Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

The poet Sylvia Plath killed herself in 1963 by placing her head inside an oven with the gas turned on. Plath had long suffered from depression and was obsessed with suicide, which she wrote about frequently in her works. Her friend Anne Sexton was a similarly brilliant and troubled person who took her own life in 1974. However, Gladwell argues that neither of their suicides were inevitable. They died because they had the impulse to do so when the circumstances were right. At the time of Plath’s death, people’s homes in Britain were supplied with “town gas,” which contained the deadly compound carbon monoxide. It was a simple and effective way to kill oneself and consequently was the most popular method of suicide until the country began making the switch to natural gas in 1965. Natural gas was free of carbon monoxide, and the preferred form of suicide was thus taken away.

Many would assume that suicidal people would simply find a different way to kill themselves. This is an idea called displacement, in which removing one option means that people will just try something else. Gladwell, however, proposes that some behaviors are coupled, or “linked to very specific circumstances and conditions” (273).