On average, about 700 Americans kill themselves each week — but in the fine-weather weeks of May and June, the toll rises closer to 800, sometimes higher. Every year, suicide peaks with the tulips and lilacs — increasing roughly 15 percent over the annual average to create one of psychiatry’s most consistent epidemiological patterns. It may seem perverse that the period of spring and early summer, as the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison puts it in her splendid book “Night Falls Fast,” should contain “a capacity for self-murder that winter less often has.” Yet it does.
My article in today’s New York Times looks at the search for answers to this mystery. Read it at Clues in the Cycle of Suicide.
Image: David Dobbs. OK to share with attribution to David Dobbs at htttp:daviddobbs.net
