Getting the Word on a Sensitive Subject

She is grateful that Newsweek recognized the significance of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. But if Rosemary Rubin were the editor in chief, she wouldn’t have featured Cobain’s gloomy face on the cover, or the word suicide in big bold type.

For that matter, Rubin, a suicide-prevention counselor in the Los Angeles city schools, didn’t like the fact that this newspaper used the S-word in its front-page headline.

Teen-agers, she explains, “are at an impressionable age. Kids who are depressed don’t think clearly. And when they see something like this. . . . “

She offered to fax me literature about the phenomena of “copycat suicides” and “media contagion,” with the hope that I wouldn’t compound the problem.

Suicide is a sensitive subject. When it was learned that Cobain, the leader of Nirvana, the most celebrated poet of “grunge,” had silenced himself at 27, it wasn’t just grieving fans who found themselves watching MTV and wondering why and thinking about others who, as the euphemism goes, “took their own life.”

It’s easy to list rock icons who self-destructed long before Cobain. It’s also easy to think of folks who were not famous. These would be the people you knew, or thought you knew, or wish you had been able to know.

Two of my closest friends were teen-agers when their fathers killed themselves. This will forever be a painful subject. My cousin Jack was 41 or maybe 42 when he did it. An admired colleague was in her 50s. And two summers ago, Adam, the troubled son of a dear friend, was only 18.

You feel sad for the dead but worse for the survivors. Sadness gives rise to anger. How could they be so selfish?

That was one young man’s quick reaction to Cobain’s suicide. “I think it sucks,” he told the MTV reporter. What really bothered him, the young man said, wasn’t Cobain’s actions so much as the fact that he left behind a 19-month-old daughter, Frances Bean. When people do this, they haunt the lives of others.

Mental illness, researchers say, is a leading cause of suicide. Kurt Cobain’s story, well known to his fans, was that of a despairing boy whose parents divorced when he was 9. As an adolescent, he shuttled back and forth among relatives and friends but wore out his welcome. He sought solace in music and drugs.

To read old press clippings now is to feel a chill.

“I was a seriously depressed kid,” he told The Times’ Robert Hilburn in an interview last August. “Every night at one point I’d go to bed bawling my head off. I used to try to make my head explode by holding my breath, thinking if I blew up my head, they’d be sorry. There was a time when I never thought I’d live to see 21.”

Despite the chronicle of Cobain’s troubles, many fans were stunned. To sing along or play air guitar is to fantasize the life of the rock star. Nirvana sold millions upon millions of recordings. Many fans don’t pay much attention to lyrics, but Cobain’s downbeat musings touched a nerve with many. “It’s cool to be depressed,” a young woman told MTV.

Don Klein, a Nirvana fan who works at Tower Records in Sherman Oaks, was hooked by an early song called “Negative Creep,” which includes the lyrics: I’m a negative creep/ I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned . . .

“The first time I heard that, I thought, ‘Yeah, this is cool,’ ” he recalls. “I was feeling pretty s----- that day and it hit home.”

The fear that some people may emulate Cobain put counselors such as Rosemary Rubin on alert. The former Taft High counselor is part of a two-member team that specializes in advising school-based counselors and teachers who are dealing with depressed and potentially suicidal youths. Suicide, Rubin points out, is second only to accidents as a cause of death in the age group between 10 and 19.

As it happened, it was the suicide of a fifth-grader at 49th Street School who shot himself in the head with his father’s gun that activated the school district’s crisis team last week. Rubin staffed the hot line while her partner assisted other counselors at the school. Among her callers that day was a high school counselor who was working with three students deeply affected by Cobain’s death.

Rubin faxed the counselor copies of Newsweek’s articles to help him understand Cobain’s significance. She also faxed him some pages from a guidebook on suicide counseling, a copy of which she also sent to me.

The guidebook urges individuals to help society form “appropriate norms” about suicide. “These norms should blend openness and understanding, without condemning or glorifying the suicide. Such norms will help to bring suicide out into the open where it can be talked about and prevented. . . .”

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The media, it adds, should be aware that some people may receive the wrong kind of inspiration from news reports. “Avoid sensationalizing or romanticizing the suicide,” it advises. “. . . Downplay the positioning of the story, avoiding front-page placement or large headlines. . . . Avoid using the word ‘suicide’ in the headline or printing a photo of the person. . . .”

Just as the guidebook recommends, Rubin and Dr. Robert Litman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, emphasized that mental illness and other conditions such as depression that lead to suicide are treatable. Depression, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, fights and a sense of failure tend to be common traits among teen-agers who commit suicide. Parents and friends, they said, should not ignore the warning signs, but should show that they care. “Love is the best protection,” Litman said.

Had I thought about it at the time, I would have asked Rosemary Rubin how one is to reconcile “openness and understanding, without condemning” the suicide if one’s open, honest reaction is that of condemnation. And how does a newspaper bring “suicide out into the open” while avoiding the word in headlines?

We had talked for maybe 25 minutes when Rubin said she had to put me on hold.

“I’ve got to go,” she soon explained. “I’ve got a crisis call coming in.”

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.