Speaking of the note, I think I made a tiny discovery which is only mildly interesting, and not worth the effort it took to track down!
Basically, I suspect either BCJD or the news reporting made a (factual) mistake in the suicide note.
Many of the articles contain aphrase like this: “…cites the writings of Emile Durkheim, a philosopher and psychologist. The young man said Durkheim called suicide "an inner direction of homicidal feelings against someone else."
So - I got hung up on this awhile for no good reason. I tracked down Durkheim’s book
On Suicide (1897) and read it. Hmm, nowhere does he say anything like the above quote attributed to him. In fact, because Durkheim is known as the father of
sociology, not psychology, his insight and ideas about suicide came at it from the view that suicide is a result of social/societal stressors, not an individual’s psychological state.
So, who DID say something like ‘suicide is a homicidal impulse directed at oneself”?
Turns out to be Karl Menninger, in his paper “Psychoanalytic aspects of suicide” (1933), expanded upon in his 1938 book
Man Against Himself; eg:
…it is not diffIcult to discover in the act of suicide the existence of various elements. First of all, it is a murder. In the German language, it is, literally , the murder of the self (Selbstmord).
…suicide is also a murder by the self. It is a death in which are combined in one person the murderer and the murdered.
Discovering Menninger had been the source, rather than Durkheim, led me to wonder whether BCJD had been a patient at the Menninger Clinic, based in Topeka, Kansas, until the 1980s (it then moved to Houston). Their records are available at the
Kansas Historical Society. (Which also seems to indicate they have patient records, but of course the average WSer likely won’t be able to access those.)
So that’s the mildly interesting thing! I totally get that it doesn’t move the needle on this case at all.
As an aside, both Durkheim and Menninger’s books are more than mildly interesting (especially Menninger’s)! They have very different approaches and perspectives in their theories of suicide, so it was informative to read both.
