there’s something we’re forgetting—the third of the mistakes we make with strangers.
3.
In the years after the First World War, many British homes began to use what was called “town gas” to power their stoves and water heaters. It was manufactured from coal and was a mixture of a variety of different compounds: hydrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and, most important, the odorless and deadly carbon monoxide. That last fact gave virtually everyone a simple means of committing suicide right inside their home. “The victims in the great majority of cases are found with their heads covered with coats or blankets, and with the tube from a gas tap brought under the edge of the covering article,” a physician wrote in 1927, in one of the first accounts of the lethal properties of town gas:
In several instances persons have been found sitting in a chair with the gas tube close to or in the mouth, and still held in position by the hand; or they have been found lying on the floor with the head in a gas oven. In one case a woman was found with a mask which she had made out of a tea cozy tied over her face, the gas tube having been introduced through a hole in the top of the cozy.
In 1962, the year before Sylvia Plath took her own life, 5,588 people in England and Wales committed suicide. Of those, 2,469—44.2 percent—did so as Sylvia Plath did. Carbon-monoxide poisoning was by then the leading cause of lethal self-harm in the United Kingdom. Nothing else—not overdosing on pills or jumping off a bridge—came close.
But in that same period, the 1960s, the British gas industry underwent a transformation. Town gas was increasingly expensive—and dirty. Large reserves of natural gas were discovered in the North Sea, and the decision was made to convert the country from town gas to natural gas. The scale of the project was immense. Natural gas had markedly different chemical properties than town gas: it required twice as much oxygen to burn cleanly, the flame moved far more slowly, and the pressure of the gas needed to be greater. Those facts, in combination, meant the size and shape of the gas ports and burners on the stoves inside virtually every English household were now obsolete. Every gas appliance in England had to be upgraded or replaced: meters, cookers, water heaters, refrigerators, portable heaters, boilers, washing machines, solid-fuel grates, and on and on. New refineries had to be built, new gas mains constructed. One official at the time, without exaggeration, called it “the greatest peacetime operation in this nation’s history.”
The long process began in 1965 with a pilot project on a tiny island thirty miles from London, with 7,850 gas customers. Yorkshire and Staffordshire were next. Then Birmingham—and slowly every apartment, house, office, and factory in the country was converted, one by one. It took a decade. By the fall of 1977, the process was finally complete. Town gas—hydrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide—was replaced with natural gas: methane, ethane, propane, small amounts of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, and no carbon monoxide at all. After 1977, if you stuck your head in an oven and turned on the gas, the worst that could happen to you was a mild headache and a crick in your neck.
Take a look at how the number of gas suicides changed as town gas was slowly phased out over the 1960s and 1970s.
So here is the question: once the number-one form of suicide in England became a physiological impossibility, did the people who wanted to kill themselves switch to other methods? Or did the people who would have put their heads in ovens now not commit suicide at all?
The assumption that people would simply switch to another method is called displacement. Displacement assumes that when people think of doing something as serious as committing suicide, they are very hard to stop. Blocking one option isn’t going to make much of a difference. Sylvia Plath, for example, had a long history of emotional instability. She was treated with electroshock therapy for depression while still in college. She made her first suicide attempt in 1953. She spent six months in psychiatric care at McLean Hospital outside Boston. A few years later, she deliberately drove her car into a river—then, in typical fashion, wrote a poem about it:
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
She meticulously blocked every gap in the doorway, turned the