Analyzing a Suicide for All the Wrong Reasons : The media: Self-absorbed journalists failed to recognize the true cause of Vincent Foster’s death: mental illness.

The weeks of press coverage, talk-show punditry and editorializing surrounding the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster have revealed a sad isolation that consumes too much of our public dialogue.

Like narcissists, the media and Washington in general have become overly fascinated by their role and their power to shape events. And this self-absorption is getting in the way of the media performing their larger function, that of educating and informing the public about important issues facing society.

Foster’s suicide should have prompted a national discussion of mental illness, depression and suicide--matters not well understood but of deep public concern--in much the same way that Betty Ford’s bout with breast cancer led to wider knowledge of that illness, or as Rock Hudson’s death by AIDS led to a new openness about that disease.

In this case, however, the press and Washington have missed this opportunity by transforming the aftermath of Foster’s suicide into a largely misplaced and easily denied question-and-answer session about secondary issues concerning themselves: Did the media kill Vince Foster (they didn’t); whether Washington is a tough town (it is, but nowhere near as tough as it thinks it is), and whether White House aides could have been more honest with themselves and the public about Foster’s personal problems (they could have).

When pieced back together, the shredded note found in Foster’s briefcase and made public Aug. 10 evokes a wrenching, eloquent pain. “I made mistakes from ignorance, inexperience and overwork . . . . I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life,” he had written.

The note, too, contains pained denunciations of a city and a profession that are the chosen home of America’s media: “Here ruining people is considered sport . . . . The WSJ (Wall Street Journal) editors lie without consequence . . . . The press is covering up the illegal benefits they received from the travel staff.”

In its totality, the note makes obvious, as even White House Communications Director Mark D. Gearan put it, that Foster had “lost perspective.” In 10 sentences, Foster accuses the FBI of lying, the press of lying, the Republican Party of misrepresenting, the White House household staff of conspiracy and abuse, and then admits it is all too much for him.

A poignant, compelling expression of a man overwhelmed, by small things as well as large. Many in Washington, even in the Clinton Administration, have suffered Washington character assassination worse than Foster. Mental illness, not headlines, led to Foster’s death.

But in the public discussion that followed, the press and Washington, ignoring this larger picture, seized largely on the question of their own guilt.

A search of databases, for instance, reveals that in the more than 100 stories written about Foster’s suicide just in the two weeks-plus since the note was made public, only 12 articles in newspapers and magazines concern the question of mental illness, suicide and depression.

Why did the press not fully grasp the larger and more valuable side of this story?

The answer cannot be ignorance of the public’s interest in the question of mental illness. Four of the books on the current New York Times bestseller list concern psychology, psychotherapy, mental health or psychiatry.

The reasons the press misplayed this story, I suspect, lie elsewhere. One factor is convenience. Nothing could be easier for journalists to reflect on than the nature of Washington and the media.

A second factor is a lingering sense of anger toward one part of the media, the Wall Street Journal editorial pages. The Journal seemed on a crusade to attack President Clinton’s confidantes from Arkansas, often in searing and sarcastic terms.

That crusade did not end with Foster’s death. The morning after his body was found, and several days before he was buried, the Journal instantly concluded that since it knew of no history of depression, his death was indeed “mysterious” and called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of it.

Yet bad taste, even a lack of civility, does not tilt the significance of a story in a new direction. I fear that the larger reason that the media and Washington fixed on itself as the center of this tragedy is a self-absorption leavened with defensiveness and a unhealthy dose of isolation. Accused of being partly responsible for Foster’s death, the press and official Washington became fascinated with their culpability.

One of the few essays on the broader implications of this story, a piece written for this newspaper by Dr. Robert H. Gerner (Op-Ed Page, Aug. 9), noted that “once thought to be a psychological dysfunction, depression is now considered an illness of the brain, associated with biological changes . . . . In fact, work and family problems are more commonly the result of depression’s effect on mood, thinking and judgment, not the cause.

“The hardest part of what is required if we are to help,” Gerner wrote, “is the rejection of the stigma associated with mental illness. Depression is not caused by a weakness of character.”

In this case, the media have hardly removed the stigma, and unwittingly may have helped reinforce it.