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  The police, on the other hand, suggested on the basis of their own casing that the woman’s decision to seek out the lion enclosure was somehow tied to her religious ideas. Christians in ancient Rome, after all, as wages for their belief, had been thrown to the lions, and Daniel, in the Old Testament, had come back triumphant and whole from his test of faith in the lion’s den. Based on what later came to be known about the dead woman’s history, it was as reasonable a guess as most. Her mind, as further inquiry would show, was not entirely her own. She shared it with voices and visions and other sundry by-products of madness.

  Then the king commanded, and they brought Daniel, and cast him into the den of lions. Now the king spake and said unto Daniel, Thy God whom thou servest continually, he will deliver thee.

  And a stone was brought, and laid upon the mouth of the den; and the king sealed it with his own signet, and with the signet of his lords.

  —DANIEL, 6:16–17

  The clues the woman left behind were fragmentary. Near her body, investigators found a Sony Walkman that contained a cassette of Christian singer Amy Grant’s “House of Love.” A barrette from her hair lay on the ground not far from where the lions had killed her. Tucked into her shoes was a money order, and a business letter was stuffed into a pocket. No suicide note was found and no fingerprints remained.

  An Arkansas Transit Authority bus pass identified the dead woman as Margaret Davis King, a transient from Little Rock. Three days before her death she had checked into a cheap hotel room in northwest Washington, where police later discovered a single suitcase and scattered religious writings. Little emerged about the last days of her life other than a quixotic late-afternoon visit she had made to the U.S. District Court the day before she died. There, according to the clerk who assisted her, King said she wanted to file a lawsuit to get her daughter back.

  It was soon clear to the clerk that King was mentally disturbed; she claimed to be the sister of Jesus Christ and declared that she and Jesus had grown up together in the same household with President Clinton. It was the president’s intervention she now sought in her child custody case. King was, the clerk reported, “clean, attractive, and well-spoken”; and although she seemed upset, she was upset in a “controlled way.” In fact, the clerk said, she appeared “very calm.” She quoted the Scriptures as she petitioned and clasped a packet of papers to her chest.

  She left the District Court building about 5 P.M., and no one knows what she did or where she went until she entered the zoo and made her way to the lion and tiger exhibit. She may have hesitated, but at some point she was certain enough of her decision to climb over a three-and-a-half-foot barrier, walk across a buffer zone of dirt, scramble down a nine-foot wall, and swim the moat to the grassy home grounds of the lions. Who was she? And why?

  Margaret Davis King, the medical examiner and journalists would discover, was twice married and the mother of three young children. She was also an honorably discharged veteran of the U.S. Navy, homeless, and a paranoid schizophrenic. Over the years she had been confined to psychiatric hospitals in California, Georgia, and Arkansas. She claimed to be not only the sister of Jesus Christ but, on occasion, Jesus himself. As evidence of the latter, she would point out what she thought to be nail holes in her hand from the Crucifixion. She said she received messages directly from God and placed telephone calls to people in cities across the country, commanding them to leave their homes and jobs and follow her. God, she assured them, would provide their transportation.

  She had been arrested for making threats and for aggravated assault. At one point, according to the sheriff’s office in Arkansas, she swung a broomstick at a deputy and told another officer to shoot her. She was hospitalized, released, rehospitalized, and released yet again. She was prescribed medication that she took for a while and then stopped. She had no governance over her thoughts, there was no tolerable flow to her mood or energy. Gradually, the pattern of her life became indistinguishable from that of tens of thousands of others with schizophrenia; she became part of the urban netherlands, the homeless mentally ill.

  The lions had the mastery of them,

  And brake all their bones in pieces.

  —DANIEL, 6:24

  We have filled these netherlands past any pretense of civilization; we have swollen their ranks with the psychotic and the incapacitated, taken the hopeless and made them more so, and then we have disregarded what they need to survive. We have released the severely mentally ill onto our streets, and they have come to make up a third to a half of our country’s homeless. They disturb the well who share their streets and perplex city managers. They make us uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that we protect or house, insure or tend or heal them.

  They die on the streets, in parking lots, in shelters, or in vacant buildings, in the park or on the sidewalks. They die younger than the rest of us, and they die of causes tied to neglect: tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B, alcoholism and drug abuse, and injuries. Nearly 10 percent kill themselves.

  The decision to release psychiatric patients onto the streets was not a malevolent one; it was just thoughtless and ill considered. The 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Act, signed into law by President Kennedy, was meant to counter the warehousing of the severely mentally ill in large institutions. It was hoped that the newly available antipsychotic and antidepressant medications would allow patients to return to their communities, and it was assumed, too optimistically, that those communities would be able to—and want to—take care of these patients. Society sent itself on a fool’s errand.

  Richard Wyatt, chief of neuropsychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health, along with other physicians and scientists, has been a vehement critic of the national execution of this consequential social policy, which hadn’t the scientific basis to back it up. In a 1986 editorial in the journal Science, Wyatt wrote:

  America’s homeless crisis began in 1963 when deinstitutionalization became law.… Hundreds of thousands of disabled patients with schizophrenia, affective [mood] disorders, alcoholism, and severe personality disorders were released from large institutions to the streets. Once deinstitutionalized, those individuals created their own communities of isolation, alienation, hopelessness, and despair. By law, the former residents of structured institutions became the homeless. This situation occurred because a social welfare movement, based on virtually no scientifically gathered data, became public policy. Remarkably, only one controlled pilot study performed in England was available at the time the law was passed. The country undertook a noble, but unfeasible, and ultimately unjustifiable project because the essential research had not been done.

  No one who treats schizophrenia or the homeless mentally ill would claim to have the solution to such knotted and bewildering problems. Certainly, no one could say why Margaret Davis King, homeless and schizophrenic, delusional, and unlikely to recover custody of her children, would choose to end her life as or when she did. Public interest in her death soon paled; quips about lions and suicide made their way to Washington dinner parties. The capital city moved on.

  King was unknown, little tolled, and less understood. Why did she die? Was she despairing and beyond hope or exultantly psychotic and beyond fear? Why did she choose such an awful way? We do not know these things; we do not know her. She left only the slightest trail of human intimation. But for the public recollection of zoo lions in a national park, there would have been an even slighter trace, a fleeting chalk-out of just one of the million suicides in the world that year.

  III

  Pangs of Nature, Taints of Blood

  —THE BIOLOGY OF SUICIDE—

  O, yet we trust that somehow good

  Will be the final goal of ill,

  To pangs of nature, sins of will,

  Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  Generation after generation of the Tennyson family was afflicted with debilitating melancholia, uncontrollable fits of rage, and mani
c-depression. Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), referred to the “black blood” of the Tennysons, and the themes of suicide, suicidal despair, and inherited madness are at the heart of some of his most powerful poetry.

  CHAPTER 6

  A Plunge into Deep Waters

  —GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES—

  It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy.

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms.… These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters.… One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF

  PRECISELY ONE year before General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Professor John Ordronaux delivered a major lecture to the students of Columbia College in New York. Human conduct, he told them, is not always the reflection of human reason. Original instincts, “however much they may be modified by intellectual culture, or repressed by circumstances forbidding their expression, are rarely, if ever, entirely eradicated.” Nature, he said, quoting Francis Bacon, “is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.”

  Ordronaux, although deeply affected, as were all his colleagues and fellow citizens, by the Civil War, was not addressing it in his lecture. He was, rather, speaking about the irrational and violent roots of an internal war, forces that seemed to pass from one generation to the next. He was addressing at length and with some vehemence the arguments for the inheritance of suicide. Like many other midnineteenth-century doctors who treated mental illness, he was impressed by the predisposing temperaments underlying both insanity and suicide:

  Observations show that the question of temperament enters quite extensively into the problem of suicide. While the sanguine and plethoric are predisposed to diseases of accelerated circulation, like mania, and may, and often do commit acts of sudden frenzy, either against others, or themselves, the nervous, bilious, and lymphatic temperaments are those in whom the predisposition to suicide most usually assumes the chronic and inveterate form. In them the morbid tendency seems easily awakened and of difficult eradication; and when slumbering as a predisposition, hereditarily transmitted, requires but a slight exciting cause to develop itself into the full-blown malady. So potent in fact is the influence of hereditary transmission in the production of suicide, that not less than one-sixth of all recorded cases have been directly traced to this source.

  It is unclear where the “one-sixth” estimate came from as there were no reliable figures then and only slightly better ones now. But certainly it had long been believed—indeed, for more than two thousand years—that madness and suicide run in families. And twenty-five years earlier, in 1840, British physician Forbes Winslow had stated unequivocally, “With reference to suicide, there is no fact that has been more clearly established than that of its hereditary character. Of all diseases to which the various organs are subject, there is none more generally transmitted from one generation to another than affections of the brain. It is not necessary that the disposition to suicide should manifest itself in every generation; it often passes over one, and appears in the next, like insanity unattended with this propensity.”

  Benjamin Rush, professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, was likewise impressed with the hereditary aspects of suicide and included in his widely published and influential 1812 textbook, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, a letter he had received from a colleague recounting a case of suicide in identical twin brothers:

  Captains C. L. and J. L. were twin brothers, and so great was the similarity in their countenances and appearance, that it was extremely difficult for strangers to know them apart. Even their friends were often deceived by them. Their habits and manners were likewise similar. Many ludicrous stories are told of people mistaking one for the other.

  They both entered the American revolutionary army at the same time. Both held similar commissions, and both served with honour during the war. They were cheerful, sociable, and in every respect gentlemen. They were happy in their families, having amiable wives and children, and they were both independent in their property. Some time after the close of the war, captain J. removed to the state of Vermont, while captain C. remained in Greenfield [Massachusetts], in the vicinity of Deerfield, and 200 miles from his brother. Within the course of three years, they have both been subject to turns of partial derangement, but by no means rising into mania, nor sinking into melancholy. They appeared to be hurried and confused in their manners, but were constantly able to attend to their business. About two years ago, captain J. on his return from the general assembly of Vermont, of which he was a member, was found in his chamber, early in the morning, with his throat cut, by his own hand, from ear to ear, shortly after which he expired. He had been melancholy a few days previous to this fatal catastrophe, and had complained of indisposition the evening previous to the event.

  About ten days ago, captain C. of Greenfield, discovered signs of melancholy, and expressed a fear that he should destroy himself. Early in the morning of June fifth he got up, and proposed to his wife to take a ride with him. He shaved himself as usual, wiped his razor, and stepped into an adjoining room, as his wife supposed, to put it up. Shortly after she heard a noise like water or blood running upon the floor. She hurried into the room, but was too late to save him. He had cut his throat with his razor, and soon afterwards expired.

  The mother of these two gentlemen, an aged lady, is now in a state of derangement, and their two sisters, the only survivors of their family, have been subject, for several years, to the same complaint.

  The assumed familial nature of suicide continued as a thread throughout much of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century suicide literature. In June 1906, Charles Pilgrim, the president of the New York Commission on Lunacy, read a paper to the American Medico-Psychological Association in Boston. In it he declared, “There is nothing more firmly established than the fact of the transmission of the suicidal tendency. This tendency is not only very apt to reappear in the offspring but it is not unusual for it to appear at the same age that it appeared in the parent, and often the same means are sought to accomplish the end.” He went another disturbing step: “Therefore, it seems reasonable to expect the accomplishment of considerable good by the efforts of our own profession to prevent marriage where any hereditary taint exists.”

  Several pedigrees of families with heavy burdens of suicide appeared in the medical literature at about the same time as Pilgrim’s remarks. Two British physicians published four generations of a pedigree of a seafaring family that was saturated with suicide and insanity: of sixty-five family members, six committed suicide, four threatened it, eight were “markedly peculiar in mental condition,” and six were “idiotic or insane.” The language of the doctors leaves no doubt about their views: “The evil results in the case of Family C2 are specially apparent, a deeply affected father having mated with an habitual drunkard.… The rapid method of suicide has accounted for two of the cousins, the asylum will protect Family C2 from further disasters, the antisocial tendencies of Family C3 will diminish the chances of procreation, and Family C5 has begun badly, and will no doubt leave its mark in asylum records.”

  In 1901, the Medical Record noted an even more alarming concentration of suicides in one family:

  A man named Edgar Jay Briggs, who hanged himself on his farm, near Danbury, Connecticut, a few days ago, was almost the last surviving member of a family which has practically been wiped out of existence by suicide. The history of self-destruction in this family extends over a period of more than fifty years, and in that time, so it is stated, at least twenty-one of the descendants and collaterals of the original Briggs suicide have taken their own lives. Among these were the great-grandfather, grandfather, father, brother, and two sisters of the one just dead.

  More r
ecently, in Iraq, five suicides—four by self-immolation and one by gunshot—were reported in the two sisters, brother, and two nephews of a woman who had herself attempted suicide by pouring kerosene over her body and lighting a match.

  Many other “suicide families” have been cited in the medical literature, but, while compelling, they by no means establish a genetic basis for suicide. The odd or striking case history is more likely to be noticed and written up for scientific publication, and other factors—such as family exposure to suicide or learning from another family member’s behavior that suicide is a tenable, even desirable, way of handling the problems of life or illness—may be important as well. Ferreting out a biological predisposition to suicide from psychological influences is difficult. And even assuming that it can be shown that suicide is hereditable, or partially so, new questions immediately arise: What exactly is being genetically transmitted from one generation to the next? Are there specific genes that make an individual more likely to commit suicide? Or is an increased tendency to commit suicide due only to the passing on of the genetic predispositions to the psychiatric conditions most intimately linked to suicide—depression, manic-depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism—all of which, especially the mood disorders, we know to have a strong genetic basis? Are there specific genes associated with certain aspects of temperament—impulsivity, aggression, and violence—that we know also to be predictive of suicide? A particularly lethal combination of genetic liabilities may well result from an underlying volatile temperament mixed with, or triggered by, mania, psychosis, or alcoholism.