Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

The recent spate of suicides at Cornell University reminds me of how little we understand suicide--despite how common it is.

As a student at Cornell, back in the day, I remember it as a fabulous place to be if you were feeling good--and a terrible place to be when you were sad. The winters last most of the year. The school is isolated from the rest of civilization. And worst of all, it seemed like you were always walking uphill. I don’t know how that is possible, but it definitely felt that way.

Then there were the gorges. Glorious cuts into the earth, dramatic and, to me anyway, proof of life--not death. When I got stressed out, I used to put on my Walkman (oh yes!) and go running down the slick stone boulders lining the gorge, jumping from one to the next, racing the booming rush of water.

It’s worth noting that Cornell’s suicide rate has not historically been higher than other university rates. But it is also true that way more people kill themselves (everywhere) than most of us realize. For a very thoughtful read on the mystery of suicide--and whether gorges, bridges and other dramatic scenery can in fact tempt people to kill themselves--it’s worth looking back at this 2008 New York Times Magazine story.

“[I]f the impulsive suicide attempter tends to reach for whatever means are easy or quick, is it possible that the availability of means can actually spur the act? In looking at suicide’s close cousin, murder, the answer seems obvious. If a man shoots his wife amid a heated argument, we recognize the crucial role played by the gun’s availability. We don’t automatically think, Well, if the gun hadn’t been there, he surely would have strangled her. When it comes to suicide, however, most of us make no such allowance. The very fact that someone kills himself we regard as proof of intent — and of mental illness; the actual method used, we assume, is of minor importance. But is it?”

In the piece, writer Scott Anderson describes a fascinating study conducted in San Francisco. Researcher Richard Seiden got a police list of the 515 people who had been thwarted while trying to kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge over the course of three decades. Then he investigated what had happened to these poor souls:

“His report, “Where Are They Now?” remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves. Even allowing for suicides that might have been mislabeled as accidents only raised the total to 10 percent.”

Vivian Reyes lives in San Francisco, where she likes to go biking and play with her puppy. She is also an emergency medicine doctor who recently went to Haiti to help with the relief effort. 

Before she left, Dr. Reyes read The Unthinkable. Much to my relief, she found it useful. And she also learned some lessons which are not in the book. Her blog post has some specific realizations about fear, chaos and the small problems created by spontaneous acts of generosity.

We have all heard the statement, “Communication is always the biggest problem during a disaster.” In retrospect, I never truly understood the implications of this statement until now. When I arrived in Haiti, local phone coverage was intermittent, at best.  Even when calls went through, the reception was often so bad that it was more frustrating than helpful. Satellite phones were unreliable and generally unusable.  Surprisingly, my iPhone seemed to send and receive text messages and email without much problem. While this was good for simple communications, texting proved too time-consuming, and time was not a luxury that I had. Coordinating relief operations via any electronic means proved to be difficult, and face-to-face communication became invaluable....[T]he time delay and content limits of text messages made me realize how important it is to be self-sufficient and decisive during the aftermath of a disaster.

I watched all the Chile “looting” footage I could find yesterday. It was hard to know what I was looking at, as it always is when you are watching disasters from afar--and often even when you are right there. I mostly saw people carrying water, diapers, sacks of flour and other necessities. I saw young men playing Robin Hood, throwing paper towels and toilet paper rolls from storefront balconies to older women waiting, arms uplifted, below.

Not to say that these people are wrong--or right. Just to say, I don’t know either way. I do think looting is happening, but it is equally clear that the reporting of the looting is somewhat more righteous than it probably should be.

What is looting? Is it the taking of property after a disaster? If so, then was it looting when some World Trade Center evacuees on 9/11 broke into soda machines and distributed water to people in the stairways? What about when civilians took water trucks in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and drove around neighborhoods distributing clean water? Where is the line?

The one consensus seems to be what I call the “plasma TV test.” If people are taking TVs, then that, we can all agree, is probably looting. Especially if they are fancy TVs! You see this pattern after most big disasters. First comes the catastrophe, then comes TV people talking about the generalized fear of looting--then comes a strange and disconcerting looting montage: footage of people carrying groceries out of stores, hearsay about violence and, finally, reports of stolen plasma TVs.

Here is one of the many plasma-TV stories to come out of Chile. (Notice the photo, which features a disheveled and frightened young man carrying...diapers.)

As I’ve written before, looting reports usually turn out to be exaggerated after most disasters. Looting happens, and it is damaging to the relief effort and the social fabric, but it rarely represents more than a drop in the bucket compared to the damage inflicted by the disaster itself.

As Ilan smartly pointed out in a comment to the previous post, we just don’t know much about disaster looting. What we do know is mostly from the U.S., which may or may not be relevant in this case. The scant research that has been done outside the U.S. suggests that it only happens in a major way when three other pre-existing conditions are met:

1. Dramatic disparity between rich and poor.
2. High levels of petty crime and gang activity.
3. An ineffective and corrupt police force.

We will one day (hopefully) get better information about what happened in the streets after Chile’s earthquake. Until then, my strategy is to listen to all the reports I hear with one question in the back of my mind: “How do you know that?” In other words, did you see it?

For example, when reading this Washington Post story today (which also includes the plasma TV claim. Check!), I had to wonder about this line:

“...the pillaging was carried out largely by poorer Chileans.”

Really? How do you know? Did you do a random sampling of the pillagers and survey them about their income levels? Or are you making that conclusion based on how the 27 looters you saw looked--what they were wearing, how they spoke, etc.? Either way is OK, but I’d love to know. 

I’ll be talking today about the Chilean earthquake and the reports of looting on the BBC’s The World Tonight.

So let me first say that I wouldn’t want to be head of homeland security and emergency management for the city of Washington, DC. It’s an incredibly hard job, and not just because it means protecting a city that is a terrorist’s fantasy land. The thing that makes it hardest of all is the fact that it is home to at least two dozen competing law enforcement agencies, many of which don’t really like each other very much.

In any city, getting police and firefighters (or the FBI and the CIA) to get along before, during and after a disaster is like trying to get through a long, hot family vacation without any fights. It’s almost impossible, and in DC, it’s impossible times ten.

In addition to the city police, known as the Metropolitan Police Department, DC is policed by the Secret Service, the Park Police, the Capitol Police, the National Zoo Police...and on and on...all tripping over each other in what is, by any measure, not a very big city. (A while back, when I tried to get a count of the total number of policing outfits in DC for TIME Magazine, neither the Mayor’s office nor the city police department could tell me the exact number. It wasn’t that the information was secret; it was that no one knew.)

So given this jurisdictional cluster, I was distressed to see this in the Washington Post:

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s nominee to lead the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency was unanimously approved Tuesday by a D.C. Council committee, despite her lack of experience in the field. The nomination still has to be approved by the full council.

Millicent D. Williams, who has a degree in business with a concentration in commercial banking, previously worked as president of the D.C. Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp. and executive director of Serve D.C.....Williams also does not hold a security clearance that would allow her to receive information about suspicious activity and attend meetings of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. She testified at her confirmation hearing Friday that she is in the process of obtaining the clearance and is pursuing a master’s degree in homeland defense and security. She said in an e-mail to The Washington Post that she was pleased to have been approved.

Now, Ms. Williams may turn out to be an outstanding homeland security chief. I wholeheartedly hope she succeeds, in no small part because I live here. And her experience coordinating citizen volunteers will help her. But it is strange that Mayor Fenty doesn’t see this as a post where decades of emergency management experience matters. Because I can promise you that the people she needs to manage--and make get along--do think experience matters.

After Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown was ousted as the head of FEMA, with many critics in Congress and in the Gulf Coast lamenting his lack of relevant experience. In fact, one year later, Congress passed a law requiring the head of FEMA to have experience in emergency management--just as the U.S. solicitor general and the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are required to have relevant experience before taking their jobs.

And yet, the same common sense apparently does not apply in the nation’s capital. I was glad to see that the Post called Eric Holdeman to get a response to this situation. Holdeman is one of the people I trust most on disaster management, partly because he is smart and partly because he has...experience:

Eric Holdeman, a consultant on homeland security based in Washington state, said in an interview that Williams’s résumé is sparse for the District, where security issues are amplified by its status as the nation’s capital. “This is the most demanding of positions there is,” he said. “The issue would be: Is she 360 degrees, all-around proven in actual disaster . . . ? No. If I was the mayor of D.C., I’d do a national search.”

Interestingly, after Congress passed that law requiring FEMA directors to have experience, something shocking happened. Bush reserved the right to ignore that requirement (issuing a controversial “signing statement” to that effect.) So I suppose Bush and Fenty have this in common. Luckily, when Obama chose his own head of FEMA, he did not see things the same way.