Autocide

Four cars in four years have smashed into Bridge 238 on the Kansas Turnpike near Topeka. In each case, the driver was the lone occupant, and he was killed. In each case, turnpike police made the same notation on their report: daylight, clear, road dry, level and straight, no skid marks. "Cause: improper driving." Or was it suicide? No one can know for sure, but more and more police and traffic experts suspect that "autocide," as one expert calls it, is an important cause of traffic deaths.

Estimates as to how many of last year's more than 52,000 road fatalities were suicides--or the unwitting victims of some other driver's suicidal impulse --range from less than 1% to about 10%. The evidence is almost always circumstantial, and the chance of identifying an automobile death as anything other than "accidental" is just about nil unless the suicide himself thoughtfully provides a note or blurts out his intent before he takes the wheel.

Double Indemnity. "There are more of these that we suspect are suicide than we care to say," says John McCleverty, director of the Cook County, Ill., traffic commission. "But we simply don't know." Adds Colonel Dan Casey, chief of the Nebraska safety patrol: "We may have the feeling a traffic death may have been a suicide, but we need proof." Yet one figure, circumstantial as it may be, stands out. Though all auto deaths have increased by 32% in the past ten years, single-car fatalities that result from collisions with fixed objects--the most likely form of autocide --have jumped 56%.

The car has several inherent advantages as an instrument of suicide, aside from its ready availability. Because it cannot be clearly labeled, autocide not only avoids the social stigma attached to suicide, but also, as Arthur Miller's Willy Loman realized, almost automatically guarantees double indemnity on most life-insurance policies. There is even an emotional release not found in most other forms of self-destruction.

None of the more common and conventional methods, note Psychiatrists Melvin Selzer and Charles Payne in the American Journal of Psychiatry, can offer so "dramatic an opportunity for the gratification of destruction and aggressive impulses."

The Rev. Kenneth Murphy, director of Boston's Rescue Inc., a nonsectarian church organization that tries to head off suicides through counseling and persuasion, believes that there may even be an "installment plan of suicide." Many people, he says, become so distraught that they drive recklessly in a subconscious effort to destroy themselves--without ever knowing consciously what they are doing. "For them," says Father Murphy, "each accident, whether serious or extremely minor, is a partial suicide."

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