Page 121 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

This is Number Three.
She meticulously blocked every gap in the doorway, turned the gas taps full on, and stuck her
head as far as possible into the oven. She was determined. If she couldn’t have used her oven to kill
herself, wouldn’t she have just tried something else?
The alternative possibility is that suicide is a behavior coupled to a particular context. Coupling
is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions. My father read
Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities to me and my brothers when we were children, and at the
very end, when Sydney Carton dies in Charles Darney’s place, my father wept. My father was not a
weeper. He was not someone whose emotions bubbled over in every emotionally meaningful
moment. He didn’t cry in sad movies. He didn’t cry when his children left for college. Maybe he got
stealthily misty-eyed from time to time, but not so anyone other than maybe my mother would
notice. In order to cry, he needed his children on the sofa listening, and he needed one of history’s
most sentimental novelists. Take away either of those two factors and no one would ever have seen
his tears. That’s coupling. If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s
the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with
a particular, readily available lethal means.
So which is it—displacement or coupling? The modernization of British gas is an almost perfect
way to test this question. If suicide follows the path of displacement—if the suicidal are so
determined that when you block one method, they will simply try another—then suicide rates
should have remained pretty steady over time, fluctuating only with major social events. (Suicides
tend to fall in wartime, for example, and rise in times of economic distress.) If suicide is coupled, on
the other hand, then it should vary with the availability of particular methods of committing suicide.
When a new and easy method such as town gas arrives on the scene, suicides should rise; when that
method is taken away, they should fall. The suicide curve should look like a roller coaster.
Take a look.

It’s a roller coaster.
It goes way up when town gas first makes its way into British homes. And it comes plunging
down as the changeover to natural gas begins in the late 1960s. In that ten-year window, as town gas
was being slowly phased out, thousands of deaths were prevented.
“[Town] gas had unique advantages as a lethal method,” criminologist Ronald Clarke wrote in
his classic 1988 essay laying out the first sustained argument in favor of coupling:
It was widely available (in about 80 percent of British homes) and required little preparation or
specialist knowledge, making it an easy choice for less mobile people and for those coming
under sudden extreme stress. It was painless, did not result in disfigurement, and did not produce