Suicides and Suicide Attempts

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      Ex-Doctor Charged With Manslaughter in New York Woman’s Suicide

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      The police provided few details about the death, making it unclear whether it would be covered by the medical aid in dying laws that some states have but that New York does not.A former doctor from Arizona is facing a manslaughter charge in New York for his role in the suicide of a woman who died in a Hudson Valley motel room in November, according to his lawyer and law enforcement officials.The former doctor, Stephen P. Miller, 85, is charged with second-degree manslaughter under a provision of New York State law that makes it a crime for one person to intentionally cause or aid in the suicide of another.Mr. Miller, of Tucson, also faces two assault counts. He pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in Ulster County Court on Friday and was being held at the Ulster County Jail on Monday in lieu of $500,000 cash bail or a $1 million bond.Mr. Miller’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, said the woman who died in the motel room had contacted his client through a national organization that advocates the legalization of medical aid in dying so that terminally ill patients have some control over how their lives end.Ten states, including New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., allow some form of such aid. A bill that would legalize medical aid in dying in New York has repeatedly failed to win lawmakers’ approval in recent years.Law enforcement officials disclosed few details about the suicide Mr. Miller is charged in, making it unclear whether it would be covered under such legislation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Canada Delays Plan to Offer Medically Assisted Death to the Mentally Ill

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      A parliamentary panel concluded that there are not enough doctors, particularly psychiatrists, in the country to properly assess patients.Canada is postponing a plan to offer people suffering from mental illnesses the option of a medically assisted death, two cabinet ministers said on Monday.The announcement by Mark Holland, the health minister, and Arif Virani, the justice minister, came after a special parliamentary committee looking into the plan concluded that there are not enough doctors, particularly psychiatrists, in the country to assess patients with mental illnesses who want to end their lives and to help them do so.“The system needs to be ready, and we need to get it right,” Mr. Holland told reporters. “It’s clear from the conversations we’ve had that the system is not ready, and we need more time.”Neither minister offered any timeline for the latest extension. Following an earlier delay, the expansion had been scheduled to come into effect on March 17.Canada already offers medically assisted death to terminally and chronically ill people, but the plan to extend the program to people with mental illnesses has divided Canadians.Some critics say the plan is a consequence of the inability of Canada’s public health care system to offer adequate psychiatric care, which is chronically underfunded and facing demand that outstrips its availability.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Attention! There’s Life Beyond the Digital.

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      More from our inbox:A Party Pooper’s View of the New Climate DealThe Biden Impeachment Inquiry: ‘Republicans, Have You No Shame?’The 1968 and 2024 ElectionsThe A.I. StakesVeterans’ Suicides by Firearm Harry WrightTo the Editor:Re “Fight the Powerful Forces Stealing Our Attention,” by D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt (Opinion guest essay, Nov. 27):In 2010, frustrated that I had to admonish the students in my large sophomore lecture course to turn off their cellphones at the start of each class, only to see them return to them immediately at the end, I told them a story.When I went to college, I explained, there were no cellphones. After class, we thought about what we had just learned, often discussing it with our friends. Why not try an experiment: for one week, no cellphones for 10 minutes after every class? Only three of the 80 students accepted the challenge, and not surprisingly, they reported back that they were thrilled to find themselves learning more and enjoying it more thoroughly.So, hats off to the authors of this essay who are teaching attentiveness. I fear, though, that they are trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. Would that they prove me wrong.Richard EtlinNew YorkThe writer is distinguished university professor emeritus at the School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, University of Maryland, College Park.To the Editor:Of course, we have lost a good deal of our ability to focus and concentrate with the persistence of digital information gnawing at our attention spans. While this is not a new problem, it has been grossly intensified.The answer in the past, and the answer now, is libraries: places of quiet reading, contemplation, study, thinking, even daydreaming.To put away electronic media for a time and enjoy the silence of a library is a gift for personal balance and tranquillity.Bonnie CollierBranford, Conn.The writer is a retired associate director for administration, Yale Law Library.To the Editor:Some years ago I returned to the tiny Greek island my family left in 1910. “There’s nothing there,” everybody said. But the nothing that was there was the absolute antidote to most of the malaise of modern life, or, as my daughter calls it, “the digital hellscape.”The effect was immediate. No credit cards, no taxi apps, no alarm systems, none of it. Just the sounds of the goat bells on the hills and people drinking coffee and staring at the water and talking to each other. And it wasn’t boring at all.Jane WardenMalibu, Calif.A Party Pooper’s View of the New Climate Deal Fadel Dawod/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “In Climate First, Pact Seeks Shift on Fossil Fuels” (front page, Dec. 14):I hate to be a climate summit party pooper, but the bottom line is that the new deal being celebrated is not legally binding and can’t, on its own, force any country to act. History has shown that if a country isn’t forced to act, it usually won’t.How do I know that? We just had the hottest year on record, with global fossil-fuel emissions soaring to record highs. We had agreed not to go there. Here we are.Douglas G. WilliamsMinneapolisThe Biden Impeachment Inquiry: ‘Republicans, Have You No Shame?’Representative James Comer, left, and Representative Jim Jordan have led the Republican impeachment inquiry.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Impeachment Inquiry Approved, Despite No Proof of Biden Crime” (front page, Dec. 14):This is a sad day for our country. Republicans voted to have an impeachment inquiry into President Biden without having any basis on which to proceed. Why did they take this unprecedented step? They were responding to the wishes of Donald Trump.The constitutional power of the House of Representatives to impeach is a solemn duty reserved for instances where a president has committed “high crimes or misdemeanors.” In this case, there is not a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing, only a father’s love for his surviving son.Republicans, have you no shame? You will rue the day you voted in such an unethical manner. To use impeachment as a political tool in the 2024 election is an embarrassment for the whole world to see.I am afraid that we have reached the point where retribution is one party’s focus instead of the myriad needs of the people of this nation.Ellen Silverman PopperQueensThe 1968 and 2024 Elections Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Reading about how President Biden is losing support among young pro-Palestinian college kids takes me back to my youth. I’m a baby boomer, and this reminds me of the 1968 presidential election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.So many of my generation were so angry about the Vietnam War and how Vice President Humphrey had backed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s handling of the war that many of us refused to vote for Humphrey. Nixon was elected, and the war continued.As President Biden often says, an election is a choice. However, one can also choose not to vote. Those of us who refused to vote for Humphrey may well have tipped the election to Nixon, and with it all of the consequences that followed.It is a cliché that the perfect is the enemy of the good, but there is a lot of truth to it. I fervently hope we don’t make that mistake in 2024.Stuart MathNew YorkThe A.I. StakesTo the Editor:Re “How Money, Ego and Fear Lit A.I.’s Fuse” (“The A.I. Race” series, front page, Dec. 4):Although the history of artificial intelligence may read like a struggle between those favoring cautious development and those intent on advancing the technology rapidly with fewer restrictions, it was inevitable that the latter would come out on top.Given the resources required to scale the technology, it could be developed only with the support of parties with enormous computing power and very deep pockets (in other words, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta).And in return for their investments of billions of dollars, it is hardly surprising that those competing parties would demand rapid advancement with fewer restrictions in the hope of controlling the future of an industry that holds the promise of spectacular profit.In retrospect, the proponents of a cautious approach to the development of A.I. never stood a chance.Michael SilkLaguna Woods, Calif.Veterans’ Suicides by FirearmPhotos of people who died by suicide were displayed during an awareness event in Los Angeles last month.Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “U.S. Rate of Suicide by Firearm Reaches Record Level, Report Says” (news article, Dec. 2):The increasing use of firearms in suicides is particularly concerning among veterans. Suicide rates among veterans are twice as high as among civilians, and veterans are twice as likely as civilians to use a firearm in a suicide attempt. Younger veterans are at especially high risk; those under the age of 55 have the highest rates of suicide by firearm.New data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs offers a glimmer of hope: New York State is bucking the trend. It saw a 13 percent decrease in firearm-related suicides by veterans in 2021. That conforms with research findings that states with stricter gun control policies experience fewer firearm-related suicides.Saving lives means reducing access to lethal means.Derek CoyNew YorkThe writer, an Iraq veteran, is senior program officer for veterans’ health at the New York Health Foundation. More

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      Bullying, and Suicide, in High School

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      More from our inbox:Fans of Netflix DVDs Offer Sad FarewellsFacing Up to the Spiraling U.S. DebtIf the G.O.P. Wants to Win, It Needs to Pick Candidates Who Can Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Elite School Admits to Failure After Suicide of a Bullied Student” (front page, May 1), about the Lawrenceville School’s reckoning with the suicide of a student last year:Reading the article about Jack Reid’s suicide brought back unpleasant memories, as I attended the Lawrenceville School between 1968 and 1971.I was a shy, timid and closeted — even to myself — gay man. Although I received a great education, and went on to have a successful career as a judge, my three years at Lawrenceville were some of my worst.During my first year, I was called a homophobic slur in Spanish by a housemate, and another housemate wanted to fight me for no particular reason, probably because I was perceived as weak. The assistant housemaster sensed my unhappiness and asked me if I was OK, and, unfortunately, I answered that I was.To deal with my unhappiness and loneliness, I would calm myself by shaking my legs and arms before I went to sleep, in addition to gleefully marking a big “X” on my calendar after I completed another day of extreme misery.In fairness to Lawrenceville, I never disclosed my unhappiness. My heart goes out to the Reid family.I commend Lawrenceville for the steps the school is taking, albeit possibly to avoid litigation.David L. PiperMinneapolisTo the Editor:The story about Jack Reid’s suicide hit home. In the 1960s I was a ninth-grade transfer student. This particular boy spotted me as an easy target in civics class, relentlessly teasing, taunting and humiliating me, five days a week. Students laughed at me, calling me names throughout the halls.The look of shame in the eyes of the teacher was transparent, yet he never said or did anything in my defense. I was already afraid and insecure. Those daily taunts and humiliation destroyed the little self-worth I had.Twice I attempted suicide. My mother was beside herself. She pulled me out of that school and enrolled me in a private Catholic school. I somehow made it through those years only because of my mother’s love and concern rather than anything the school ever did.Bravo to the Lawrenceville School for publicly stating, “We acknowledge that more should have been done to protect Jack.” It’s long overdue for schools to finally step up and take responsibility rather than turning a continual blind eye.Marge KellerChicagoFans of Netflix DVDs Offer Sad Farewells Illustration by The New York Times. Images by Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Here’s Looking at You, DVD.com,” by Pamela Paul (column, April 28):Thanks to Ms. Paul for her eloquent, bittersweet ode to DVD.com. This year marked my 15th year as a Netflix subscriber, and while my queue is a fraction of hers (I have a thing with lists — no more than 10 on there at once), my recent mandate for managing my movies has been to include only those that are not available on any streaming service. (“Altered States” was a recent rental for me, too; maybe Ms. Paul and I had the same disc!)I will treasure these last few months of deliveries. Farewell, red envelopes, but luckily I can fill the void with a combination of fond memories and frequent trips to the New York Public Library DVD stacks (and pray to the lords of corporate do-gooding that Netflix donates its DVD inventory to libraries).Kevin ParksNew YorkTo the Editor:One point Pamela Paul didn’t mention is the superior image and sound quality of DVDs, especially Blu-ray. The colors are much richer, the blacks are blacker and the audio is much fuller. Filmmakers put incredible effort into the look and sound of their art.Luckily I live a few blocks from one of San Francisco’s last video rental stores, Video Wave of Noe Valley. Not only does Colin Hutton, the proprietor, carry hundreds of titles unavailable via the internet, but he also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the films.Whenever I want to watch a movie in which the cinematography and audio design are critical, I walk down the street to pick up a shiny disc.Michael FasmanSan FranciscoThe writer is a filmmaker.To the Editor:I loved this piece. It echoed my feelings and experiences with DVD.com. But there is another layer no one seems to be talking about.I live in a rural area of western North Carolina. I have no cellular service at my house, and my internet connection is via a very slow satellite service and has a data cap. Both the slowness of the connection and the low data cap prevent us from being able to stream anything but fairly short YouTube videos. And those eat up our data allotment pretty quickly. Forget trying to stream an HD movie.As Pamela Paul indicated, we won’t purchase a DVD that we would only watch once.I’m sure we aren’t the only family in America in this situation. So what are we to do? It’s depressing and frustrating.Kimberly Baldwin WhitmireFranklin, N.C.Facing Up to the Spiraling U.S. DebtSenate Republicans hold a news conference outside the Capitol to urge passage of legislation to raise the debt limit and cut federal spending.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “The Cowardice of the Deficit Scolds,” by Paul Krugman (column, May 9):It is time to face up to massive U.S. debt that both Presidents Trump and Biden helped accelerate.Many years ago, Mr. Krugman and others accused President George W. Bush and me of trying to privatize Social Security. The rhetoric poisoned the well for Social Security reform, which even Mr. Biden was suggesting was then needed. Reforms would have greatly improved today’s U.S. financial position.The “scolds” I know believe that long-term deficit reduction requires lower expenditures and higher revenues. Having managed four government agencies, I would add better management by political appointees and Congress to proactively address the challenges.We have to raise the debt ceiling, but we need to stop the U.S. debt doubling over the next 10 years. That is not “extortion” or “blackmail.” It is acting to safeguard America’s future.James B. LockhartGreenwich, Conn.The writer is a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. He was director of the Federal Housing Financial Agency and the Office of the Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, principal deputy commissioner of Social Security and director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.If the G.O.P. Wants to Win, It Needs to Pick Candidates Who CanRon DeSantis has cast himself as more electable than Donald J. Trump, but for years Republican primary voters have cast ballots with their hearts, opting for hard-liners who lose in general elections.Scott Eisen/Getty Images; Christopher Lee for The New York TimesTo the Editor:“DeSantis’s Electability Pitch Wobbles, Despite G.O.P. Losses Under Trump” (news article, April 23) describes the angst many Republicans feel about the electability of their candidates and the fact that they are losing many elections they feel were winnable.The answer to their problem should be very evident: The majority of Americans favor sensible gun control, including the banning of assault rifles. The majority of Americans favor women’s reproductive rights. The majority of Americans deplore the vicious tone of American politics that prevails today. The majority of Americans do not believe the idiotic conspiracy theories that abound.Yet the Republican Party continues to run candidates who cater to the morally and financially bankrupt National Rifle Association, who seek to eliminate completely a woman’s right to choose, who sow chaos with their nasty political rhetoric and who continue to push the completely ridiculous lie that Donald Trump won in 2020.If the Republican Party ever wants to regain its status as a mainstream, serious participant in governance, it needs to jettison these fringe types it continues to trot out as candidates.Bill GottdenkerMountainside, N.J. More

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      The Mental Health Toll of Trump-Era Politics

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      In the last few years the hideous state of our politics has often kept me up at night, but until recently I thought I was an outlier. Even when I’ve written about political despair as a problem for Democrats, I assumed it was something that applied to activists and base voters, the sort of people who go through their days silently cursing Joe Manchin. But a striking new study from Kevin B. Smith, chair of the political science department at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, suggests the universe of people who find our politics a torment might be much larger than I’d realized.“Politics is a pervasive and largely unavoidable source of chronic stress that exacted significant health costs for large numbers of American adults between 2017 and 2020,” writes Smith in “Politics Is Making Us Sick: The Negative Impact of Political Engagement on Public Health During the Trump Administration.” “The 2020 election did little to alleviate those effects and quite likely exacerbated them.”Around 40 percent of Americans, he found, “consistently identify politics as a significant source of stress in their lives.” Shockingly, about 5 percent have considered suicide in response to political developments. Smith told me he was skeptical of that figure when he first calculated it, and still isn’t wholly sure it isn’t a statistical fluke, but it’s remained fairly consistent in three surveys. (After publishing results from the first survey a few years ago, he said, he got a call from someone who worked at a suicide hotline who reported experiencing an uptick in calls after the 2016 election.)I’m fascinated by Smith’s work for a couple of reasons. The first is partisan. People from both parties reported that political stress during the Trump years has damaged their health, but Democrats have, unsurprisingly, had it worse. While Donald Trump was in office, they were able to turn their rage and fear into fuel, but I’m not sure how sustainable this is. The more politics becomes a pageant of infuriating Democratic impotence in the face of relentless right-wing spite, the more I fear people will disengage as a means of self-protection.But I’m also interested in the role politics plays in the disastrous state of American mental health, which is one of the overarching stories in the country right now. For all our division, there’s a pretty broad consensus that the country is, psychologically, in an awful place. According to a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll, almost nine in 10 registered voters believe there’s a mental health crisis in the United States. The crisis expresses itself in all sorts of ways: in rising rates of youth suicide, record overdoses, random acts of street violence, monthslong waiting lists for children’s therapists, mask meltdowns, QAnon.I’ve long thought that widespread psychological distress — wildly intensified by the pandemic — contributes to the derangement of American politics. But maybe the causality works the other way, too, and the ugliness of American politics is taking a toll on the psyche of the citizenry.Smith first surveyed a sample of around 800 people about politics and mental health in March 2017. As he wrote in a 2019 paper, he found fairly high levels of affliction: Besides the 40 percent who said they were stressed out about politics, a fifth or more reported “losing sleep, being fatigued, or suffering depression because of politics.” As many as a quarter of respondents reported self-destructive or compulsive behaviors, including “saying and writing things they later regret,” “making bad decisions” and “ignoring other priorities.”At the time, he thought he might just be capturing the shock of Trump’s election. But his next two surveys, in October and November of 2020, showed similar or greater levels of misery. Now, those were also moments of febrile political activity; perhaps if Smith had surveyed people in 2018 or 2019, he’d have found less political angst. Nevertheless, his findings suggest that there are tens of millions of Americans who’ve felt themselves ground down by our political environment.In some ways, this is surprising. Most people aren’t political junkies. The majority of American adults aren’t on Twitter, which tends to drive political news microcycles. Even in an election year, more people watched the 30th season of “Dancing With the Stars” than the most successful prime-time shows on Fox News, the country’s most-watched cable news network. As the political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan wrote in The New York Times, most Americans — “upward of 80 percent to 85 percent — follow politics casually or not at all.”Smith doesn’t dispute this. But he speculates that even those who aren’t intensely interested in politics are still affected by the ambient climate of hatred, chaos and dysfunction. “What I think is going on is that politics is unavoidable,” he said. “It is essentially a permanent part of the background noise of our lives.”Of course, the last thing a political scientist — or, for that matter, a liberal columnist — would tell you is that you should totally tune that noise out. It is depressing to live in a dying empire whose sclerotic political institutions have largely ceased to function; this is a collective problem without individual solutions. There’s an awful dilemma here. Any way out of the gloom of our current political situation will almost certainly involve even more politics.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). A list of additional resources is available at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More