Resurrection, the voyage to the land of the dead and back again, is common enough in old legends and in the experiences of people who live through a near-terminal illness or accident. But that journey is also made daily in hospital emergency rooms.
About thirty thousand people kill themselves in the United States each year. An estimated ten to forty times that number try to kill themselves but don't die, either because they don't really want to die or because they don't know how.
I didn't realize the impact of that statistic until I talked to friends and acquaintances while researching this article. Everyone I talked to, whether I interviewed them or casually brought the subject up, knew someone who had attempted suicide.
Some of the stories are tragic. A friend of a friend jumped from a high building and hit a parked car several stories below. She broke most of her bones and punctured several of her inner organs but didn't die. Instead she was wheeled, conscious, to the local emergency room, her most privately conceived act announced to the world by the ambulance siren. She spent the next year in bed, much of it in a hospital ward allocated to critically ill victims of violence, her still-suicidal mind the only functioning part of her body.
This article about what happens to people who attempt to kill themselves started as a brief review of a pair of new publications aimed at the terminally ill. One booklet, the widely-publicized but little-read "death manual", How to Die With Dignity, contains a chart of lethal doses of different types of pills and methods of deliberately ensuring a calm death in a suicide attempt. It was published by Scotlish Exit, the London group that in the past year sought and won more than its share of controversy. Two of the members of the London group are now facing trial on nine charges of aiding people to kill themselves.
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