The suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain have saddened and stunned the world, and left many people asking, “Why?” What would drive these incredibly successful, seemingly happy, publicly-adored people to end their own lives? What did we miss? And could you or someone you know be struggling silently in the same way? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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| So, a very close friend of ours. | |
| He was married to a friend and actually went to a track meet just because our kids were friends. | |
| And we spent a couple hours talking together. | |
| And then two days later, he killed himself. | |
| And I always wondered, what happened? | |
| How could I not have picked up any subtlety? | |
| It wasn't like this guy was a stranger or once in a while acquaintance. | |
| I know him really, really well. | |
| And yet I missed it. | |
| Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. | |
| The suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain have saddened and stunned the world. | |
| And they've left a lot of people asking, why? | |
| Why? | |
| What would drive these incredibly successful, seemingly happy, publicly adored people to end their own lives? | |
| What do we miss? | |
| And could you or someone that you know be struggling silently in the same way? | |
| There are the questions that I want to answer today, along with the help of renowned psychiatrist and director of the Gold Center for Mind, Health, and Wellness, Dr. Jody Gold. | |
| So these were two people, Jody, who had it all. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You just couldn't imagine committing suicide at that point in your life. | |
| Young kids, on the surface, success. | |
| I mean, Borgaine, my goodness, maybe the biggest travel show ever. | |
| He's shooting the show. | |
| It's not like he was on hiatus where he maybe got lonely with people that he liked, who liked him. | |
| And Kate, similar situation, makes sense of this for us. | |
| And I'm going to ask later on some personal questions because we've had friends, Lisa and I, who we've lost to suicide and you sort of kick yourself for not realizing there was a problem. | |
| But I just want to tease everyone to the first issue is how do the successful people commit suicide? | |
| What do you see people who aren't in a good spot in their lives? | |
| So I think that's what's so striking about these two celebrity suicides is that they appear to be so famous and so successful. | |
| And I think that the truth is, is that success and money does not protect you from depression and suicide. | |
| And I think this is a really strong reminder, you know, sort of back to back. | |
| Clearly, there's no question these people were successful. | |
| But they were clearly also suffering with their own demons and had histories of depression and anxiety. | |
| And the fact that they were successful and wealthy and it appeared in the media that they were successful doesn't mean that they weren't suffering. | |
| And I think it is a reminder. | |
| I think it's why we're talking about it so much because they don't fit the profile of who we think commits suicide. | |
| Can it be just like a... | |
| Is tomorrow you're not feeling happy and you're totally depressed and you commit suicide? | |
| Or is it usually something that's a long period of time? | |
| Do you have to be depressed for months or at least weeks before that? | |
| Or can you just wake up in the morning and say, ugh, that's a good question. | |
| Good question. | |
| So the truth is that only two-thirds of people that kill themselves are actually diagnosed with depression and anxiety. | |
| So I would say for the people that are depressed and anxious, they don't just wake up and decide to kill themselves. | |
| This is something that's been going on and on. | |
| But there's another third of people that kill themselves that don't actually officially carry often any diagnoses. | |
| And sometimes that can be impulsive. | |
| Usually when you go back, there is some pattern of either loss, tragedy, illness, divorce, something that triggered it, but then it can be impulsive. | |
| Especially the suicides that happen by guns are often impulsive because they get upset and then they actually can kill themselves with a gun. | |
| So there's a variability. | |
| The truth is that there usually are warning signs. | |
| We are really bad in the research world and in the psychiatry world to be able to predict. | |
| The truth is we don't do a good job at predicting who's going to do it. | |
| Having said that, you know, hindsight is 20-20. | |
| When we look back, there's almost always warning signs. | |
| Just as you brought up guns, the countries that have tight gun laws have lower suicide rates? | |
| Significantly lower suicide rates. | |
| What strikes me is that just having a gun in your home, no diagnosis of mental illness, just having a gun in your home increases the risk of suicide for everyone in your family. | |
| People that have guns in their home do not have an increased risk of mental illness at all, but they do have an increased risk of suicide by guns. | |
| People kill themselves with guns more often than all the other ways combined. | |
| Oh my goodness. | |
| Yes, it's not the most common way people attempt suicide, but it is, you know, the most fatal way. | |
| So one way we could actually save lives is sort of to keep the guns away. | |
| If you have someone at home that you are worried about, they don't have to be clinically depressed. | |
| They could have just lost their job, had a diagnosis of something, gotten out of a relationship. | |
| If you're worried about them, you want to keep the guns, if they're in your home, locked up, or maybe in someone else's home. | |
| Because the feelings of suicidal ideation pass. | |
| That's what's so upsetting here, is that the idea to commit suicide isn't something that's chronic, meaning that it's not something that continues. | |
| If you can hold out and get help, it will pass. | |
| But then it usually comes back. | |
| Sometimes it comes back, but at that point, we have an opportunity to have a real intervention. | |
| If you can just hold on, if you're thinking about killing yourselves or hurting yourselves, if you can just not do it, and reach out to a hotline, but also reach out to friends and family, whatever connections you have, that feeling will pass. | |
| I've often heard it say that it's a long-term solution to a short-term problem. | |
| Yes. | |
| Which is a tragically truthful statement, it seems, from what you're saying. | |
| Yeah, no, it is. | |
| Because the truth is, is that it is a long-term solution, but if we can just get them not... | |
| Like, if you're thinking about killing yourself, I promise you, right now, anyone out there, I promise you that in an hour, a day, or a week, it will go away. | |
| The problem is, is that when you're feeling depressed and suicidal, you have distorted thinking. | |
| You have this idea that you're a burden. | |
| You have this idea that the world is better off without you. | |
| And so that's what's so insidious, specifically about depression, right? | |
| Is that when you're depressed, you feel hopeless, and you feel that you're a burden. | |
| It's not real. | |
| You're always better off not killing yourself in terms of being a burden. | |
| But when you're depressed, that's the way you feel. | |
| Do these suicides and talking about them increase the incidence of suicides? | |
| Thank you for bringing that up, because this is one of my big shticks, is that people are worried in the media that if we talk... | |
| It is true that suicides come in clusters. | |
| I mean, we see this with Bourdain and Spade. | |
| It is also true that when we talk about these celebrity suicides, these suicide hotlines get an uptick in calls. | |
| All of that is true. | |
| The flip side to that is, if we don't talk about suicide, then we're further stigmatizing it. | |
| So the truth is, it's about the way we talk about it, and it's about being thoughtful. | |
| We have to talk about it, because we have to understand it so that we can prevent it. | |
| I mean, it's one of the top ten leading causes of death in our country, and it's completely, or at least 98, 99% of the time, preventable. | |
| We're only just scratching the surface here. | |
| We've got a lot more to discuss, so stay with us. | |
| So we're going to share a story of a very close friend of ours. | |
| Actually, I won't give more detail just to protect him. | |
| But we've known him most of our lives. | |
| He lived with us for a long time. | |
| He was married to a friend and actually went to a track meet just because our kids were friends. | |
| And we spent a couple hours talking together. | |
| And then two days later, he killed himself. | |
| And I always wondered... | |
| What happened? | |
| How could I not have picked up any subtlety? | |
| It wasn't like this guy was a stranger or once in a while acquaintance. | |
| I know him really, really well. | |
| And yet I missed it. | |
| And I hear relatives say this frequently. | |
| I mean, my son killed himself. | |
| I had no idea. | |
| Sometimes parents will say, you know, there were problems lifelong. | |
| You had this issue, that issue. | |
| I get all that. | |
| I'm talking about the ones that sure shock everybody. | |
| So what are the signs you look for? | |
| And how do you do an intervention and walk us through that? | |
| I'm so sorry for your loss. | |
| It's really upsetting every time you lose a friend or a loved one. | |
| And I think that's important if you're out there thinking about hurting yourself or killing yourself. | |
| It really does have an impact on everybody and you will be missed. | |
| So identifying, as I was saying before, it is very hard to predict who's going to hurt themselves or kill themselves. | |
| Some of the obvious known risk factors, which I don't think were the case with your friend, are histories of depression, history of suicide, family history of suicide. | |
| That stuff I think we all kind of know. | |
| Substance abuse, things like that. | |
| Those really increase the risk. | |
| I think what you're talking about is someone who seemed like they were quite functional and well-related and happy and then all of a sudden they're gone. | |
| My interpretation, just examining it, is he was so confident that he was doing the right thing that there was no point. | |
| There was no anxiety over it. | |
| By the way, when you're going to kill yourself, there's probably not a lot of doubt in your mind, because that's not a subtle thing to do. | |
| So you must be 100% sure you're doing the right thing. | |
| So much so that anyone who tries to tell you that the world's not so bad, or that it wouldn't be better off without you, you're probably going to ignore it because you know better. | |
| Otherwise, why would you be so certain? | |
| Well, I think there's two different groups of people that attempt to kill themselves, right? | |
| There is a huge group. | |
| For every suicide that results in death, there's 25 suicide attempts. | |
| You're kidding me! | |
| No, it's suicide. | |
| I mean, really, what we need to be talking about, to some degree, is the degree of suicide attempts. | |
| Suicide attempt is quite common. | |
| So that's not all. | |
| I mean, sometimes that's a cry for help. | |
| Sometimes they're not really meaning to kill themselves. | |
| Depending on the actual arrangement, sometimes they don't actually mean to die. | |
| So one of the questions you ask as a psychiatrist after someone's tried to kill themselves and if they've survived is what was the intent? | |
| Now, in other cases where they're quite fatal, we don't know. | |
| I mean, we can't go back and know whether or not it was just a cry for help. | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| However, the truth is that in the moment, if you actually kill yourself, especially with a very fatal method, such as shooting yourself or something else, at the moment, you think the world's better off. | |
| And in terms of predicting it, the biggest thing to look for are changes in behavior. | |
| It doesn't necessarily mean they're talking about suicide. | |
| For instance, if they are focused on these two celebrity suicides, if you've got friends that are focused on it in a way that seems... | |
| I mean, we're obviously all mourning it to some degree, but if a few weeks from now they're still talking about it, I would take that as a warning sign. | |
| If your friends have an abrupt change in behavior, it doesn't have to mean that they're, you know, Acting weirdly. | |
| They're different on social media. | |
| They're not as present at work or at school. | |
| They're isolating more. | |
| They're not responding to your calls or your texts. | |
| All these, they're subtle, but changes in behavior are really what is across the board we see before people kill themselves. | |
| So, it sounds like in this case, it was impossible to predict, and he probably felt like he was doing a favor to his family and friends. | |
| Oh, I'm 100% sure, although if you talk to his family, that's definitely not how it's perceived. | |
| Since you gave us this number, the suicide rates have increased 25% in the last 20 years, right? | |
| I mean... | |
| Why won't it keep going up? | |
| And in the context of that, I want to talk about loneliness, which I still think is the number one epidemic. | |
| I mean, my show's in about a hundred countries. | |
| I travel around with Lisa to see a lot of these markets. | |
| It's the same thing everywhere. | |
| People are lonely. | |
| So is that the main driver of the increased rate of suicide attempts and suicides? | |
| I think that's one of the main reasons, and I don't think it's talked about enough, and I'm glad that you're talking about it. | |
| I think we talk about all kinds of stuff and not about loneliness. | |
| I think that one of the reasons it's gone up is because our society, our American society, has become so much more fragmented. | |
| There's no more block parties. | |
| There's less community around churches and synagogues. | |
| There's less unions for people to be connected to. | |
| You live further away from your families. | |
| People travel much more for work. | |
| And it's very easily, and also, of course, the technology piece where we're at home on devices. | |
| So I do think we're much more alienated and disconnected, and I really believe that is part of the reason that the rates of suicide have gone up. | |
| I think if you're connected in some way, you can prevent it. | |
| We're also seeing that the rates of suicide have gone up specifically in states where there's less access and more rural areas where there's less access to mental health services or the quality of mental health services is not as high. | |
| And we know there's a timing here with suicide. | |
| We know that it's about getting them help right away. | |
| And if you're in rural Montana or South Dakota or North Dakota and it's a long distance, just so you know, psychiatrists are actually in shortage in most states in the United States. | |
| So we don't have enough psychiatrists. | |
| We have really not enough child psychiatrists. | |
| So there's the issue of not having enough access to mental health care. | |
| There's the loneliness piece. | |
| And we do see that the places where suicide has gone up the most are places or the states where there's most easy access to guns. | |
| Up next, how to talk to someone you love about suicide. | |
| It could save a life. | |
| For most humans, there's a stigma around suicide. | |
| Much of it's driven by cultural, religious beliefs. | |
| Robin Williams actually, you know, there's a great movie he made, What Dreams May Become. | |
| What Dreams May Come. | |
| What Dreams May Come. | |
| I was close. | |
| And, you know, obviously committed suicide for a little different reason, but I'm going to get the quote that he offered as well. | |
| Do you think the stigma, the blame around suicide, the argument that it's selfish, helps or hurts the situation? | |
| I think it hurts the situation because it's a misunderstanding. | |
| I completely understand why family and friends in the media feel after a suicide that it was very selfish because it appears that the person is gone and the rest of their family and friends are left to pick up the pieces. | |
| So it does, I mean, I get, I think we all get why it appears selfish. | |
| I think it's a misunderstanding though. | |
| I don't think that most people who kill themselves, that is their intention. | |
| I think, to your point even about your friend, that when people are thinking about killing themselves, they think that they're actually relieving a burden, that their kids are better off, that their family members are better off without it. | |
| Well, that's why, you know, so in the movie, What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams dies in a car accident, two kids dies, wife's left by herself. | |
| They're in heaven. | |
| It's technicolor, beautiful. | |
| The colors are so rich, they're like paint, they come off on you. | |
| And then his wife commits suicide. | |
| And she's not allowed to go to heaven. | |
| Which many religions argue. | |
| So she ends up in this dark gray place, Never Never Land, and he's got to go rescue her, which is what true love is about. | |
| That's the hero journey. | |
| That's the arc of the story for him. | |
| But the pain that he witnessed as he played the movie... | |
| Interestingly, it came to affect his family. | |
| I'll read this. | |
| This is from Robin Williams. | |
| I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it's like to feel absolutely worthless. | |
| They don't want anyone else to feel like that. | |
| comedians are dark oftentimes. | |
| So as a psychiatrist, what do you think about that quote of his? | |
| And the fact that he ended up committing suicide at the end of all this. | |
| Well, that quote's clearly a window into his soul, right? | |
| I mean, we understand now how very telling that quote was, even if we didn't at the time that he said it, right? | |
| So, you know, we know that artists and people that are out there often suffer. | |
| They're more sensitive. | |
| They're more creative. | |
| Sometimes they do suffer more from anxiety and depression. | |
| And I do think that people try to compensate. | |
| I mean, I think we're looking at someone like Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. | |
| Anthony Bourdain, you know, tried to bring the world happiness through food and travel. | |
| And Kate Spade made the, like, happiest bags in America, right? | |
| The happiest purses in America. | |
| That's how she was described. | |
| So I do think that, you know, in psychiatry we talk about reaction formation, which means when you want one thing, you act like something else. | |
| So you're really miserable. | |
| So instead what you do is try to make everyone happy. | |
| It's an interesting coping mechanism. | |
| It's not always so functional, but it's not surprising to me. | |
| And I think that's also why it's so hard when we see these entertainers or even people in your life that seem to be very happy on the surface and deep down they're really suffering. | |
| So for folks listening right now, if they have someone that they're worried about, let's say they're going through a divorce or bankruptcy or one of the episodic events in our life that makes us feel worthless, what do you say? | |
| How do you sort of kick the tires a little bit and see if they're okay? | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, the first thing is don't be afraid to ask. | |
| The big deal here... | |
| That's an awkward thing to ask. | |
| Have you thought of killing yourself? | |
| You don't have to start with the, do you want to kill yourself line? | |
| I mean, I think it starts with the connecting to the people, right? | |
| So it's about going maybe and having the drink with them, right? | |
| It's about finding the time in your busy life to text them, call them, talk to them for a few minutes, spend some time with them, get a sense of how they're doing, Get connected to them. | |
| If you still feel that they're suffering in some way, ask them how they're doing. | |
| We all try to respect each other's privacy so much these days. | |
| And I feel like in the olden days, when there was more sense of community, we didn't do that. | |
| We said, what's going on? | |
| You look bad. | |
| It was Peyton Place. | |
| Right? | |
| So we need to do that more. | |
| You are not going to make someone kill themselves or hurt themselves because you say to them, have things gotten so bad that you weren't born? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And if someone says yes to that, okay. | |
| We've got to help them. | |
| But if nobody asks, you're never going to know. | |
| And how effective is treatment? | |
| Because my aunt killed herself. | |
| She tried three or four times before she succeeded. | |
| But she had a lot of treatment. | |
| It wasn't like she wasn't in treatment. | |
| You know, she was medicated. | |
| She was institutionalized for a while. | |
| But I'm just wondering, today, are the treatments effective? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Oh, another good question. | |
| Yes, they are effective, but it's a complicated question and we don't prioritize mental health in this country enough. | |
| We don't cover it in the kind of way we need to. | |
| So medication is one form of treatment. | |
| But in order for it to be really effective, you have to have a comprehensive treatment approach. | |
| And that means building a community. | |
| Sometimes that means a nutritionist. | |
| Sometimes that means helping social skills. | |
| You know, of course, there's a role for medication. | |
| There's a role for therapy. | |
| There's a role for hospitalization at times. | |
| But we also have to look at the village. | |
| I'm a big believer in the whole village, not just with kids, but also with adults. | |
| It takes a village. | |
| So when you're treating someone for depression and anxiety, you have to look at their entire village. | |
| If they're bankrupt or they just lost their job, maybe the treatment is really more about a budget or finding affordable living. | |
| Those are the kinds of things we don't talk about. | |
| And to be fair, they're the kind of things that aren't covered by insurance. | |
| So I wish, as Americans, we could take a more sort of broad approach to treating depression and anxiety. | |
| I think we'd make more inroads in preventing suicide, especially in people that have suffered with chronic depression. | |
| Well, these numbers you've given us, they've been shocking. | |
| That's cool. | |
| Thank you very much for being with us. | |
| If you feel depressed, you're having suicide thoughts, if you're worried about someone else having suicidal thoughts, you know, make sure they're not lonely, and you can reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. | |
| There are no judgments here. | |
| There's trained professionals who are going to talk with you and listen to you. |