People in the suicide prevention field discourage the use of the term “committed suicide.” The verb “commit” (when followed by an act) is generally reserved for actions that many people view as sinful or immoral. Someone commits burglary, or murder, or rape, or perjury, or adultery, or crime – or something else bad.
Suicide itself might be bad, yes, but the person who dies by suicide is not committing a crime or sin. Rather, the act of suicide almost always is the product of mental illness, intolerable stress, pain, or trauma.
To portray suicide as a crime or sin stigmatizes those who experience suicidal thoughts or attempt suicide. This stigma, in turn, can deter people from seeking help from friends, family, and professionals.
As Susan Beaton and colleagues note in their article, “Suicide and Language: Why We Shouldn’t Use the ‘C’ Word”:
“Suicide is not a sin and is no longer a crime, so we should stop saying that people ‘commit’ suicide. We now live in a time when we seek to understand people who experience suicidal ideation, behaviours and attempts, and to treat them with compassion rather than condemn them.”
“Completed Suicide” vs. “Died by Suicide”
Warning: I am a word geek. I love language, and I also love discussing its intricacies. Some will deride this discussion of suicide terminology as political correctness gone awry. But language has power. If changing our language can help suicidal people to feel safer asking for help, then changing language can save lives.
With that said, I prefer the term “died by suicide” because it avoids the judgmental connotations of “committed suicide.”
Some people advocate for using the term “completed suicide” instead. I urge people not to use the term “completed” suicide. I explained my objections to the term in this post, and they bear repeating.
What’s Wrong with the Term “Completed Suicide”
Think of the sense of accomplishment you feel when you complete a big project. Then think of the disappointment you feel when you don’t.
Completion is good. Dying prematurely is usually a tragedy.
To complete something conveys success; to leave something incomplete conveys failure. In fact, at universities, if a student receives an “incomplete” in a class and doesn’t complete their remaining requirements on time, the “I” converts to an “F.”
Some suicide prevention advocates use the term “completed suicide” because they view it as an acceptable alternative to “committed suicide.” Not all suicide prevention advocates agree, of course. The State of Maine’s Suicide Prevention Program, for example, states on its website, “Both terms (committed and completed) perpetuate the stigma associated with suicide and are strongly discouraged.”
The term “completed suicide” is especially popular among academics. A search on Google Scholar yields 470 articles where “completed suicide” is used in the title. Here are just a few examples:
- “Characteristics of Completed Suicides,” in the Psychiatric Times
- “Risk of Completed Suicide in 89,049 Young Males Assessed by a Mental Health Professional,” in European Neuropsychopharmacology
- “Suicidal Ideation and Subsequent Completed Suicide in Both Psychiatric and Non-Psychiatric Populations: A Meta-Analysis,” in Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences
Those examples actually bring me to a different complaint about the term “completed suicide.” When “completed” is used as an adjective for suicide (instead of a verb), it is redundant.
Characteristics of completed suicides = characteristics of suicides.
Risk of completed suicide = risk of suicide.
Subsequent completed suicide = subsequent suicide.
Completed suicide is suicide. Why not just say “suicide,” then?
More about the Term “Died by Suicide”
The Associated Press dictates the standards for appropriate language in most mainstream newspapers and magazines (but not academic journals). The AP changed its style book recently to discourage the use of the phrase “committed suicide.” Instead, it recommends alternative terms like “killed himself,” “took her life,” and “died by suicide.”
I have no objections to any of these terms. As a direct substitute for “committed suicide,” I prefer “died by suicide.” I’ve heard only a couple complaints about this term, and none is that it perpetuates stigma against people who die by suicide, as the term “committed suicide” does, or that it portrays the act of suicide as an accomplishment, as the term “completed suicide” does.
The first complaint is that “died by suicide” is a little clunky. Usually, we say somebody died of something (like, “she died of cancer”) not by something. Suicide is different, I guess, because the term “died by her own hand” also is in the vernacular.
The second complaint I’ve heard from folks, especially my students, is that “died by suicide” is an unfamiliar term and hard to get used to using. It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Over time, the more you substitute the term “died by suicide,” the more natural it becomes. Likewise, over time, the more you say “died by suicide,” the more the term “committed suicide” will hurt your ears.
And if you’re like me, “completed suicide” will hurt your ears even worse. So please, I urge you, say something else.
Copyright 2017 by Stacey Freedenthal, PhD, LCSW. Written for SpeakingOfSuicide. All Rights Reserved. Photos purchased from Fotolia.com.
I agree with using the wording, died by suicide. I know that wording means everything to the loved ones of the person that is dead.
Anonymous,
Hmm, I detect some irony there. No, the wording doesn’t mean everything to the loved ones, but I’ve heard from many survivors of suicide loss that the phrase “commit suicide” is hurtful to them. If it helps even a little to use a different set of words, why not use it?
I find it really upsetting at times when many advocates what to change or read more into issues so it feels better to people. Suicide is death. The person who goes down that painful path of thinking of suicide is not stuck on the wording except I am hurting and can’t figure this out. The real issue is changing society perception of mental health so people can finally get help without being judged. Stop trying to make yourself feel good about a person deciding that life is too painful to deal with. I prefer died by suicide because that is the reality. I do not see the word committed as offence because that word does not only apply to something negative. Committed to me means the person did what they planned to do-they were committed to ending the pain. The work complete also means the accomplish what they set out to do and that is end the pain via suicide. let’s stop making people feel comfortable at other expense. Suicide is painful and it hurts family, friend, and community. it is the final act of a mental heath issue.
Personally, I just say “they killed themselves.” That gets the concept across without shaming them.
For the avoidance of doubt by, “What punishment should they have to face?” I mean the tormentor, unwitting and otherwise, who could be a serious and long term threat to the health and wellbeing of acutely vulnerable children and adults., following suicides and many other dire circumstances.
Inflicting our own harmful views in ‘therapeutic’ situations, must be prohibited and urgently stopped when it exists.
That includes a need to satisfy our own determination to avoid so-called political correctness. Referring to “PC” is often a lazy attempt to avoid critical analysis and used like waving a magic wand, to close down analysis and impose an unrecognised dogma.
In health and welfare settings, it is crucial to identify, permanently remove and punish, staff who are causing subtle and stark emotional abuse of acutely vulnerable children and adults.
When responding to their desperate needs, self gratification because of religious, philosophical, political or other beliefs, cannot be a legal or psychological justification for inflicting unintentional torment.
That could easily become a slippery slope to torture, resulting in investigations and prosecutions many years later. The reason why such scandals keep being exposed, is because they were not nipped in the bud and were left to spiral out of control.
It is essential to recognise the dangers in the early and very subtle stages. The danger signs are often in the attitudes, beliefs and values of new students and unqualified staff with their feet on the first rung of a career ladder and that is the time to stop them. It is a difficult action to take but easier than having to deal with abuse and scandals.
As previously mentioned, I speak not as an armchair theorist but a former tutor, continuing practitioner (unpaid) and relentless whistleblower, who has acted to prevent and stop various types of serious abuse and had to resort to courts and tribunals.
For the avoidance of doubt, are you are telling me, that it is the right and proper thing to do, when helping bereaved young children,
who are bereft by the suicide of a parent, other close relative or a friend, that the reason for their pain, is because the person they miss so much was a heartless criminal? Me thinks that the true criminal would be the tormentor. What punishment should they have to face? In what subject do you hope to graduate and would you be safe working with vulnerable children and adults?
The best thing in the world for bereaved young children is to hear the truth. Telling them things that are untrue will lead to their not trusting your word in the future. Telling them that their parent was a heartless criminal has (in my opinion) no positive benefit – you are basically telling them that they are the children of a criminal – how is that supposed to make them feel?
What punishment would we recommend for the person who has taken their own life?
My perspective on this is incredibly eastern and would not likely be accepted by most people in the west. I believe that every person is on a journey that encompasses many lifetimes. In that eastern perspective it is believed that those who take their own lives will have their lives taken from them in a future lifetime. In that perspective everyone eventually reaps what they sow.