"Did you see House last night!?"
That was the echo sounding from my last week. Everyone who knows I work in suicide prevention found out about this blog last week, just in time for the television show House to air an episode depicting the suicide of one of the show's characters.
To demonstrate the impact of this one show, I'll share that some of my friends' Facebook status updates reflected the sadness they felt at the death of actor Kal Penn's House character Lawrence Kutner. The New York Daily News called it an "instant communal experience." The Baltimore Sun headlined their coverage with the statement: "‘House' character's suicide inspires real mourning." Entertainment Weekly commented on the resultant "outpouring of grief."
Perhaps building on the "instant communal experience" it helped create, Fox, the network that airs House, has sponsored a Kutner memorial page. For all that was done right with this episode (and by right, I mean safely), memorializing a person who has died by suicide is one of the more dangerous responses to the death. Memorials draw even more attention to the death - and to the person - than perhaps would have been received otherwise. Risks of imitation and contagion, which are major safety concerns following a suicide death, are increased with this kind of memorial. This situation becomes even more interesting, and complex, when the person who "died" is a television character.
The Entertainment Industries Council, in collaboration with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's Center for Mental Health Services and the National Institute of Health's Institute of Mental Health co-sponsored Picture This: Depression and Suicide Prevention, a forum for mental health experts, mental health consumers, and survivors of attempted or completed suicide to determine priorities for those who write, direct, or produce content for the entertainment industry. You can access the publication that resulted from this forum online.
Ultimately, presenting suicide as inexplicable does not aid in prevention. I hope, for the television viewing audience's collective good, that House will go further in future episodes to help us understand Kutner's suicide, because television has immense power.
Television can affect change on a grand scale, by raising awareness around social and health issues and drawing attention to resources for people who need help. House writers and producers created a beautiful episode that spoke to many themes, including the often deeply buried pain of someone who dies by suicide and the guilt of survivors.
As I have said before and will say again, suicide is a complex outcome. The core of the episode was the search for the "why" of Kutner's death, and even when not directly talking about Kutner's death, the writers addressed this question. "Either we have all the clues and we're idiots, or we don't have all the clues", Dr. House shouts, as he and his team search to discover why one of their patients is dying.
As I watched the show, I analyzed if it was just the "way of House" to deal with this death this way - by trying to find out the hidden details to discover the reason behind this outcome. But, I realized that this depiction wasn't just representative of House's style. It is our collective, human style. It isn't, as Dr. Wilson says, about what we missed, but about why we missed it.
