The other day I had the opportunity to see a presentation by Stockton’s very own Dr. David Lester. The presentation, “The “I” of the Storm: Understanding the Suicidal Mind”, is about his experiences and research about the mind of a suicidal person. I was excited to see this presentation because the topic was one that I was interested in and I wanted to see how my future teacher (for next semester) would be.

At the start of the presentation, Dr. Lester voiced his surprise at the turnout of people. He was really only expecting a couple of psychology students to show up so he did not have a microphone. This, I imagined, did actually affect how many students heard him. While he tried to speak up it was somewhat hard to listen to him even though I was in the middle row. Anyway, he started off with an introduction; what was the objective of this presentation, where he got the inspiration and the materials for this study, and how        he had compiled the information. Dr. Lester is fascinated by suicide and what goes on in the suicidal mind. He had published a number of papers on the subject but had not really come to understand what occurs in the suicidal mind. However, one day in one of his classes, a student came up to him and offered him her sister’s diary. Her sister had died from suicide a couple months earlier. He took the diary and ran it through a writing analysis program, and saw how she had felt about herself. Dr. Lester explained how even though the common thought is that suicidal people are very depressed; there is actually a lot of anger in them too.  She was very into her appearance and how if she was perfect, then she would be loved. That was another important word, perfection. She was constantly striving for perfection or wishing to be perfect, and in that way shut herself off from the rest of the world.  A month or several weeks before she died however, there was a change in her style of writing. She became happier or at least more at peace and talked more positively.  Dr. Lester used this example to show how the mood changes once the decision seems to have been made to commit suicide. He stressed how rare suicide was though.  According to him, only about 32,000 out of 380 million people in the United States die from suicide. This to me seemed very small compared to how suicide had been stressed in my health classes. The health classes as well as the media had given me the opinion that suicide was actually quite prominent.

Dr. Lester used several other examples, including other male and female diaries each with their own set of issues and writing styles. One man seemed to have suffered from an anxiety disorder increased by his living in constant darkness and having a major road by his house. The most interesting example Dr. Lester had though was two tape recordings from a young man who had committed suicide. One was taken before lunch the day of his death while the other was taken after. The first one showed him as a weeping emotional wreck but the second one showed a completely different person, calm and worrying about how his death would affect others. Dr. Lester’s analysis of the tapes was quite interesting as was the rest of his presentation.

Overall, I enjoyed Dr. Lester’s seminar and hope that he continues to do more research on the subject and show his findings. I would like to see another seminar with his findings in the future and hopefully more people will come to learn about this saddening topic and there will be a way found to stop it.