Исследование подтверждает: внезапное желание прыгнуть с высоты — это защитный механизм, а не признак суицидальных наклонностей

High-Place Phenomenon Back in 2003, not long after my partner and I started dating, we found ourselves on a balcony suspended ten storeys above Vancouver’s English Bay. Our first vacation together. A Canada Day party, if I recall. Anticipating fireworks. One look at my partner’s face and I knew we had to get off that balcony immediately. He was overcome by an irrational need to jump. I too am terrified of heights, and I too have that nonsensical instinct. Leap. End the suffering. Now, the body screams while—thankfully—the rational brain guides me off said balcony. My partner’s rational brain was less bossy than mine, so he remained there, frozen, until I yanked him by the sleeve toward safety. In 2012, Florida State University researchers named intrusive thoughts when one is in high places as HPP, or high-place phenomenon. HPP is the brain’s primal instinct response even though we don’t want to jump. Researchers say that contrary to how it seems, HPP is actually an affirmation of our will to live. Jumping is the last thing we would do. According to therapist Melanie Dideriksen, “The urge to jump from a high place is not linked to suicidal ideation.” “I didn’t know you were afraid of heights,” my partner said in Vancouver after I yanked him off the balcony. I shrugged, doing that thing I do with most things: I minimize. “I used to never be, and then it just sort of started, randomly, when my mother left,” I told him. Everything in my life seems to return to that moment in May 1986, when my mother left. I was nine and my sister was five. We stayed in Poland under the supervision of a relatively new stepfather and my mother’s parents. Our mother worked in Canada as a live-in nanny until we joined her in Toronto in August 1988. “Trauma,” my partner said. “Oh stop,” I said, but the idea took hold of me. Now that I’m a parent of two children, my life between ages nine and eleven seems unimaginable to me. I can’t fathom leaving my children for over two years. But then, I said: “Trauma is trendy. I survived no wars, no rape. I don’t have trauma.” My partner made a face. “Intergenerational trauma is real,” he said. He was already a teacher, four years older than me, wiser, more experienced, so I listened, and told him about my cousin Adam. In February of 1986, three months before my mother left for Canada, Adam died in a tragic accident. I was nine and Adam was eight. He was my favourite cousin, the one closest in age to me, the one I looked forward to playing with at crazy family gatherings. He fell to his death from his eighth story bedroom window. He was waiting for a puppy. My partner was incredulous, “An accident?” “Adam’s parents were divorcing, so they got him a puppy to make things better. A lady was delivering the puppy. He was waiting for her, looking out of his window excitedly.” My partner regarded me suspiciously. No one had ever questioned the story of Adam’s death before. Of course it was an accident. Adam’s death was family lore. We were the family with the child who tragically died. Everyone knew. Everyone agreed. What a tragic accident. What else could it have been? After the Vancouver vacation, I went to teacher’s college, and a year later, at twenty-six, I started teaching. I am now forty-nine and celebrate every birthday like a terrifying victory. I’ve made it to the average life-expectancy age in Poland in the 1930s, when my grandparents were children. Adam didn’t make it. I am immensely grateful, and apprehensive of what’s around the corner. In my twenty-three-year teaching career, several of my former students have died. Death is always sad, but the death of a young person is particularly devastating. One young person died in a fire, another in a drunk-driving accident, yet another of suicide. The most recent tragedy involved a fall from great heights. A horrendous accident. I took the news disproportionately hard. It beheaded me. My lopped-off head rolled into dark, grimy corners, and I had a hard time setting it back atop my injured spine, mangled, full of nasty images and vivid memories. I was taken back to Christmas 1985, to a family apartment in the Baltic city of Gdańsk, my home town. A doily tablecloth with a spread of festive foods: peppered tripe soup, jellied pig trotters, jellied carp, beet soup with wild mushroom dumplings, horseradish and lemon slices, ice-cold bottles of vodka. Cigarette smoke and Christmas carols. Adam and I sit under the table, the doily tablecloth obstructing the view like bangs that we cut ourselves. His father and my mother are siblings. My father is not in attendance, my parents having divorced years earlier. Adam’s mother is not in attendance, having recently split from his father. Adam and I understand one another; we are two of a kind. The other cousins are much older and don’t come from broken families like we do. They drink and laugh with the grownups. Under the table, Adam and I sit quietly, whispering about this and that. We know what’s coming. We’ve sat through enough of these family functions. Very soon, someone, probably his father who drinks too much, will start an argument, someone will shout, and Adam’s father will throw something heavy at the wall, a crystal ashtray or a pitcher, swear never to speak to the other person again. One of us will be tugged violently and told to get our stuff. We’re leaving. Before my mother left, I travelled with her on an old train from Gdańsk to Warsaw, where she would get her visa from the Canadian embassy. We didn’t know it then, but Poland was nearing the end of its Communist chapter. It was February, murky and frigid. I wished the Canadian government would withhold my mother’s visa. It did not. It was official: she would leave me. We celebrated her win by riding the elevator to the observation deck of the Pałac Kultury, the Orwellian, Soviet behemoth now called the Palace of Science and Culture, which was then the tallest building in Warsaw. It resembled others like it that were strewn all over the Soviet Union. The communist cousins, they’re called: the Latvian Academy of Sciences, the Hotel International in Prague, Moscow State University, the Hotel Ukraina. Atop the thirtieth-floor observation deck, dusk was falling over the city. Everything was ashtray gray. I looked down and my breath was caught. I was terrified. “It would take forever to fall from here,” I said to my mother, who immediately tugged on my coat and pulled me back. I wasn’t in any danger. The area was secured off with metal and wire. I have thought about that moment countless times, that visceral feeling of falling, and thinking of what a long, terrible death that would be. I can still feel my stomach lurching upward toward my throat. After our visit to the observation deck, when my mother and I returned to the cramped apartment of a great-aunt where we would sleep that night, there was a message to call Gdańsk. It was urgent. My mother dialled. I watched her crumple and dissolve into feral tears. Adam fell. Adam died. At the funeral, I refused to go up to the casket. I didn’t want to see him dead. But it didn’t matter, because a few days later, Adam’s father showed me photos of his bruised son. My uncle smelled of alcohol and sounded strangely proud when he forced me to look at those photos. I never saw Adam in a suit before. He looked like an old, dirty doll. When he was alive, he was exceptionally good at Lego. He never took my things, never hit me, never yelled. He was gentle and beautiful, perfect to play with. He was focused and meditative with his blocks. Infinitely patient. When two months later a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl blew up, and us kids had to line up at school for life-saving stable iodine served up in plastic shot glasses, I had no one to commiserate with. So bitter. Three months later, my mother left for Canada. I couldn’t grasp how she would still go. What sort of tragedy would make her stay, if not a death in the family and a nuclear disaster? What sort of upheaval would divert her plans? Would she stay if I threw myself out of the window? Palaces of Culture weren’t the only buildings in Eastern Europe that matched. Residential buildings did too. Our apartment block in a suburb of Gdańsk was identical to Adam’s building in the neighbouring city of Sopot. We both lived on the same floor. Our apartments were mirror images of one another. After Adam died and my mother left, I often stood on the windowsill of my bedroom window, face pressed against the cold glass, staring at the asphalt below, bowels knotted. Sometimes, I would open the window and peer down gingerly. There are no screens in European windows, no protective barriers, even on the eighth floor. There was absolutely no way I could stand up with the window open, like Adam allegedly had. It’d be suicide. Maybe it was my HPP? Maybe Adam was more fearless? But I knew him. I knew he wasn’t fearless. I knew he was also scared. The dominant narrative in the family was that Adam died in a tragic accident. He was waiting for a puppy. His parents divorced, his mother was moving out, and his father got him a puppy to make life better. I never questioned this narrative, until Vancouver, and then again until my former student died from a great height. What if we told the truth? What if Adam, like me, was devastated that his family broke up, that his mother was leaving his father who drank too much and was often violent, that his life would never be the same again, that the unknowns about what would happen next filled him with hopelessness and terror? What if we said, Adam died by suicide? Children have no voice. Adults make all the decisions. Adam decided. But who was going to tell me that my beloved cousin died by suicide? Not my grandfather, the ardent Communist, who joked about shooting Germans in the woods and escaping from a Nazi concentration camp. No one knew what he actually did during the War. He never wanted to talk about it seriously. He was violent with my uncle, Adam’s father. His father, who was a terrible drunk, beat my grandfather. Not my grandmother, who was fourteen when Hitler invaded Poland, fifteen when she was raped by Nazi soldiers, sixteen when her father was murdered by the Soviets and his body never recovered, eighteen when she married my grandfather, nineteen when she had her first child, and twenty when the War ended. Not my uncle, who was born with a physical disability, who drank to numb his pain, who picked fights with everyone in the family, who lost his only child. Not my father, who divorced my mother when I was four, disowned our whole damaged family as soon as he could, and spent the majority of his life in the South China Sea working as a merchant marine. Not my mother, who was a single parent, who juggled several jobs, who concocted plans to give her two children a better future abroad. In “September 1, 1939,” W. H. Auden wrote: “I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.” My family’s trauma didn’t start when Hitler invaded Poland, it continued, and it magnified. Adam might have wanted a puppy, but what he wanted more than anything else—and this I am sure of—was to not be his father, not to be his grandfather, not be the violence acted and re-enacted over and over again. A moment of action. Elation and desire allowing risk and recklessness. Leaning over just a little too far. A signal of an end of something, and the beginning of something new. Photo by uriel from Unsplash Read more