Chemical Suicides, Popular in Japan, Are Increasing in the U.S.
By ERICA GOODE
Published: June 18, 2011
In Japan it is known as detergent suicide, a near-instant death achieved by mixing common household chemicals into a poisonous cloud of gas
By some counts, more than 2,000 people there have taken their own lives, inhaling the gas — in most cases hydrogen sulfide — in cars, closets or other enclosed spaces. The police now say they are seeing an increasing number of similar suicides in the United States, inspired by Web sites that carry recipes for the chemical mix as well as detailed instructions on how to use it.
And as in Japan, where the suicides have caused whole neighborhoods to be evacuated and sent dozens of people to the hospital, the desperate and despondent are not the only victims.
Of 72 chemical suicides experts have documented in the United States since 2008, at least 80 percent have resulted in injuries to police officers, firefighters, emergency workers or civilians exposed to the gas, despite the efforts of suicide victims to protect others by putting warning signs on car windows or closet doors, said Deputy Chief Jacob Oreshan of the New York State Office of Fire Prevention and Control, who has been tracking the cases.
Last year there were 36 chemical suicides in the United States. Since Jan. 1, there have been at least 27, indicating that the incidence is rising, Chief Oreshan said. Those numbers, however, still represent a tiny fraction of the 34,000 or so suicides reported each year.
The injuries to first responders have so far been minor. But in some cases where police officers have opened car doors or broken car windows without protective equipment, the gas “is knocking them right to the ground,” Chief Oreshan said. To avoid exposure, rescuers cannot reach the victim until the hazard is cleared, a process that can take hours.
And that, said Michael Cerone, the police chief in Irvington, N.Y., is “heart wrenching.”
“You want to help,” he said. “You want to get in there.”
On March 28, Chief Cerone went to investigate a report of a person slumped inside a Jeep Liberty parked on a deserted dirt road. A sign on the window warned against breaking the glass and urged rescuers to call a hazardous materials team, he said. The bomb squad was summoned, and a robot was sent to breach the car’s rear window. Houses in the neighborhood were evacuated.
At that moment, a few miles away, Dr. Stephen Kelly, a family practice physician, was at the police station in Irvington waiting to file a missing person report on his 24-year-old son, John. As he stood there, a dispatcher on the police radio described the car and the body found inside and Dr. Kelly knew immediately what had happened.
He and his wife, Janet, a nurse, had spent hours that afternoon in an increasingly frantic search for their son, who had suffered since childhood from a severe form of obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression and had been hospitalized in December after a suicide attempt. Dr. Kelly had quit his practice to stay home and try to help John overcome his depression.
Despite John’s illness, he had graduated from college with a degree in psychology and was working at a nearby psychiatric hospital.
“He didn’t let people know,” his mother said. “He was always counseling others.”
Other suicides have followed a similar pattern. On May 23, a 23-year-old woman died in her car in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, after mixing up the recipe and placing signs on the window saying “Danger! Chemicals Inside! Call 911.”
She had made a suicide pact with a man who changed his mind at the last minute and left the car, the police said. In a suicide in Baldwin, Mich., on Jan. 8, emergency workers were taken to the hospital after a firefighter moved a canister in the car of a suicide victim, causing the gas to be re-released. And in Massachusetts, an elderly woman was sickened when the toxic fumes leaked through her ceiling from an upstairs apartment.
“Suicide is generally intended for one victim,” said Richard Perrin, under sheriff of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, who was at the scene of the suicide in Michigan. “Whereas this form of suicide has the potential to affect many, whether it be intended or unintended, and that’s what makes it so dangerous.”
Under Sheriff Perrin is one of about 50 police and fire officials who are part of a nationwide working group organized by Chief Oreshan to educate first responders about the suicides.
In Japan, Web sites advertised the chemical suicide method as a way to “die easily and beautifully,” according to one 2008 news report. After the number of people affected by detergent suicides reached alarming proportions — in the central city of Konan, a 14-year-old girl’s suicide sickened 90 of her neighbors in 2008; in Otaru, 350 people were evacuated after a 24-year-old man’s suicide — government officials tried to persuade Internet sites to remove the recipes.
But the proliferation of the sites has proved difficult to control, and instructions remain readily available, in some cases provided by visitors to suicide forums in answer to pleas from desperate people.
“In my last post I told my story,” one forum participant with the user name “Death” wrote under the headline “researching reliable ways to go.” “I am now here to ask if anyone can put a link to the Japanese detergent suicide recipe.”
Hydrogen sulfide is a colorless gas that smells strongly of rotten eggs and is produced naturally by the decomposition of organic matter. Deaths from it most commonly occur from accidental exposures in mineshafts or sewers. The gas dissipates quickly, but if inhaled at high concentrations it can cause convulsions, coma and a rapid death.
“You definitely don’t take any chances, because literally one breath will kill you,” said Dr. Kurt Kleinschmidt, chief of medical toxicology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, who has been following the suicides.
Dr. Kleinschmidt said the lethality of the method left no room for ambivalence or second thoughts.
John Kelly, the young man who died in Irvington, seemed determined not to be deterred. In the months before his suicide, he had told his parents that he felt increasingly trapped by his obsessions. His world was shrinking, he said.
In a journal entry written a few days before he died, he wrote about his struggles with his disorder: “Need to up the ante, apply the skills. Putting in the work. Gotta put in the effort. There’s no shortcut.”
He noted that he should “look into yoga” and reminded himself that if he felt suicidal he should “take a Klonipin, go to the gym, call a suicide hot line.”
The morning of March 28, Dr. Kelly said, he and his wife talked to John about plans for him to go to McLean Hospital in Boston for further treatment.
“Does that give you hope?” his father asked him. He said it did.
