gas taps full on, and stuck her head as far as possible into the oven. She was determined. If she couldn’t have used her oven to kill herself, wouldn’t she have just tried something else?
The alternative possibility is that suicide is a behavior coupled to a particular context. Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions. My father read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities to me and my brothers when we were children, and at the very end, when Sydney Carton dies in Charles Darney’s place, my father wept. My father was not a weeper. He was not someone whose emotions bubbled over in every emotionally meaningful moment. He didn’t cry in sad movies. He didn’t cry when his children left for college. Maybe he got stealthily misty-eyed from time to time, but not so anyone other than maybe my mother would notice. In order to cry, he needed his children on the sofa listening, and he needed one of history’s most sentimental novelists. Take away either of those two factors and no one would ever have seen his tears. That’s coupling. If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.
So which is it—displacement or coupling? The modernization of British gas is an almost perfect way to test this question. If suicide follows the path of displacement—if the suicidal are so determined that when you block one method, they will simply try another—then suicide rates should have remained pretty steady over time, fluctuating only with major social events. (Suicides tend to fall in wartime, for example, and rise in times of economic distress.) If suicide is coupled, on the other hand, then it should vary with the availability of particular methods of committing suicide. When a new and easy method such as town gas arrives on the scene, suicides should rise; when that method is taken away, they should fall. The suicide curve should look like a roller coaster.
Take a look.
It’s a roller coaster.
It goes way up when town gas first makes its way into British homes. And it comes plunging down as the changeover to natural gas begins in the late 1960s. In that ten-year window, as town gas was being slowly phased out, thousands of deaths were prevented.
“[Town] gas had unique advantages as a lethal method,” criminologist Ronald Clarke wrote in his classic 1988 essay laying out the first sustained argument in favor of coupling:
It was widely available (in about 80 percent of British homes) and required little preparation or specialist knowledge, making it an easy choice for less mobile people and for those coming under sudden extreme stress. It was painless, did not result in disfigurement, and did not produce a mess (which women in particular will try to avoid).…Deaths by hanging, asphyxiation, or drowning all usually demand more planning, while more courage would be needed with the more violent methods of shooting, cutting, stabbing, crashing one’s car, and jumping off high places or in front of trains or buses.
There is something awfully matter-of-fact about that paragraph, isn’t there? Nowhere in Clarke’s article does he speak empathetically about the suicidal, or dwell on the root causes of their pain. He analyzes the act the way an engineer would look at a mechanical problem. “The whole idea wasn’t very popular at all amongst psychiatrists and social workers,” Clarke remembers:
They thought it was very superficial, that these people were so upset and demoralized that it was sort of insulting to think you could deal with it by simply making it harder to commit suicide. I got quite a lot of pushback here and there from people about that idea.3
This simply isn’t the way we talk about suicide. We act as if the method were irrelevant. When gas was first introduced into British homes in the 1920s, two government commissions were created to consider the new technology’s implications. Neither mentioned the possibility that it might lead to increased suicides. When the official British government report on the gas-modernization program came out in 1970, it stated that one of the positive side effects of the transition to natural gas would be a decline in fatal accidents. It didn’t even mention suicide—even though the number of people who killed themselves deliberately with gas dwarfed the number who died from it accidentally. In 1981, the most comprehensive academic