You just knew that Hunter was really crazy - all of the time. The booze, the dope, the guns and exceedingly strange outlook on the world. But still...but still there was something endearing about him. I can't quite figure what it was, but his writing sure made college a lot more interesting than it would have been otherwise.
He was a man who made positively no apparent sense in his writing - except to tell us that life was a bizarre and uncanny thing that could truly bite in you in the butt when you least expected it.
I hope God enjoys Hunter a lot.
PS: Do you think there's good scotch in Heaven?
There he goes.. one of god's own prototypes.. a higher powered mutant never even considered for mass production.. too wierd to live, too rare to die.
Patients suffering from psychiatric illnesses - alcoholism and major depression - contribute the lion's share of the fatal suicides, but the vast majority of depressives and alcoholics do not take their own lives. For each of these diagnoses, different "risk factors" predict who will commit suicide. Persons suffering from major depression, for instance, take their lives for "internal" reasons: feelings of misery, guilt, and hopelessness. Alcoholics, by contrast, kill themselves in reaction to events in their environment: of the alcoholics who commit suicide, one-third experience the loss of a close relationship within the prior six weeks, and one third expect to sustain an equally severe interpersonal loss.
In studying fifty alcoholic suicides, I was struck by how often seven factors again and again were associated with their deaths. Nearly all these suicide victims (96 percent) had continued their substance abuse right up to the end of their lives. More than 70 percent communicated their suicidal thoughts to others, often over a long period of time; or had a comorbid major depression; or had no spouse, family, or friends offering them any social support. Nearly half the suicides were unemployed, or had serious medical problems, or lived alone. These seven factors predict risk of suicide in alcoholics; in another study I participated in, they characterized the 32 alcoholic suicides, but not the depressed, non-alcoholic suicides.
The alcoholics' lack of social support explains why acute interpersonal loss so powerfully drives alcoholics to suicide. Of the 20 cases where the loss occurred within the last 6 weeks, 19 possessed no other social support beyond the minimal camaraderie of their tavern buddies. The relationship they lost was their last relationship; losing that link, coupled with the global deterioration in their lives, proved unbearable.
Our next question was whether this pattern uniquely points to the alcoholic suicides, or whether these stressors occur commonly among all alcoholics. Six of these risk factors were investigated in a large mental health community survey. When we reviewed their data, we found these risk factors were present far more often in alcoholic suicides than in living alcoholics. Every suicide had at least one risk factor; 90 percent had at least three risk factors, and 80 percent of the suicides had four or more risk factors. In contrast, one quarter of the living alcoholics had none of the risk factors, and only one had four risk factors. This suggests that the risk factors cumulate: the more factors an alcoholic has, the greater his suicide risk.
These factors discriminated suicidal alcoholics from alcoholics living in the community, but would they serve to select the suicidal alcoholics out of a hospital population? We compared our suicides with 142 medically-treated alcoholics. Each of the five factors evaluated was found significantly more often among the suicides. Other researchers have also found that similar risk factors characterize the suicides of substance abusers who are not primary alcoholics.