by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Last time I saw Louis Martin he was cheerful but shabby, a look I was unaccustomed to from what Greeks would call my enantiomorph - my mirror image. We were identical in height and age. Like me, he was a disillusioned cynic, enjoyer of beer and a great admirer of a pretty face. But he was also my opposite: a quiet-spoken, yet rabid revolutionary separatist who usually minded his own business. I dismissed his down-at the-heels ways as a new layer of enigma.

We had a pleasant beer last summer at the fabulously leafy Ste-Elisabeth terrace, and three weeks later he launched himself over the Jacques-Cartier Bridge.

I guess that's another difference. He thought life was too long. I've always thought it was way too short.

I've since felt irritated and betrayed by his awful act. As undoubtedly are countless other Quebecers who've known acquaintances to end their own lives. In fact, every six hours someone commits suicide in la belle province. Women do so at a quarter of the rate of men, but still higher than elsewhere in Canada.

For several years Quebec males have been killing themselves at two to three times the rate of those in Ontario, B.C. and Alberta. It's the leading cause of death of men aged 20 to 39 in Quebec. It stops the metros and has led a whole industry to grow around it and solve and cope with it. You can even get a Ph.D. in suicidology, which would ensure that there will never be a true consensus to explain our self-murdering ways.

We commit more suicides than homicides, which means that statistically you are at more risk of wielding a knife on yourself than somebody else holding it on you. How Darwin would explain this is unknown.

Suicides are slightly down: 1,331 Quebeckers killed themselves in 2002, compared to 1,615 in 1999. But it remains our under-publicized catastrophe. In comparison, 600 die annually of AIDS in the whole country and yet the glitterati still don't sport suicide-prevention ribbons at the Junos.

There's no convincing explanation for Quebec's self-murdering ways, but speculation has involved such theories as:

• Blame the hippies: Charles Côté and Daniel Larouche of the Saguenay Health Board, authors of a World Health Organization study called The Evolution of Suicide in Quebec in the 20th Century, cite Quebec's "declining social fabric," which coincided with the decline of our ecclesiarchy and the embracing of groovy new values.

• Undiagnosed mental illness: Studies have shown that almost everybody who commits suicide is found to have had a mental health problem, although I don't know how they establish this (hard to do the Rorschach test when you're dead).

• Genetics. A recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience blames an "impaired repression at a 5-hydroxytryptamine -1A receptor gene polymorphism." The science fingers a debilitating reduction in serotonin as the culprit.

• Bad education: Around the world - but not here - school children are exposed to problem-solving videos like Zippy's Friends, which are designed sneakily to discourage later thoughts of self-inflicted homicide. Some states have said Zippy has a role in halving of their suicide rates.

• Pseudoautochiria: murder disguised as suicide. Granted I'm sneaking my own theory in here, but I've always suspected that a lot of jumpers are pushed.

Suicide is a touchy subject for the media, indeed the coroner has a full page of guidelines on how to write about it without inadvertently promoting it. But if you read old newspapers - notably from the Depression - Montreal's dailies used to print the gruesome minutiae of local suicides. They were horribly icky and yet the suicide rate hasn't exactly plummeted since their disappearance.

I feel obliged to offer some pithy insight into the real cause of suicide, but frankly it's as perplexing and incomprehensible as could be to somebody who plans on hanging around way past 100 and then begging the Grim Reaper for three more days by the beach.

But if you've entertained dark thoughts of self-directed violence, I'd beg you to seek help, call the suicide hotline at 1-866-APPELLE, and do whatever it takes to fight that horrible urge.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca