Phil Rockstroh: reflections on suicide

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Suicide is delivering the US cultural elite (e.g., Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain) to the Dreamworld’s twin realm. James Hillman averred, after much study and contemplation on the subject (an early analysand of his committed suicide) that when one turns to suicide, the individual is attempting to kill a psychical complex — not themselves. The misapprehension arrives by being afflicted with the phenomenon R. D. Laing termed the False Self and Friedrich Engels termed capitalist false consciousness.

Although Engels applied the term to members of the underclass who had internalised the self-defeating value system of the capitalist ruling class, the misery of the cultural elite cannot stay mounted on the chimera of careerist ambition. As a general rule, the Cult of Success’ mode of mind and modus operandi evinces manic compensation — to wit, the striving, obsessive, winged, grounding-bereft, split off half of despair. Yet an individual cannot remain airborne, mortals that we are, ad infinitum.

The manic Spirit, enthralled and intoxicated by its own scintillating glow, by compulsion, ascends while the Soul, by nature, makes chthonic descents. Rilke compared the Orphic impulse to a tree — whose roots reach into the singing loam of the earth as its branches are played like the strings of a lyre by the winds of spirit. The Dead must be engaged, their laments acknowledged or their beckoning will grow into the overpowering admonition of a Death Drive.

Walker Percy limned the psychical landscape thus:

“Death in the form of death genes shall not prevail over me, for death genes are one thing but it is something else to name the death genes and know them and stand over against them and dare them. I am different from my death genes and therefore not subject to them. My father had the same death genes but he feared them and did not name them and thought he could roar out old Route 66 and stay ahead of them or grab me and be pals or play Brahms and keep them, the death genes, happy, so he fell prey to them.”

The capitalist paradigm is held in the thrall of its inherent death genes, by ecocide and nuclear annihilation it will succumb to their Thanatic admonitions. In this manner the suicides of both the cultural elite and the pandemic of suicide of the underclasses reflect the phenomenon. In short, there must come an economic/socio/cultural sea change or the beckoning of the Dead to join them in endless song will prove too potent to resist.

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APPENDIX

Bipolars are at highest risk.
Never doubt the risk of bipolar suicide. Many studies indicate a 15% rate of suicide amongst individuals with bipolar disorder. This rate is about 30 times higher than than that of the general population.

The rate of suicides amongst bipolar people is even higher than that for schizophrenics.

Some studies have come up with rates as high as 30%-50%.

While Spade suffered from depression, a mental health condition is not always a predictor for suicide.

More than half of the Americans studied by the CDC who died by suicide did not have a mental health condition. Substance abuse, financial stress and relationship problems or loss are all factors that contribute to suicide risk, data shows.

Suicide remains the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., according to the CDC.

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