Joint Contrast

By – J.C.

Of all the roles David Carradine ever played, on both the big screens and small, the 72-year old actor will forever be remembered by a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately society as the title character in Quentin Tarantino‘s Kill Bill saga.

Yet he was known for much more than that. There was the 1970′s television series he starred in, Kung Fu, and an IMDB page full of appearances in a variety of different shows (Gunsmoke, Airwolf, The Fall Guy, Matlock) and movies (Mean Streets, Cannonball, Bound for Glory, Behind Enemy Lines).

But the last image in many of our minds now is that of Carradine dangling from a cord inside a closet in his Bangkok, Thailand hotel room while a film crew awaited his arrival. (The details painted an even weirder picture than that, if ever you could imagine the possibility.)

If after the initial reports of suicide surfaced you were startled to hear of someone Carradine’s age deciding to make such an exit, which was later discovered not to have been the case, then just take a look at the numbers offered up by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. During a one-year period in 2006 it’s noted that 2,384 people between the ages of 65-74 decided to make a planned-jump from this life, as well as 2,075 individuals between the ages of 75-84. The AFSP also explains that there have already been more than 5-million deaths by suicide throughout the world over the first part of the decade.

Why does this happen at such an alarming rate? There are several factors involved according to various studies. And more often than not it happens to be males making that leap of no return as opposed to women, though females make the attempt three times more often than men.

Guess a lifestyle of fame and fortune, however little or excessive it is, is not enough happiness for some people to accept. Maybe one day depression will be viewed as a serious ailment by our society instead of being looked at as some sort of crutch that those who suffer from it lean on. And from reading a number of news reports, it’s likely Carradine was already a prime candidate for anti-depressants, or an intervention, after battling these demons in year’s past. Yet instead it was a sexual taboo that did Carradine in. Maybe that was his anti-depressant after all.

Had the reports of suicide held up, Carradine would have not only become a suicide statistic but also have joined a growing number of celebrities that have taken their own lives throughout our history. They include the likes of Ray Combs, Kurt Cobain, Herve Villechaize, George Reeves, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson and Elliott Smith, among others.