California Suicide Cleanup

Suicide Cleanup Narrative

Decontamination - Sterilization - Training and Experience - Prices Suicide Arguments

Suicide cleanup begins after the coroner leaves the suicide scene. The coroner or county administrator pastes a seal on the door. Only a responsible party, not the suicide cleaner, has the authority to break this seal. When the responsible party communicates to the suicide cleaner their understanding, and when the suicide cleaner responds with his or her understanding, the suicide cleanup begins.

Our suicide cleanup technician first removes biohazard material, contains and decontaminates these materials (or seals them), and then begins cleaning. Suicide cleanup includes scrubbing with abrasive materials, rinsing, and then cleaning again. Areas soiled by biohazard materials are sealed. At times we seal entire rooms. Our cleaning process reduces or removes the death odors.

Decontamination

Ozone gas and chemical fogs help to decontaminate and remove germs and odors before, during, and after suicide cleanup. Both tools work well for suicide cleanup to cover wide areas contaminated by flies and other insects. Suicide cleanup decontamination requires removing the source material. Sealing the once blood soiled area ensures decontamination by encapsulating biohazard material. Suicide cleanup decontamination is not the same as sterilization. Sterilization occurs in very few placs.

Sterilization

Clean rooms created for scientific research sometimes claim to have a "sterile environment," but even here the possibility for contamination remains high. Many hours of hard labor, thousands of dollars for filters, and millions of dollars for filtration equipment help to sterilize environments. Some authors point to boiling water and steam generated by boiling water as "sterile," which seems logical enough. Of course none of this applies to a practical suicide cleanup.

Using boiling water and steam to "sterilize" surgical equipment remains a common method of blood cleanup and recycling tools for surgery and scientific research. Otherwise, the use of boiling water has its limits. Boiling water exists under the earth's oceans as it mixes with cool sea water. Shifting continental plates create pressure under the surface and volcanic action releases the boiling water, which becomes habitat for life forms in some cases. This proves that boiling water will not always destroy organisms, especially after a suicide cleanup.

Chemicals like bleach destroy bloodborne pathogen (germs) like HIV, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C, but claiming that areas treated with bleach become sterilized cannot be done proven after suicide cleanup, given the equipment and tools available. Reducing micro-organisms and eliminating their conditions for survival, their habitat, is the best we or anyone else can do.

Reducing bacteria count during suicide cleanup to a level as low as or lower than the pre-suicide act calls for a professional suicide cleanup technician. However, when a family or friends do a suicide cleanup, we have pages giving some suggestions at crimescenecleanup.com/Suicide_Cleanup.html

Protective equipment worn reflects the age of the suicide scene and possibilities for personal contamination.

Training and Experience

My experience includes military trauma cleanup and seven years of homicide cleanup, suicide cleanup, and unattended death decomposition cleanup.

In the military I cleaning equipment soiled by blood and other materials. Many times my own equipment needed cleaning after helping others injured. I have no fear of blood or death scenes, but I do understand today's bloodborne hazards.

In the active army I served for 3 years, and then 20 years in the National Guard and Army Reserve. During these years decontamination training remained a central part of training for all soldiers because of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

My formal training derives mostly from the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning, and Restoration, IICRC, classes. I took classes from Carl Williams (RIP) a number of times. Carl remains one of the most prolific writers in the Janitorial and Sanitation industry. As a result I bring skills, knowledge, and abilities to suicide cleanup.

Other instructors also offered class work and hands-on work in carpet cleaning, upholstery cleaning, floor inspection, water damage and restoration, mold inspection and restoration (NAMP), crime scene cleanup, and house inspection (AHIT).

Formal Education

No degrees for suicide cleanup exist, but if they did, I would earn one. I hold an Associate of Arts, general education, Bachelor's in Sociology, and Master of Science in Educational Counseling. I have held many teaching credentials, including adult education, English Language Arts (High School), English as a Second Language, and more.

I have both public and private school teaching experience.

Prices

As a retired teacher without employees, my suicide cleanup prices remain below my competitions' prices in most cases. I clean throughout California. If a suicide occurs in a Southern California home, you most likely will not learn about my services until too late because of cronyism. Most suicide cleanup in Southern California get done by crony suicide cleanup companies. These companies receive their suicide cleanup information from county employees working for the coroner or county administrator. See Crime Scene Cleanup Cronyism for more information on cronyism in coroner, medical examiner, and county administrator offices.

In fact, because of corruption in our local governments, I must create hundreds of suicide cleanup web pages to find suicide cleanup work.

Suicide Cleanup Narrative

White Male Suicides - White Female Suicides - Black Female Suicides

Note: I use the term "American" for US citizens while I understand that all of the North, Central, South American geographical areas have "American" inhabitants.

If you have wondered about which group of people in our society commit suicide most often, you will not be surprised that single, older, white males lead all other sociological groupings. This group leads older, white women, a group accounting for the second most suicides. By now you may have begun to piece together what's going on in your life and anyone's life that you have lost to suicide.

Of the various sociological groups studied for suicide, black women have the greatest number of suicide attempts, but the lowest rate of suicide.

If we were to consider the broader, more obvious conditions these three groups experience during their lives, we might look at what follows as something to contemplate, add to, and further discuss with others.

Suicide Cleanup and White Male Suicides

I understand that I'm privileged to enter a stranger's home, especially when I'm hired of suicide cleanup.

White American males in our society have some baggage others do not have when born into the world. Granted, white males have many privileges others do not share, but they carry expectations others do not share. I will not write on male privileges, which have only come into the social discourse during the last generation. Whiteness also accords privileges not part of the social discourse until the last generation, except in scholarly books and journals. Since suicide cleanup proves to me that white males suffer, in spite of their privileged status.

White males suffer emotionally at times from the dominant ideology's "competitive" drive and "individualism." Whether or not these individualized relationships actually exist in our American society misses the point.

The point shows that the dominant American ideology places males at the top of the power hierarchy while expecting the most from white males' performance. Not all males buy into this ideology, or at least do not accept this part as applying to them. For these fortunate few, life goes on without the unmentioned pressures bestowed on those American males indoctrinated to the competitive, acquisitive, individualism of the dominant ideology.

So for the majority of males life in the US means competition and individualism from boyhood to manhood. The strident individualism came across the Atlantic with the Pilgrims, especially the Protestants. (See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.) With these colonialists came gun powder and firearms, which were used for game and dealing with indigenous populations.

Firearms happen to be the weapon of choice among American males chosing suicide. Handguns take the prize as the preferred firearm. We should expect this outcome because part of the dominant ideology bases itself on the romantisized American Western story so popular in the middle of the last century. The detective and murder mysteries have replaced the wester, but not its formula of individualism competition, and violence.

Popular westerns like "Have gun Will Travel," "The Rifleman," and others captured young males' imaginations. College courses on film began using The Six-Gun Mystique to explain the power of the western and handgun. Commercialized interests profitted wildly from this "mystique" and befor long it became deeply interwoven in the American consciousness.

Some will point to penny wester novels like Lewis Lamore's work and Jack London's work, to name a couple. These two played a role, but nothing like commercialized television role fallowing the end of Edward R. Murrow's genuine news television for profit beginning with the "I Love Lucy" series.

The emerging western set the bar for masculinity, and that bar reached for guns, competition, and individualism, all components of the American Western.

Add the above social and cultural baggage to surviving as a white male, and the outcome becomes apparent during periods of social change. Economic hardship cuts into the white males' ability to maintain the image of the individual succeeding by their own wits and skills, like western heros. Add the handgun to the floundering while males' picture of the world and the prospects for suicide increase.

Naturally, we look to older white males left alone in the world by divorce, death, and simple single lifestyles. Disease and other physical problems add to the burdens of life. Old age becomes the last issue to consider here. Often older people become objects of derision and scorn among the young, especially now that Social Security and other social services appear to go forward on the backs of the young. Needless to say, environmental collapse adds to these hostile feelings toward older generations.

Whatever we might believe about the above, white males account for about 73% of suicides in the USA. The majority of these use handguns. In Europe, the noose remains the preferred means of suicide for white males.

White Females

White females survive in "a man's world" and patriarchy set the tone in almost all areas of American life. Women divorce abusive husbands and become the sole means of support for their children. Women remain married to abusive husbands "for the sake of the children" and survive as punching bags for a child in a man's body, their husband.

When these women become lonely in their older years, they become at risk for suicide, especially by overdose.

Black Women

Black women figure highest in attempts and lowest in suicide. If we compare and contrast the two worlds of black women and white men we come up two staggering different worlds.

While white men bend toward individualism, competitiveness, and violence (football on Monday nights), black women bend toward community, cooperation, and religiosity.

What I've said about white women will apply to black women, and sometimes, many times, with sharper edges. Black women attempting suicide elicit concern from others in their community. The black woman's community usually has less wealth, fewer resources, and less social power in most situations outside of the government workforce.

Because of their poverty they live more closely with others and find solace in the comfort of others nearby "in the same boat." In brief, it's lonelyness and powerlessness for both white males and black females that leads to suicidial thoughts and action.

It's the males' competitiveness, guns, and attitude toward violence that leads to their suicide.

It's the black women's shared experience as discrimation objects and derision in white culture, until recently, that gives them a sense of surviving together.

Suicide Arguments

I write metaphorically here; after all, metaphores rule any discussion of life, death, and suicide.

After completing well over one hundred suicide cleanup jobs, I 've come to the conclusion that suicide victims die at peace with the universe and at war with the world. This means to me that the suicide victim may fear death, while at the same time preferring death to life at war. The fear of life, the shame of life, the hurt of life, the lonliness of life, and perhaps the absurdity of life create the need for with the universe.

As with birth, death's exit from the world separates the deceased as does birth separate the fetus from its mother. The fetus joins the world defenseless. The suicide victim exits the world in self-defense by self-extinction, ironic as this twist of fate sounds.The fetus joins the world as a biological bundle of potentiality and soon grows into the roles shaped for it by its sociey's institutions and customs. The suicide victim exits his life's potential rather than explore the next moments promise or threat.

We know the majority of suicides in the United States occur by handguns in the hands of of white men, about 73% of suicides. The majority of these sucides create suicide cleanup issues proving that the suicide left the world self-absorbed; this means that male suicides tend towards the horrific.

At time the white male's suicide leaves evidence that the suicide victim's state of mind, at war, menacinly soils the suicide scene to the greatest degree possible. His final act intended to shock and punish the suicide victim's friends and relatives.

We should expect, in another time, penny-in-the slot suicide machines allowing for zero remains. I suspect only a few suicide victimes will use them. Somehow leaving a biological statement behine seems to apply to the meaning of "suicide" for many white males.