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Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States. And yet, it’s not talked about very much; at least, not openly.
Clancy Martin, a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and author of the soon-to-be published book “How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of a Suicidal Mind,” said that needs to change.
“The most important thing we can do is talk about suicide,” Martin said on Up To Date Monday. “Talking with another human being about suicide is the only known guaranteed medicine for suicidal thinking, and anyone can do it.”
Martin knows how difficult it can be to talk about suicide. He’s attempted suicide 10 times in his life, and many times, he kept these attempts a secret from his wife and coworkers.
“There’s this idea that a person has one face in public and a different face in private,” he said. “It's more that this internal struggle is part of who you are, and so you can naturally be a kind of happy and cheerful person and yet, at the same time, also have this very deep belief structure that you would be better off dead.”
Because of the stigma surrounding suicide, Martin said people are usually shocked when a person takes, or attempts to take, their own life, when in reality, that person has likely been thinking about suicide for years.
“You need to think about someone's suicide attempt in a different way,” he said. “They've probably been fighting this battle for a long, long time.”
- Clancy Martin, author and professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri, Kansas City
Event details: "How Not to Kill Yourself" by Clancy Martin in Conversation with Angela Elam, 6 p.m., Thursday, March 23 at Kansas City Public Library Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St., Kansas City, Missouri 64112
