I mean, these are just huge issues. And for us to be like nitpicking at the media is let's put our energies elsewhere. But I mean, so let me get back to like the history of the media's role in this. So anyway, the first formal study that was done on the media's effect on the suicide rate was done in 1974, I think by this sociologist named David Phillips. It's amazing to me that we can have a problem, an observable problem for so long before

someone's like, what if we tried to mitigate, you know, try to look at developing some best practices or like, what if we tried to prevent people from committing suicide? Like it seems like we really took a while. From what I've read, it seems like suicide for many, many years was often looked at as just sort of like a survival of the fittest. Especially in America, like if someone couldn't handle life, then we don't need them around, you know, like get rid of them. And the suicide statistics were often totally skewed because in the cases where there wasn't

a note or it wasn't like a very obvious suicide, people would often rule it as an accident to save families from exorbitant grief and being ostracized from their communities. So I talked about this study that that guy did about the correlation between the newspaper articles and the suicide rate, but it was actually, I didn't even say the name of the study, which is called the Werther effect, it's he names it after Goeth's Werther as it should be like actually pronounced in German, but I say Werther because I'm not one of those American people who pretend I'm cultured. Anyway, I'm just going to call it Werther. So Werther is a book about a young man starts off very happy and then becomes very forlorn

because he falls in love with a woman who is engaged to someone else and it is a long sort of slow downward spiral of unrequited love. In the end, she gets married, he's very despondent, he borrows her husband's shotgun and shoots himself. And this was published in the 1700s, I want to say, late 1700s. There was immediately a big response to this book. And like one of the responses is referred to as Werther fever, where people started to dress the way that Werther dressed in the book, which I think was like a blue coat and yellow breeches. And I don't remember specifically, but because young people specifically responded so aggressively to the book, it was banned in several places because people were afraid that people were going to start

killing themselves to imitate this character in the book. And there is one certainly known person, I think her name is Christine von Lassberg, who drowned herself with a copy of Werther in her pocket. And I think that set off sort of the first copycat crisis in Western history for like a sort of celebrity copycat crisis. And so the guy who did the study in the 70s, he called the copycat crisis the Werther effect based on that. But there's actually been some debunking studies done that there was any copycat crisis after Werther at all besides this one woman, because there haven't actually been any other confirmed cases. People will cite things like there were 200 suicides, but there's actually like very few statistics, like confirmed statistics

around it. So it may have just been this one woman or a handful of people, but I guess that's what's fascinating about copycat suicide is that we will never know. I guess any suicide to some extent, right? I mean, as you said, it's always multifactorial. Yeah. So in 1974, this sociologist named David Phillips does this study where he compares suicide rates. I think he just uses suicide rates in the country to highly publicized suicides. I think he does a study in America and a study in England, I think. And so he looks at front page stories of suicide, and he compares it to the rate in the weeks after that story was published, and then he compares it to like the year before and the year after. And he sees this absolute correlation between like the suicide

rates go up when there's a highly publicized suicide. And one of the notable examples that's in there is Marilyn Monroe, who died by suicide. I think it was 1962. Unless the Kennedys killed her because we can't let anything not be a murder. And she's another person that a suicideologist would call like a textbook suicide. She had a tumultuous family life growing up, and she ran away from home to Hollywood, and she was very depressed for a long time, and had seen, was seeing a psychologist, was seeing different doctors and things like that, and she died of a barbiturate overdose. I mean, that was like a pretty big Hollywood suicide. Obviously, there was a lot of newspaper coverage about it, and there was a spike in the suicide rate

by like 12 or 13%, which was pretty freaking big. So, you know, he draws this conclusion that, yes, there's a correlation between how much the media reports on suicide, how much it's focused on, and the suicide rate. So that was in the 70s, and that was kind of the first time that people started to realize that there was an issue. So, by the time that Kurt commits suicide, people are fairly knowledgeable about this. And I think specifically because they know that he could potentially be very influential to, you know, the adolescent suicide group, which adolescent suicide in and of itself didn't even become like, people didn't even recognize it as a thing until like the early 80s, really. No way. Kids were killing themselves, but it

wasn't on anybody's radar because people just wanted it under wraps for the family's sake. And a lot of teenagers would do things like drive their car into a pole, and which is just a car accident. So, like those dead man's curve songs from the 50s. I know, I know. Drag racing, I mean. Yeah. But in the early 80s, there was a big suicide contagion cluster in like the northern suburbs of Chicago. And it was the first time that it was really heavily publicized and people were looking into this, like why are these rich white kids killing themselves? I think it was like 17 kids over a period of 12 or 13 months, like in these related suburbs, which is a big deal. And they're all just like, you know, upper middle class white kids and people are like, what the hell's

going on? And then there were these clusters that were happening all over the country in the 80s. This friend of mine from Alaska says they lost four kids a year to suicide in her high school. Oh my god. Wow. Because one kid at my high school killed himself and I mentioned this to her and she's like, oh yeah, we had like 20. Wow. Because when you think about large rural states with a lot of gun access. Yeah. So there's these clusters and that's sort of when, you know, adolescent suicide kind of entered the public spotlight when like, as you know, after school specials sort of enters the health education classes and a movie like Heather's Happens, which is like a parody on everyone freaking out about adolescent suicide. But then the AIDS crisis

happens and AIDS is taking way more people than adolescent suicide is. And that becomes like a much more immediate, we need to educate kids on this. And even though suicide is still happening, the rate in 1990 for like say was much lower than it is now and much lower than I think it was in the early 80s. And then AIDS kind of takes center stage. So by the time Kurt Cobain happens a few years later, it was sort of dormant for a while. But then people start to think about it again and worry about it. But for the most part, it's looked at among suicidologists that the media actually dealt with it pretty well. You know, I think it was the first time that, you know, if you go back and watch the Kurt Loder MTV specials that weekend when it happened, he's saying like the crisis

number, the crisis, the 800 crisis number over and over and over. If you're struggling, if you're having suicidal thoughts, call this number. And like that was really new at the time. That was the kind of thing you'd see at the end of one of those very special episodes or whatever. But it wasn't the kind of thing that was in the sort of sphere that you see it everywhere. Now anytime anyone writes an article about suicide, there's, you know, that number at the end of it. And it's all over the place. And it's, I think it's just sort of like a standard practice to include that information. But that was really new at the time. And that was happening all over the place. But it wasn't necessarily happening in Entertainment Weekly or Newsweek.

Can I give a few thoughts? Yes, please. First of all, the 50s and 60s were fucking terrible. It's one of our themes. When we talk about like going back to these Halcyon days in America, it is amazing to me how many problems we were sweeping under the rug during those days that this idea of like the perfect suburban family depended on let's not talk about priest raping people, let's not talk about suicide, let's not talk about drug use. There were all these problems that weren't seen as crises. Because we weren't talking about them. They were still happening. We just couldn't admit that they were happening. Exactly. We weren't interested in finding out why they were. And I

think what this represents is issues go from being acts of God to being public health crises. And I think issue after issue has become this thing where it's like, well, some people are just alcoholics. There's nothing you can do for them. And then all of a sudden, oops, there's like this whole field of like there are genetic determinants and behavioral determinants. And there's lots of things that you can do about alcoholism like, wow, this is a public health thing. And then suicide is just some people kill themselves. How weird. And then it's like, oh, there's actually a science to this. And we've gone through the same phase with so many issues. I am very involved in like car accident Twitter. What? What is car accident Twitter? Well, basically, I mean, for a really

long time in America, car accidents were seen as acts of God. About eight or 10 years ago, people were pointing out that like Sweden has like one eighth the rate of car accident deaths that we do. And it's like, how wide are the lanes? What is the turning radius so that people can go really fast around a corner where they can't see in front of them? How many stop lights do you have? How many seconds are the stop lights? Hey, wait a minute, car accidents aren't actually an act of God. Car accidents are constructed in our public health crisis. And there's something we can do about them. And I'm sure there's like 50 other issues that now we think of as acts of God that in like 10 more years will be like, Hey, wait a minute, this is actually a constructed problem.

We can do something about this. I guess one of the stories you could tell about just what civilization is, is realizing to what extent you're constructing these things that seem like they're inevitable and realizing that not everything is inevitable. Absolutely. Those are my thoughts. Well, I have my thought on top of those thoughts in our in our debunk bed. I mean, one thing that this makes me think of is that in terms of things that catalyze suicide. And of course, the first thing I think of to bring this into my wheelhouse and closer to murder is John List. He killed his whole family, and then he disappeared and was found via America's most wanted decades later. Then the same way that suicidology, I think can sound too hilariously on the nose for people to

believe that it's a real word. I've told people about the phenomenon and the family annihilator, and they're like, what? And I'm like, no, that's the technical term. The technical term for that is family annihilator. Wow. It sounds like a bad horror movie from the 80s. I'm shocked it wasn't. I like it because I think it speaks to the mindset that emerges seems to emerge at this time of like, you have to annihilate your family with John List. It's similar to Jonestown. It's similar to the Suicide of Bud Dwyer, which we talked about in our film's episode, which was also a film that Kurt Cobain watched repeatedly. Really? Really? Yeah. He found like a pirated tape of it at a thrift store, and he was obsessed with it. That's fascinating. Yeah. One of the vendettas I never

expected to have is now against Pennsylvania news shows of the 80s for deciding to show that on TV because once you release a contagion, it's out for good. You can't take it back. But yeah, in every case, Bud Dwyer was being forced to resign from the socially lauded role that he had been in. Jim Jones was about to lose his followers, lose his son in a custody battle, have his power taken away. John List was very deeply in debt and couldn't allow his family to find out about that. The house was about to be foreclosed on, and he wrote this very, very low-key note explaining to his pastor, this is where the bodies are, this is how I killed my family. I had to do it for these reasons. I know that people won't understand, please understand goodbye, and left and was

eventually found and incarcerated after disappearing for a couple of decades. But it seems to me that in these cases, specific to the case of the successful white American male, that there's something that seems to happen where the thing that the structure that your life seems to be built around, the power that you have, the people that you're in control of, the social position that you have, if that's going to be taken away, that it's like you lose your sense of identity and you just, it's suicide or murder, suicide or murder seems like. Within an irrational society, the only rational response, because if you're not this person who's in charge of these other people, then who are you? And maybe you have absolutely no idea. Of course, individual pathology

is a big part of this, but I'm very ready to hold the rest of America accountable for that, especially if we're talking about the 50s and 60s being terrible and being the crucial during which we created these ideas about, who are you as a person? Well, you're the power that you have and the people that you're in control of and the social capital that you accrue. And if you don't have that, then you just barely even need to kill yourself because you don't exist anymore. One of the suicidologists I spent a decent amount of time with for my gay suicide article said that one of the things that separates depressed people from suicidal people is this feeling of the walls closing in, that there are people who just get depressed and they're really

depressed and they're bummed and they don't leave the bed and that's fine. And then there's people that get really depressed and they think there's no way out. It's only going to get worse. I feel trapped. It's like the sense of being trapped is a predictor of suicide kind of separate from the depression itself. Yeah. And you don't, I mean, I think that that sense does apply to a lot of people who are suicidal, whether they're depressed or not. I don't think you need to kind of pass through depression first to reach that point. Oh, really? Because depression is not always, doesn't always come before suicide. There are other mental illness issues, but also just other life issues. For a long time, the community sort of maintained that 90 plus percent of people who

died by suicide had a diagnosed or diagnosable mental illness. And I think part of that effort of putting that big number out was to create this direct correlation and also say we need to get more help for people who are struggling with mental illness. Essentially, like it should be on par with physical illness, you should be able to cover your therapy bills with your insurance, you know, which is still a huge issue for many, many people. So I think that that's important, but it's interesting how that statistic has actually changed. Like I think the most recent study that the CDC did said that only 54% of people who died by suicide had been diagnosed with a mental illness. And the suicide rate has actually gone up a lot in the country in the last couple

years. I've always bristled a little bit at that 90% statistic. And then maybe it's because I sort of think of everything through the lens of my friend who was outside of a lot of that. He may have had the beginnings of a mental illness or depression or something that kind of swayed him, but I think in most cases, like he was just adolescent and thought very impulsively and reacted to this big influential thing in his life, rashly and had access to a gun. I don't want to simplify it by saying, oh, maybe he was depressed or struggling or whatever, which I don't really think is the case even though it's part of me feels like I can't really speak on that because I certainly don't know what's going on in his head. I think it sort of not only does it simplify,

but I think it sort of allows us to just like put the mental illness label on it, which is the same thing we do with mass shooters. I think it's like so easy to just put that label on it and not face the other issues that may be leading this person to do such a violent act. Where it's like crazy people got to be crazy. Exactly. And then we're finished. And allows the self described mentally well, whatever the fuck that demographic thinks it is, to opt out of it. I've been interviewing a lot of stigma researchers. Is that a field stigmatology? There's a journal. I interviewed the editor of the journal Stigma. He's been working on this for like 20 years and he told me, so he works on mental illness stigma,

that calling people crazy is like a form of stigma. Unlike a lot of other minority statuses, if you have mental illness, people can't see that on you. It's only you have to decide how to disclose. It's kind of like a parallel for gayness, that this issue of like, do I tell people that I have clinical depression or not is like a source of stress because you think people are judging you? Can they tell? Can they not tell? And that stresses you. Anyway, he said there was a big, there was like decades of advocacy on classifying mental illnesses, getting the medical community to see mental illness as a disease because you wanted to take the fault away from people, right? Or this bullshit like, just cheer up and you won't be

depressed anymore. Take a walk and look at the sunrise. Yeah, exactly. But he said in doing that, one of the unintended consequences of that was that getting this disease definition of mental illness in some ways backfired because it actually encourages discrimination because if you're an employer and somebody's applying and that person has clinical depression, you think, oh, it's a disease, i.e., they're never going to get better. So I don't want to hire them. I don't want to rent them an apartment. I don't want to get into a relationship with them because it's a disease that is incurable and it's totally out of their control and it's never going to go away. So I don't know if he is of the opinion that like, they shouldn't be thought of as diseases or if this is

just an unintended consequence, but calling something a disease makes it seem incurable and can actually fuel discrimination. Yeah, like, unlive with a bull that you cannot have a regular day that your life is in continual crisis mode. Like, even if it is chronic depression, that it's something that you're just mentally skabrous about every minute of your life and that there's no kind of possibility of having a routine. I mean, I also think that just regardless of even of something being objectively or subjectively bad or good, we are just terrible as a society at recognizing and accepting difference. We're like, but can't everyone be the same? And then the people who work here or live here are all the same as each other because that's the ideal

situation. And it's like, why is that ideal exactly? And like, of course, people don't want to be stigmatized, but also people just don't, people just want their fucking insurance to pay their medical bills, you know what I mean? Like, it's like a lot of times it's just like, come on, I'm depressed and that's a real thing and I don't want to pay $150 every time I go see a therapist, you know, which is their absolute right. It also speaks to the extent that we like to focus on acute causes rather than chronic causes. It's easy to be like Courtney Love drove Kurt to suicide because it's like this acute like one thing I can do to where something like he had access to guns, he had something in his family, it's like these long, these long standing things that are kind of

in the air and in the water that you can't explain as easily. Right. Well, and Candice, you have a metaphor in your book about this that I really love about them, you know, using Chernobyl. Yeah, that was kind of interesting, like someone else had done a study specifically about media related suicide contagion and how when you think of someone like Kurt Cobain, who had these suicides, you know, he had two like great uncles that died by suicide and other people in his life, a lot of people who die by suicide do have other suicides in their life. So it's like sort of this model setup and you can kind of think of it as almost like a contagion, like catching a cold or something like that to put in very simple terms, which is not really the case. But you know what

I mean, like it can move person to person within a community. But when you think of, you know, a celebrity, there's this middle messenger that is the media and this researcher compared it to Chernobyl, this huge natural disaster happens, right. And anyone within the vicinity is potentially affected. But the only people who emerge from that with cancer are people who are already vulnerable in some way. There may be people who are affected by this sort of media related contagion. But it's because they already have a proclivity for this, or they already are vulnerable in some way, because not everyone who was a fan of Nirvana and read these articles went out and shot themselves. Some people did. So I think that in the community is interesting, they really push for like better

media guidelines and more responsible reporting. But they also kind of say like, if it happens, there's other stuff percolating, there's other stuff going on. How has all of this changed your view on your friend suicide? Like how do you think about it differently now? It's interesting. Like I think I grow really frustrated when I was doing the research and I found that study saying like, oh yeah, there wasn't any crisis at all. There's just this one guy in Seattle and overall everything's great and the media did a great job. And you know, I just want to like sometimes like scream and yell like, well, clearly not, you know, this affected my friend. And how do we know like there could have been people all over the place

and you we just don't have those statistics. But I think when I look deeper into that, I realized that it was very convenient for me to be able to attach my friend suicide to this big cultural phenomenon that made it easy to blame Kurt Cobain for it, but B, to feel like I was connected to this big thing that happened. And I think that for a long time, I felt really like I had been like touched in some way by like this huge cultural phenomenon that it was really special and unique. In some way, it was like sort of my way of coping with it in that way. And to realize that having done all this real this research and knowing how much suicide affects so many people, like it certainly doesn't feel unique anymore. But also like right that there wasn't really a

phenomenon. There were clearly other reasons and a gun hiding under somebody's bed is a much bigger reason than reading an article about Kurt Cobain. So do you think copycat suicides are kind of overall a myth because it sort of exists, but it also it's much more these other it's like the frosting, but there's this huge cake. Exactly. Exactly. Like I said, it's a catalyst, but it's so infrequent. It is a concern. And if we talk about it and it makes people do more responsible reporting, then that's great. You know, I think about my friend sometimes and I'm like, well, if he didn't do it that year, what do you have just done it two years later or five years later? It's like, I'll never know. You know, it is a thing and it isn't just as much as anything else

that may be a factor in someone's, you know, kind of suicide narrative. Maybe this makes me a terrible person. I always get really kind of annoyed when I see media folks putting out the suicide crisis hotline. Not because I think that like suicide crisis hotlines are bad, but it's weird to me how we as journalists are really comfortable advocating for social change on this one fucking thing. I think people having lots of guns is bad too, but you never see articles being like call your senator about their gun control issues. Use the number to call or like, hey, people who can't afford mental health treatment. What is it? Like 70% of homeless people have some sort of untreated mental illness. That is also bad, but I don't see articles being like, hey, here's a number where

you can donate to homeless crisis services. We don't have the same like we are social actors. Let's try to make the world better kind of framing unless we're talking about suicide. Then all of a sudden it's like, okay, to try to make the world a better place. I think we should do this with lots of stuff. I think the suicide crisis hotline is fine, but there's like 20 other things. Call your senator to talk about juxtaposition and how it shouldn't be used in trials. I get that you don't want to be, the minimum wage should be raised because there are economists on both sides of that issue, blah, blah, blah. But there's many issues that are just as clear cut. Clear cut. Like kids should not be killing themselves. And the media is like,

we don't know. We're just the messengers. I think the reason behind that is because there's just like this sort of new awareness that a suicide crisis is often a very short-lived thing. And if someone can get through that immediate crisis, they're usually okay, at least for now. So I think people are just more aware of how immediate and urgent that can be. And because there is a life at stake in a very immediate way. And so I think that's part of the reason. But it's actually interesting. I went to this one lecture with a woman who was talking about addressing suicide from a public health crisis. And she used this great metaphor. It's called the upstream metaphor. And I think it's used in various public health crises. The whole thing is like,

okay, you're hanging out by a river and you see someone floating downstream screaming for help. So you go in and you get the person and you bring them out. And then a minute later, you see someone else coming down the river screaming for help. So you go in and you get them out. And then all of a sudden there's two people, then four people, then six people, and you are not able to save all those people. But then you realize the better thing is to do is walk upstream and see where these people are getting in the water and stop them from getting in the water. And like it's this whole public health thing of like, we need to change the language around suicide, like we need to help people before they get to that crisis state, right? And if people are getting the mental

help that they need and they're more aware of it and the dialogue is just out there and more familiar to them. And so I think that putting the phone number in and just having it all over the place, I don't even know if people are consciously doing it or if it's just sort of like, it's just the thing we do now. I'm often struck by the realization that as a nation that we don't have that many numbers that we can call, we have 911 for medical emergency or if a black congressperson is canvassing in a neighborhood in Oregon. So we have medical emergency, criminal emergency, fire, we have suicide hotlines, and then you can call your senator or various elected representatives and talk to an intern or an answering machine or whatever. But like, there aren't that many

direct lines of contact between us as citizens and the emergencies that we have or that we see and ways that you can try and get help for something without potentially making yourself vulnerable to a bill that you can't pay for. Like it feels like a lot of the help we need is stuff that as private American citizens, we just can't afford and we know that no one else can afford or it's going to bring the cops and they're probably going to make more trouble. And it's interesting that in the absence of having necessarily trained operators on a suicide hotline, what that is offering, one of the things that it seems to offer is non-judgmental contact with a human being, that you can talk to someone who's not part of your life and say, I want to end my life

and guess that you can talk to a human. And someone who you never have to talk to again. And so you don't need to be worried about being judged because it's like you don't have to face that person the next day. I use sitting next to people on airplanes for that. People on airplanes use sitting next to me for that. They're like, what brings you to Cleveland? I'm like, I was born on a Wednesday and I never felt love for my parents. Just go straight in. You know, one of the things we didn't talk about is the 27 Club. Oh yeah, I was going to ask about that because I remember when Kurt Cobain killed himself, 27 seemed like unbelievably old. And now 27 seems incredibly young to me. Like he's just this like whippersnapper.

He's a tiny baby. I know. My first experience for the 27 Club was our local music store called Strawberries Music and Video, which I think was like an East Coast chain. They had their section of posters and there was like this cartoony poster that said the 27 Club and it had Jimmy Hendricks and Janice Joplin and Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. Speaking of glorifying suicides, that's like not a great idea. It's also glorifying dangerous drug use to be fair. Yeah, absolutely. And I believe since Amy Winehouse has joined that club, but I can't figure out where it started. And right after Kurt died, like the first interview that someone did with his mom, Wendy, is that she said, now he's gone and joined that stupid club. And I think that she was just talking

about rock stars that died and not necessarily like specifically rock stars that were 27 years old. But I don't actually know where the source of the 27 Club is. Yeah, or if people notice that in the late 60s, early 70s, suicide definitely changes the way we look at a person's life. Because I think that we start to look at it as like their whole life was leading to that moment. And I think we naturally sort of create a narrative out of it and I'm guilty of that as well. And one of the things that I think really helped me was, I have talked to my friend's family throughout this process and his mom at one point said to me that that last year was the best year of his life and just talked about how happy he was and how he made so many more friends,

like new friends and like for a parent who lost a child to get to the point to be able to say like that was actually a high point for him really made me kind of rethink how we think about the lives of people who have died by suicide. I've read a lot of biographies about people who have died by suicide and they're always written in this way as though the biographer is trying to figure out what happened and sort of painting their life in such a way that it was all leading toward that point. But like what happens if we think outside that box and we just think about this person's life as what it was and not as a life that's leading to this like inevitable destruction. I remember after I told my parents I was gay, there was like this two-year period

of every couple months, they would be like, hey, when you dropped out of high school, was that because you were gay? Like they were going through the rest of my life and retconning and putting the gayness like at one point, I think my dad was like, you quit the soccer team, like the neighborhood soccer team when you were nine, is that because you were gay? And it's like, well, on some level, yes. But also, I also didn't like being on that soccer team for like exactly the reasons that I had at the time, right? And like it rains a lot in Seattle and I don't want to play soccer in the rain. There's like one new reason I did all those complex things for many reasons. Like there are a million reasons why you drop out of high school or quit a soccer team or

play the trumpet and not the trombone. Like any decision in your life has 50 million reasons for it. But like we want to like grasp onto this like one thing and be like, oh, the suicide is like this thread that runs through your whole life. And sometimes you do things in your life not because you're depressed or you're suicidal, but just because like it's raining out or something. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, speaking of romanticizing all of that, I spent all of high school with a Jim Morrison with his shirt off looking piercingly into the camera. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Me too, actually. Really? Because I mean, A, I liked his torso because it was like my subtle way of being a gay teenage boy. But also, yeah, I was also really into the doors when I should have been into

Nirvana. That was another band that I was really into. That's why we ended up here. That's the, you know, that's the link. Yeah. Yeah. I would say come as you are. No. Oh, sorry. Someone had to do one of those because I thought I'm terribly, terribly sorry. Better to burn out than to grow in a way. I know. It's terrible.