Cultural Reflection

 Focus on the rationale for why we should seek to understand the perplexing phenomenon of suicide from distinctly cultural perspectives. 

The information is include below

Cultural Reflection Paper
September 23, 2024
Total Number of Pages: 3, Exclusive of your title page, abstract, and reference
page(s). APA style is required.
From the essay below, focus on the rationale for why we should seek to understand
the perplexing phenomenon of suicide from distinctly cultural perspectives.

An Attempt to Understand the Painful Phenomena of Suicide, by Daphne Merkin,
New York Times, June 7, 2018

Suicide, no matter how well we know a person, usually comes as a shock, even a
violation, putting the lie to our conviction that existence is to be cherished. The
fact that taking one’s own life can exist on a parallel track with our ordinary days,
in which we go out to dinner or put our children to bed or worry about growing
old, always puts me in mind of W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
Overtly about the poet’s gazing upon Bruegel’s painting “The Fall of Icarus,” the
poem evokes the relativity of tragedy and the isolation of despair: “About
suffering,” it begins, “they were never wrong,/ The old Masters: how well they
understood/ Its human position: how it takes place/ While someone else is eating or
opening a window or just walking dully along.”
We are all, always, outsiders when it comes to other people’s pain. But there is no
starker reminder of that truth than suicide.
Serious depression, which almost always precedes suicide, retains not only the
stigma of mental illness and is thus often undisclosed even to one’s nearest, but is
also a fairly disguisable illness. Most often, it leaves no track marks. It comes
without benefit of casts or bandages. It can be covered up with a smile and denied
even by the one enduring it.
Having suffered from acute depression since I was a very young girl, I am all too
familiar with this paradox. I learned early on — no one wants to be around a sad
girl, after all — to artfully distance myself from my own downcast mood, to whistle
a happy tune around my peers as well as adults in official positions, such as
teachers and doctors.
I have read these books in an effort to break suicide’s unholy grasp on my own
melancholic imagination and to try and track the essential mystery of the act down
to its psychological roots, although I also realize there is a heritability factor,
based on identical twin and adoption studies, of somewhere between 50 and 60
percent. In my case, given my belief that the manner in which I was nurtured left
much to be desired, I have always tangled with the genetic component, wondering
if it really applies to me and how one would know, anyway.
Doing all of that reading, in addition to writing a memoir exploring the origins of
my own depression, has partly broken the fatal allure of suicide. But only partly.
There is still a side of me that veers in that extreme and violent direction when
something goes wrong, that responds as if to a siren song when I hear of a person
who has killed him or herself. “You got out,” I think.
Sometimes I think part of the thing that keeps me here is witnessing the silence
that suicide leaves in its wake. There is no going back from the act, no way of
trying to unravel the story and certainly no way of making it come out differently in

the end. It inspires a collective gasp, after which, and so rapidly, the hole — the
vacancy — closes over and we all return to our lives.
Some will inevitably blame Kate Spade for her decision or call it “selfish.” I don’t
agree. It is very hard for those who haven’t suffered from serious depression to
understand the hold it has on its victims — how it wipes out human connection,
abnegating the claims of love or need, and the way suicide can begin to seem like
an imperative, an escape rather than an ending.
But I grieve for her husband and, most of all, for the 13-year-old daughter Ms.
Spade left behind, who will carry this trauma with her forever. This leads me, in
turn, to think of my own daughter, now 28, who has watched and helped me pull
through some of my own dire moments, keeping us both, for worse and better, in
this, our one and only life.