Suicide

We were out buying groceries the other day, and the checkout lady at Waitrose refused to ring up a 16-pack of generic aspirin. It wasn't her fault; my wife had already bought a packet of her favorite pain reliever and the store forbids employees from selling more than one pack of aspirin per shopping party per visit. The reason? Suicide by aspirin is a hugely popular method of topping oneself over here.

The theory, I believe, is that your average fifteen year old girl who gets into a strop over her boyfriend forgetting their 3-week anniversary will make it to Teso's, Boots and possibly Super Drug before losing interest and going home to watch Dawson's Creek. It's hard to say how many lives have been saved by mini-packets of aspirin and ADD.

As an American, I'm incredulous; we sell aspirin by the bucket load, but I can't name a single person who has scarfed down enough of them to induce a permanent out-of-body experience. In Britain, however, nearly half of all female suicides choose some sort of overdose--aspirin being the runaway favorite--as the preferred Dirt Nap Nightcap.

So, fair enough, the terminally depressed on this side of the Atlantic remain stuck in a medieval mind-set that casts poisoning in a romantic light, but you'd think the cashier could have looked at the rest of my groceries--fresh fruit, salad greens, whole meal bread; I'm not exactly a man on the edge.

Besides, for forty-six years I, and everyone else I knew, lived in a house with enough aspirin in the medicine cabinet to put Belgium in a coma. If I had the notion to eat a bowlful, I surely would have done so by now. Waitrose, Sainsbury's and the other big supermarket chains here should bestow special dispensation on American ex-pats, maybe give us a badge that says, "Let us have all the aspirin we want. We're Americans; you can trust us with this stuff."

I suppose you could argue that, as Americans, we didn't need to resort to such questionable methods of self-termination as we have so many other more attractive, convenient and lethal means at our disposal. I'm referring, of course, to our ability to get our hands on an unlimited supply of aspirin (just kidding!), I mean, guns and the requisite ammo.

Any teenager worth their angst has made at least one half-hearted attempt at attaining room temperature, and unluckily for them, there is generally a firearm close to hand. I say unluckily because, as we all know, suicide is most often a cry for help, and one has plenty of time to text a pitiful note to their friends if they take poison or hack at their wrist with their dad's safety razor (teens are expert texters; they'd have no problem broadcasting a good-bye note one-handed while the other is leaking all over the new carpets). Even jumping from a cliff or throwing oneself off a bridge is generally prefaced with a protracted period of standing around waiting for someone to notice them and then wailing to the crowd and local news crew about what a tragic life they have before they finally grow weary of their own pity-fest and step into the waiting arms of the matron. But for those unfortunate enough to have hardware handy when the mood strikes, backing out fails to be an option once the trigger is pulled.

This is why, in the US, firearm suicides are (sorry, but I have to say it before someone else does) number one with a bullet.

For men in the UK, hanging is head and shoulders (okay, I'll stop, I promise) above poisoning, but the two categories together make up nearly 70% of all the DIY deaths in Britain, looming large over the next most popular category, the ominously titled, "Unspecified," which makes one wonder what shape the bodies were in when the rightful owners were finished with them. Firearm deaths are so far down the list that they have to be combined with "Explosives" in order to attain statistical significance. (As you may have guessed, this category is far more attractive to those with a Y chromosome.)

In the US, the combination of firearms, hanging and poisoning (non-aspirin class) comprises a hefty 87.3% of the total number of Americans willing to roll the dice on the off chance of reincarnation. The next largest category--Falls From High Places--weighs in at a paltry 2%. (I also suspect some statistical skullduggery here: the use of the word "Falls" leads me to believe they bulked the numbers up by including people who weren't ambitious enough to take the big step but were merely clumsy; if I had the balls to swan-dive off the Chrysler Building, I'd be highly affronted to find myself lumped into the same category as some guy who slipped while taking a photo from the top of Mount Rushmore.)

Just one more statistical tidbit before I stop reading from "US/UK Suicides, 2004-2005" (you knew that's what I was doing, didn't you?). The UK has a category that doesn't even show up on the American Hit Parade: Moving Objects. Really, what were they thinking! My life would have to take some serious bad turns before the idea of jumping in front of a bus sounded attractive.

Even so, having once been a teenager, the concept of suicide in a general sense (i.e. not involving busses) used to excite a certain fascination and, oddly enough, it was the lethal abundance of firepower at my disposal that kept me from acting on any ill-advised impulses. Being too unimaginative to see beyond the obvious, the idea of the mess I would leave behind deterred me from taking action. So I guess I'm here today because I was too lazy to entertain abstract thought and my mom taught me to be tidy.

Good thing I didn't know about the aspirin.