Daily Score Blog

This isn't the sort of thing I blog about regularly, but it strikes me that this New York Times article on suicide, of all things, has an important lesson about how our physical environments can shape our behavior.

According to the article, large numbers of "impulse" suicide attempts -- the ones that are undertaken with little premeditation -- could be prevented simply by making the most common means of taking one's life a little less convenient. Consider Great Britain, where replacing deadly "coal gas" with relatively non-toxic natural gas in home ovens led to a dramatic decline in the national suicide rate:

[I]n its unburned form, [coal gas] released very high levels of carbon monoxide, and an open valve or a leak in a closed space could induce asphyxiation in a matter of minutes. This extreme toxicity also made it a preferred method of suicide. “Sticking one’s head in the oven” became so common in Britain that by the late 1950s it accounted for some 2,500 suicides a year, almost half the nation’s total.

Those numbers began dropping over the next decade as the British government embarked on a program to phase out coal gas in favor of the much cleaner natural gas. By the early 1970s, the amount of carbon monoxide running through domestic gas lines had been reduced to nearly zero. During those same years, Britain’s national suicide rate dropped by nearly a third, and it has remained close to that reduced level ever since.

In short, removing an instrument of self-harm from people's homes made fleeting self-destructive impulses far less deadly.  Venturing a guess, it may even have made such impulses less common:  the constant presence of the nation's #1 instrument of suicide -- in the kitchen, no less -- surely triggered self-destructive thoughts among people in the middle of a temporary bout of depression or anxiety.

The lesson here is some matters that seem intensely private -- and exclusively in the realm of personal psychology -- more properly belong in the domain of public health.  Preventing suicide attempts that result from temporary despair may be less a matter of identifying and dealing with the underlying emotional issues, and more a matter of making the actual mechanics a pain in the ass.

At risk of reading too much into one article, I think there's a more general point to be made here:  our physical environment -- the objects we surround ourselves with, and the places we make for ourselves -- can have a potent influence both on what we do, and on how we think.