One Suicide Too Many

CYNTHIA DOYON meant business the morning of Aug. 5. She was cleaning out her desk at KUOW-FM and moving on after 24 years at the NPR station. The 48-year-old with a smooth, husky voice had been working part time on weekends as the host of The Swing Years and Beyond. For photographs, she dressed like a 1940s throwback?checked jackets and skirts, permed blond hair carefully parted to the side. Around the University of Washington campus, however, she was most commonly seen walking to the library wearing khakis and a windbreaker, Schlitz beer cap on her head, books in her arms.

Many thousands in the Seattle area spent Saturday nights with Doyon. They had a relationship. She was the unseen, friendly, soothing guide taking listeners back to a time when the world didn't seem so rough, when Glenn Miller ruled the airwaves and people dressed up for a walk to the corner store, when radio had an allure as the dominant mass medium. But when she signed off the previous Sunday, Doyon didn't mention her pending departure to her loyal audience. Nor, on this Tuesday morning, did she visit the announcer's booth to say goodbye to Deborah Brandt, who was hosting the local segments of Morning Edition.

Then again, Doyon was shy, a loner living a largely reclusive life that even colleagues of two decades knew little about. She almost never went to parties. She didn't go to staff meetings at the radio station. Colleagues couldn't say what neighborhood she lived in, or if she had a love interest.

She set her card key on the desk. It was a little after 6 a.m.

Leaving her car parked near the station on University Way Northeast, Doyon headed south, walking along the fringe of the UW campus. She had spent much of her adult life around the university since entering as a freshman in 1973. Doyon crossed Northeast Pacific Avenue and followed Northeast 15th Avenue, where it curves into the university's massive medical school complex. Just to the south is a collection of concrete buildings comprising the university's oceanography department. She passed them and walked onto a dock alongside the Lake Washington Ship Canal.

THERE SHE stood, 5 feet 4 inches, maybe 120 pounds. Across the chilly slip of water, on the other side of Portage Bay, are the houseboats and houses of the Montlake neighborhood. There's a whoosh of traffic on Highway 520. Ducks glide on black water. Birds sing from shore.

This is where Cynthia Doyon came to kill herself, and that's what she did next. She was one of 207 who did so in King County last year. Like all the others, she was one too many.

She lived a troubled life. She ended it in a troubling way. I know the pathology. I know the impulse. I know the frantic searching for an end to psychological pain. It does not end its course, or yours, in the manner of heart disease or cancer. Instead, it forces you to a do-it-yourself end.

We largely accept suicide as the ultimate act of the mentally ill. Bag and tag the corpse and leave it at that. It is, after all, one of the worst social taboos, the act you don't want playing out in your family or circle of friends. How can we boldly discuss, much less stop, this nasty business that claims tens of thousands of lives a year, given a backdrop of societal paranoia and blindness?

One answer: We have to get over ourselves. If we do, we can save thousands of creative, productive people like Cynthia Doyon.

Each year, 30,000 Americans kill themselves. Seventy-five percent of them are men. They shoot bullets into their brains, hang themselves, and jump off bridges and buildings. This year, America will spend an estimated $21 billion on pharmaceuticals designed to control depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. We will spend another $1.5 billion on mental-illness research funded by the National Institutes of Health. Yet despite all the advances since 1958 in neuroscience, genetics, clinical treatment, medications, and telephone help lines, the rate of suicide in this nation is essentially unchanged at about 11 per year per 100,000 people, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. (Health care statistics are measured per 100,000 population to make year-to-year and location-to-location comparisons easier.)

Suicide is a full-blown public-health problem, but if public spending is any indication, society has responded with a yawn, if not outright contempt. For every medical problem, there is a fix worth investing in. It's a core American value. We've rightly thrown untold billions at investigating, preventing, and treating heart disease and strokes, for example. The effort has paid impressive dividends. Since 1958, the death rates of heart disease and strokes have fallen by 50 percent.

But suicide, and mental illness generally, are problems we virtually ignore. The federal government spends twice as much on AIDS research as it does on all mental-health research. Almost always directly linked to mental illness, suicide claimed twice as many victims in 2001 as AIDS or homicide did.

So why doesn't mental-health research merit a level of funding equitable to AIDS research? Suicide claims far too many victims and screws up too many families to be ignored. It doesn't care what class or religion you belong to. The 21-year-old son of Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., killed himself last September. The next month, singer-songwriter Elliott Smith (no relation) apparently did, too, although authorities in Los Angeles aren't so sure now that it wasn't murder. I have yet to hear Sen. Smith deliver a speech from the floor of the U.S. Senate on the problem of suicide. I have yet to see any of the hollowness that accompanied Elliott Smith's death?admit it, you felt it?turned to good end. I have yet to hear the Department of Defense speak openly about suicides among troops in Iraq, at least 20 by last count.

Cynthia Doyon in 1973 as a senior at Lincoln High School, where she was a member of the honor society.