About 30,000 people kill themselves in the United States every year. An estimated ten to forty times that number try to kill themselves but don’t die—either because they don’t really want to die, or because they don’t know how.
Suicide attempters go through ordeals on top of the ordeals that made them want to die in the first place. When I was researching a long article about suicide in 1982, I heard about a woman who jumped from a high building and hit a parked car several stories below, but didn’t die. Instead she was wheeled, conscious, to the local emergency room. She spent the next year in bed, her still-suicidal mind the only functioning part of her body.
