History professor finds links between suicides of yesteryear and today

For history professor Richard Bell, suicide is his academic interest, but it’s also personal.

He first became interested in the subject when a college friend’s sister committed suicide, deeply affecting his friend’s relationships and religious views. Bell became interested to find out what people in the past understood about self-destruction and in how they thought they should respond to it. Now, after time at Cambridge and Harvard universities, the British-born Bell has spent much of his career exploring the causes, implications and views of suicide in the early United States. Some of his research, he says, has unearthed connections to modern day suicide.

“I’m using what early Americans thought about suicide as a way to figure out what they thought about power and selfishness and authority,” said Bell. “It becomes a lens onto a larger, bigger story about what sort of country America is.”

Bell’s studies of suicide in the 17th and 18th centuries have led him to publish a variety of journals and articles on the subject.

“He told us the first day of class his research specialty is suicide,” said junior history major Julie Gilbert, who is in HIST429W: Communication in Early America, a course Bell is teaching this semester. “He’s really knowledgeable about suicide in a historical context, which is definitely unique.”

The most intriguing thing Bell has discovered through his research, he said, is how fixated early Americans were on self-destruction.

“Everyone was writing about it; everyone was talking about it,” he said. “Everyone was worrying that teenage children were going to be extremely vulnerable to suicide, as if it’s something you can catch, like H1N1.”

Much like today, Bell said, early Americans worried about the negative effects the media had on teenagers. While parents today are nervous about their children playing violent video games, their 1800s equivalents thought exposure to newly available novels would make teenagers more susceptible to suicidal behavior.

“It’s the same debate over and over again,” Bell said, “that the media, if not properly regulated, is dangerous to our children.”

One consistency Bell found in the study of suicide is its causes. Statistically, he said, romantic disappointments, financial trouble and family deaths are among the underlying catalysts for suicide, regardless of whether it’s 1809 or 2009.

Currently, Bell is revising a dissertation into book form to be published, hopefully, in 2011. Do Not Despair: Suicide and Power in the Newly United States, he said, discusses social responsibility in relation to suicide.

“I’m asking the question, ‘Are we our brothers’ keepers, or is every man for himself?’” Bell said, which addresses the idea of compassion through the centuries.

“There’s real complexity to understanding suicide,” Bell said. “If it were simple, we would have found a way to stop it a long time ago.”

ga at umdbk dot com