Finding identity, saving the soul

Ken Stifler heard this from someone once: “The worst time to kill yourself is when you’re suicidal.”

Which sounds like a cross between a bad joke and a Catch 22, but Stifler — a mental health consultant in the Lynchburg General Emergency Room and author of a just-released book on suicide — sees the truth tucked away in that wry comment.

“For many people, it’s a split-second decision,” Stifler said, “one they’re not really in a rational position to make. If we could just get them to wait even a couple of days
… .”

There are no good reasons to commit suicide, but there are some that have a certain logic to them. For a person facing a slow, painful decline from a terminal illness, for instance, such a decision may be made for the sake of his or her family.

Not-so-good reasons include reacting to a short-term problem, feeling discouraged over the course one’s life has taken, or acting to make someone else feel bad (perhaps the worst reason of all).

And then there are those who are afflicted with chemical imbalances, have hijacked their emotions and sent them careening down a long dark hill without brakes.

That’s the variety Stifler confronts at his job, but he does see one common trait. All of those people have souls. Hence the title of his book: “Suicide, Despair and Soul Retrieval: Finding the Light of God.”

He didn’t say this, but I have a suspicion that one of the motives prompting him to write the book was frustration. More often than not, the suicidal people he sees in the ER come to him agitated,

intoxicated or drugged — in no mood, in other words, for a sober discussion of religion and philosophy.

“I wish I could give this book to everyone I see in my work,” said Stifler, a Baltimore native who now lives in Bedford, “but it’s not financially possible.

“Maybe, at some point, I can find a sponsor who will buy some and donate them.”

A note here: When you go through a traditional publisher (Paulist Press, in Stifler’s case), your books don’t belong to you. If you want some, you have to pay for them like everyone else (although authors generally get a discount).

Stifler was raised a Catholic, which didn’t keep him from what he describes as “kind of a wild adolescence. I was on the streets a lot.” A religious experience at the age of 16 launched him on a lifelong search for meaning and truth and all of that, and he now describes himself as “a mystic. I’ve taken a little bit from a lot of different philosophies.”

He has been constrained from using much of this knowledge in his professional life, however. In his book, he says of the prevailing medical dismissal of spiritual healing: “This attitude is ... born of professional blindness and a prejudicial smugness that assumed scientific knowledge is superior to faith, that the head contains information superior to the heart and that a person’s soul is disembodied from his psychological conflict. This attitude cheats the client of the possibility of receiving a full-spectrum intervention.

“Many suicidal people want to talk about God.”

Moreover, Stifler said, it is often fear of an unknown afterlife that keeps even more people than the 30,000 souls who commit suicide each year in the U.S. from pulling the trigger, either figuratively or literally.

Yet Stifler doesn’t see God as just another anti-depressant, but a bridge to a person’s “real self.”

In his mind, and in his book, it is this lack of identity that drives many tortured souls over the brink.

“I know of a woman,” he said, “who attempted suicide several times because her son was a drug addict, and she felt that makes her a bad mother. She took the pain she was feeling for him and turned it inward.”

Being a mother had become her only identity, masking who she really was. And perhaps the son was also acting out of despair.

“I think people were created to be happy and joyful,” Stifler said, “but we lose our original innocence.”

Suicide and suicide attempts are far more prevalent than most people realize, he added.

“When I was working at the Bedford hospital, I’d tell someone, ‘I saw 10 suicidal people this week,’ and they’d be amazed.

“‘In Bedford?’” they’d say. Lynchburg, as the second busiest ER in the state, has a lot more.”

Stifler is not dogmatic in his spiritual beliefs, but he has seen numerous cases where belief in a higher power has pulled someone from a suicidal swamp.

“There is, believe it or not, a positive way to look at it,” he said. “I tell people who have attempted suicide, ‘You’re at a radical stage in your life, and it’s a wonderful time to make significant changes. After all, if your life has become intolerable, what do you have to lose?

“People think they don’t have any options.”

You can find “Suicide, Despair and Soul Retrieval” on Amazon.com, and soon in local bookstores. It came out earlier this month.