Another Trick Bag,. This One About Suicide

Sometimes, and more often than they should, people write articles and get them published that are nothing more than "trick bags," because the pieces don't deliver what their titles promise.

Such an article is now running in Forbes magazine. Written by a Matthew Herper, it is called "What We Don't Know About Suicide."

That title seems to be promising to tell us something that we don't know. But if that "We" in the title includes the author himself, then how could he tell us anything that he doesn't know himself? But one brings up the article on his computer anyway, figuring that that title, like so many others, is just badly phrased, and that the article contains something new and interesting anyway.

But in fact this author does go on to tell us nothing new about suicide. Instead all he says is that a lot is still not known on the subject, and he does do us the service of subjecting that it will be a while yet before that changes, if ever, because suicide is so mysterious and daunting and terrible that even the the people charged with studying and trying to prevent it have too much trouble keeping from averting their eyes.

The several attached comments offered more, though still not much. Even though there were only seven of them, and all were somewhat detailed, they still suffered, as so many comment sections do, from coming at us from too many different and confusing directions at once. But I don't think it's inaccurate to say that that kind of thing works right in with the nature of suicide, too.