In an interesting historical footnote a 78 year-old man in California revealed that he most likely had slipped cyanide to Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering when he was a young prison guard during the Nuremberg trials. Goering was thus able to thwart his execution by taking his own life.
Herbert Lee Stivers, now 78, was a 19-year-old Army
private when he took notes and a capsule hidden inside a fountain pen
to Goering at the request of two men who said the notorious Nazi
general was "a very sick man" who needed medicine, the newspaper said.Stivers said he is now convinced the
"medicine" was the cyanide that killed Goering on Oct. 15, 1946, the
night before he was to be executed. The commander of the German air
force had been convicted at the Nuremberg trials the previous month.
Der Denkpass has an amusing post about this where it is recommended that "refills" be passed out to Goering’s NPD followers in Saxony.
It turns out that Saxony already has the highest suicide rate in Germany. A recent article in Sachsen im Netz has the details. But Saxony is followed closely behind by the other east German states:
Die Zahlen weisen auch ein allgemeines Ost-West- und ein relatives
Nord-Süd-Gefälle aus. Demnach sind die Suizidraten auf dem Gebiet des
heutigen Freistaates Sachsen seit jeher ausnahmslos am höchsten, dicht
gefolgt von Thüringen und Sachsen-Anhalt.
One can speculate about the reasons behind these statistics, but these are states where right-wing extremism has been flourishing. Looking at the United States we see a similar trend. Here it is the so-called "Red States" – those that voted Republican in the last elections – that have suicide rates as high as Saxony. The two states with the lowest rates are New York and Massachusetts – the bluest of the blue that voted overwhelmingly Democratic:
The five states with the most lopsided Bush vote (Alaska, Montana,
Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, with a margin of 25 percent or more) were all
among the top eight for suicide.
Certainly access to mental health care plays a role in this. In states with a poor, uneducated population there tends to be a stigma attached to mental illness. I also believe that the xenophobia (Fremdenhass) displayed in Saxony and the bigotry against gays and lesbians as well as dark-skinned "foreigners" so often seen in the US southern states must be influencing this – for isn’t this but a symptom of self-loathing?
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“Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho”
Not one of these is a southern state, by the way. And do you possess one iota of evidence that there exists any more bigotry in Alaska or Utah than, say, in Massachussetts or New York?
There are many factors involved in suicide, one of which is miserable weather and long, dark winters. As for the bigotry of the southern US, there’s a difference between legalized segregation and bigotry. As far as I know, northern communities in the US are just as bigoted as the south, and, 45 years post-civil rights era, many northern communities are way more segregated. That ‘old south’ ain’t what it used to be, your stereotyping notwithstanding.
Montana has always had one of the best education systems in the country on the basis of its results, so I don’t know what hat you pulled ‘uneducated’ out of…and introducing the southern states into the mix at the end is a non-sequitur.
Good points; there is an article about the “Suicide Culture” in Montana in today’s NYTImes. Evidently easy access to guns coupled with isolation and lack of mental health resources play a big role.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/health/13rural.html?