Chris Cornell, the Black Hole Sun, and the Seasonality of Suicide

Abstract

Purpose: Seattle-inspired rock and roll superstar Chris Cornell died by suicide in May 2017. In the northern hemisphere, May represents the peak of the widely replicated but still unexplained seasonal spring rhythm in suicide. Years earlier, Cornell had suffered openly from recurrent bouts of severe depression, and his early musical lyrics do indeed suggest an enduring sensitivity to the vicissitudes of depressed and suicidal states. Cornell's most famous song, Black Hole Sun, suggests a mixed mood state, the incidence of which also peaks in the spring. The present work explores Cornell's May suicide from a chronobiologic perspective.

Methods: Review of Cornell's lyrics and literature on suicide.

Results: Cornell's lyrics contain clear indicators of mixed depressive and seasonal imagery, highlighting 3 fundamental axioms of suicidology: (1) the yearly suicide rhythm peaks in May in the northern hemisphere, (2) mixed depressive states are particularly lethal, and (3) the suicide risk increases dramatically when recovering from depression and mood turns mixed.

Conclusions: Cornell, in his life and music, left us with a novel and important hypothesis about the spring seasonality of suicide, namely, that the yearly suicide risk becomes maximal when winter turns to spring and there emerges a deadly mixed mood state under a May photoperiod, i.e., the suicide risk is maximal when a Black Hole Sun occurs in May. It is hoped that Cornell's legacy and sensitive hypothesis inspire research into the etiology and treatment of the spring seasonality of suicide risk and mixed mood states.

Limitations: The Cornell hypothesis was formulated based in part on several speculative inferences regarding the course of his functioning just prior to his suicide.

Keywords: Epidemiology; Latitude; Mixed depression; Photoperiod; Seasons; Suicide.

Fig. 1

a Average number of suicides per day for each month in the USA from 1999 to 2016. Note the apparent marked increase over time in the amplitude of the seasonal factor. May has the maximum number of suicides in 5 of the 18 years, whereas December has the minimum number of suicides in 15 of the 18 years. b Simplest least squares curve fit for the data in Figure 1a. The curve is described by the equation: suicides per day per month = 75.30 + 0.22t – (2.76 + 0.021t) × cos(2πt/12 + 0.006), where t is the time (in months with January = 1, 13, 25…) from 1 to 216. All 5 numerical coefficients are highly significant at p < 0.0005, including the amplifier coefficient 0.021, which drives the linearly increasing amplitude of the seasonal suicide effect over time.

Fig. 2

Number of times that a month was the peak suicide month for a given year in the USA from 1999 to 2016.