The Attempters: The Science and Struggle of Suicidality
The project:
Suicide and suicidal ideation is a subject we might be tempted to turn away from. In The Attempters, however, Jason Cherkis’s deep reporting on the history of suicide prevention and treatment of patients, alongside his close portrait of one deeply moving therapist-patient relationship, show that this difficult corner of mental illness is undeniably a part of the human experience. A work of rigorous, committed research and reporting, The Attempters provides an intimate look at therapists and their clients, as well as the researchers working to understand the suicidal impulse and how to stop it.
From The Attempters:
The therapist turned pages back in time until she came across an entry for January 4, 2016—just before Mary had quit therapy. In it, Mary had listed things she had done that she felt ashamed of:
Being drunk at inappropriate times
Lying, stealing pills
Mixing pills/misusing prescript.
Screaming & having melt downs, making my parents feel like shit
Not apologizing, explaining misunderstanding of behavior
Looking for guns while family went to mass
Seriously contemplating opening car door on highway
Not even making an effort to control myself
One of these things immediately jumped out at Whiteside. “I think you told me some of these,” Whiteside said matter-of-factly. “But I don’t remember the ‘Looking for guns while family went to Mass.’”
Mary explained that she had searched the house for her father’s guns when she was at her parents’ home last Christmas. When Whiteside asked if she had gone any further when she returned to Seattle—considered buying a gun or gone to a store—Mary admitted that she had.
“How far did you get?” Whiteside asked.
“Why?” Mary asked.
“Cause I want to understand better,” Whiteside said, her voice calm and measured, close to a whisper.
Whiteside had learned to live with a constant noise in her head: the worry that at any time, the pain would get too much for one of her clients and they would kill themselves on her watch. A steady basic drone, this noise had outlasted apartments, cars, and boyfriends. And in moments like these, that noise got louder. She knew Mary would be going home for Christmas soon, where she might be alone again and this time her search for her father’s gun would be successful. Mary confided to her that she knew the combination to her dad’s gun safe and told her what it was. She was set to leave for Chicago in a few days. Whiteside’s tone turned unusually urgent.
“Please don’t be around anything that you could impulsively use to kill yourself,” Whiteside said. She asked Mary to tell her family that she needed barriers between herself and the guns in the house.
“I mean if I’m being 100 percent honest there’s no way I’m saying any of that to my family,” Mary said. But she assured Whiteside that she couldn’t imagine killing herself at her parents’ house.
“I can’t imagine you doing that either,” Whiteside said. “Does that mean you are willing not to even look for the guns?”
“Yeah,” Mary said.
“But you have to look at me when you say that,” Whiteside said gently. She needed Mary to make eye contact, to check if Mary was being truthful but also to make this moment memorable, so that it would stick with Mary during her trip home.
“Yeah,” Mary said, looking at Whiteside.
“Really?” Whiteside said, not convinced. “Like we have a real relationship.”
“Yeah,” Mary said, agreeing, finally.
Whiteside couldn’t be sure what Mary would do when she went home for Christmas. She didn’t think Mary would kill herself, but there was no way to be sure. She could still lose her. It was dark out and their time was up.
The grant jury: With bracing emotional clarity, intellectual depth, and stylistic precision, Jason Cherkis's The Attempters explores a difficult subject which destroys families, corrodes society, and often defies treatment. He moves beyond personal and clinical perspectives to examine the broader ecosystem surrounding suicide, making this a foundational work, especially necessary as the scale of this problem grows apace. The book is a sensitive, humane, and propulsive exploration of suicide, which highlights both its urgency and complexity.
Jason Cherkis is an investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C. He has reported extensively on crime, mental health, and poverty for decades. He began his career in the late '90s as a staff writer at the Washington City Paper under David Carr, where he covered police brutality. In 2011, he became a full-time reporter for Huffington Post, covering national issues and managing the staff’s public records requests. His work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among others.