Post Mortem

EVEN the most stolid of us is sometimes glad of an excuse for not grumbling about the winter. Here is a novel.one: 'Suicides are commonest in the early summer. . . . It has been suggested that the need to seek shelter in winter enforces social intercourse (Hopkins, 1937*); in winter the misanthrope can again segregate himself.' These words are taken from a breezy little monograph, called Suicide in London, by Mr. Peter Sainsbury; it is published for the Institute of 'Psychiatry by Messrs. Chapman and Hall at the exorbitant price of 15s.

I do not think that the passage I have quoted exhibits Mr. Sainsbury at his most perspicuous. Loneliness, he tells us, is an important factor in suicide; 30 per cent. of London's suicides live alone, and this is either four or eight times— depending on what you make of Table 9—the percentage of the total population who do so. But is it really probable that the lonely—most of whom are old or elderly people—become more gregarious in winter thad they are in summer, and brave the long, dark nights in search of company? I should hardly have thought so.• Mr. Sainsbury is not, however, a man with whom one lightly disagrees. When I tell you that, in approaching this great• human problem, he obtained his coefficients of rank.correla- tion from the following formula : , 2 P ,\/ in (n-1) — I.

you will see that the ordinary, yes-but-what-I-mean-to-say methods of disputation would stand one in poor stead. He is, needless to say, quite right about early summer being the fashionable season for felo de se. In 1936-38 May produced fifty-five suicides in the five Metropolitan Boroughs, April and November tying for second place with thirty-ninc.

* * * Mr. Sainsbury's main purpose, like his colourless and im- personal style, is not dissimilar from that of Dr. Chapman, of whose selfless endeavours to analyse the sociological signifi- cance of pelmets and Occasional tables I recently gave an account on this page; and he sets out to achieve it by 'examining the differences in the suicide rate in various neighbaurhoods and social groups in London, and interpreting these in terms of their social and cultural structure.' Very' greatly over- simplified, the sort of thing he wants to find out is : is an unemployed, divorced Duke living over a pet shop in Bays- water more or less likely to blow his brains out than a pre- maturely bald, unmarried Lett working in a glue factory in Poplar?

Rather surprisingly—to me, but not to Mr. Sainsbury or to the authorities he quotes (among them Durkheim, Fromm, Gaupp, Halbwachs, Kraepelin, Siewers, Tietze, Zilboorg and, making a nice change, the Registrar-General for England and Wales)—a definite though confusing pattern seems to emerge. There are. of course, local aberrations which slightly impair its symmetry; 'elderly females in Hampstead, for example, have a suicide rate above the average, which suggests a local factor may be raising the rate in that group.'t But the main 4' Hopkins. I do not think that this can be an allusion to Major `Charpoy' Hopkins, who was joint-master of the Spongeby Chase before the last war. Probably it is lsomebody else of the same name. t In this sentence the Scottish usage of 'factor' is clearly far from our author's mind. conclusion to be drawn from Mr. Sainsbury's patient researches is inescapable : suicide is U. • It is people belonging to the 'classes and occupations least subject to the common mores' who most readily do away with themselves. In economic crises 'the classes that. had most to lose contributed the most suicides. . . ."Unemployment and overcrowding rates showed no correlation with suicide. . . 'In Mayfair the impersonal, fleeting nature of relationships and the lack of a consistent and generally accepted set of values seem to be especially important.' Mr. Sainsbury contrasts, and is well justified • by his statistics in contrasting, 'the restless, meretricious West End' with 'the settled East End where the Cockney, the hereditary Londoner, lives by the commerce of his port and City,' and the 'neighbourly and cordial atmosphere in many of London's poor districts' with the 'cool formality of South Kensington and other more prosperotis areas.'

* * This is all very interesting, but it is also rather sad. For Mr. Sainsbury's long-term objective is to 'provide data on which a practical programme of mental hygiene might be based.' As far as I can see, the only real hope of bringing down the London suicide rate is—since 'indigenous poverty and suicide are mutually exclusive'—to take everybody's money away from them and make them live in slums. (This. of course, is what each of our great political parties says the other means to do; it is small wonder that the suicide rate has never been a live issue at the hustings.) The only other expedient which might make a substantial difference would be to abolish gas. It will be seen from Table 12, which I reproduce betdw, that this is far the commonest method employed.

TABLE 12

PERCENTAGE INCIDENCE OF SUICIDE METHOD EMPLOYED NY MALES AND FEMALES IN 355 CASES

Total Male Female Carbon monoxide , . 40.6 40.3 41.0

Poison. .. . .

20.6 16.7 27.9 Jumping from building .. 12.1 10.3 15.6 Drowning .. .. .. 8.1 9.0 6.5 Ilanging ..

. ,

7.9 10.3 3.3 Cutting (throat, wrists, etc.) .. 5.0 6A 2,5 ('rushing (beneath train) .. 3.1 3.11 1.6 Firearms... .. 2.0 2.6 (1.8

Setting tire to self ..

11.3

0.8 Electrocution .. • • 0.3 0.5

100.0 100.0 100.0 Mr. Sainsbury's theme is basically a tragic one. If I have treated it with less than the solemnity which it, and he, deserve, I must plead a measure of justification, or perhaps of provo- cation, in Mr. Sainsbury's own approach to his subject. This would have keen admirably congruous to a monograph on the death-watch beetle, the warble-fly, or even the rat; and I realise that a learned and specialist document should be couched in terms of irreproachable objectivity. But ought a psychiatrist, whose study is the soul, to write as though he could see nothing but decimal points in death? And it is surely odd that a study of suicide in the capital of a Christian country should make no reference of any kind to religion. STRIX