According to the Health and Wellness Resource Center, people who are intelligent, but abuse drugs, are most likely to commit suicide. In the novel, Mockingbird by Walter Tevis, humans are dependent on narcotics to live through a world of illiteracy which results in suicidal thoughts throughout the population. As it was written during the years leading up to 1980, Mockingbird is somewhat a reaction to the author’s life before then. It portrays the rise of narcotic substances, which is shown, as the characters in the novel are constantly under the influence of drugs. The human populations in the story are all illiterate, which is contradicting the increase in reading and writing scores in America during the seventies. Also, as suicide is very …show more content…
Sopor, also known by its registered name, methaqualone was made a Schedule ll drug by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973 as people became dependent to it (“Judge Links Drug to Dependency, U.S. Puts Strict Controls on It”). On the contrary, the robot run government in the novel promoted the use of such drugs to control the human population from increasing and to make them ignorant of the robots plans to annihilate humans from existence. Bentley stops taking Sopor after he realizes the negative effects of it. As a result to his lifelong dependency to Sopor, he faced the known withdrawal symptoms of stomach cramping and insomnia, while urging to take the drug again (Health and Wellness Resource Center). Methaqualone is also a common drug among youths as they use it as a stress reliever and sexual stimulator. The antagonist, Bob Spofforth is an advanced robot in the novel who recalls his time working at a school. He saw teenagers using Sopor and marijuana every day, which made them sexually active for a limited amount of time, as the people believed that “quick sex is the best” (Tevis 11). This was a dictum created by the robots to avoid long-lasting interpersonal relationships, as they believed in Individuality and Privacy to a high degree and this would prevent human reproduction. A large part of the drug influence on youth, came from …show more content…
In a world where individualism is practiced and no relationships occur, people feel lonely, which causes depression and results to suicide. The author must have included this theme in his novel, as just in the last thirty years before the publication, suicide rates had tripled in the United States (National Bureau of Economic Research). Bentley repeatedly talks about suicide in the book, as he has witnessed it in public on many occasions. On his first day in New York, Bentley witnessed a group immolation where “two young men and women seated themselves in front of a building” from where they burnt themselves in front of everyone, to which people only noticed for a few minutes as “they are said to happen frequently in New York” (Tevis 21-22). Along with that, Spofforth is also lonely, as no human wants to interact with him because he is a robot. He wants to die as he has been lonely for hundreds of years, but his programing prevents him from committing suicide, making him very envious of humans. “People who don’t feel they have [any] kind of support from their families are often the ones who commit suicide” as said by Dr. Kenneth Shulman of Sunnybrook Medical Centre, whose study resulted that 20 to 30% of suicides that occur in the United States are of people sixty-five and older (“Top Suicide Risk Seen In Elderly”). These people are usually neglected as their families have moved on and in some cases their