Many of this site’s readers send me angry emails or texts. They post challenging comments. Some are so passionately opposed to suicide prevention that they resort to harassment. I have received threatening missives and phone calls from numerous people. Some urge me to kill myself.
A common argument is that people should be free to die by suicide without intervention by others, no matter what:
“For some people there is little to be done sadly and if they want to exit life then I completely understand and I believe they should be helped: either by medical personnel or at least by giving them access to pain-free means. This is the humane, moral and decent thing to do and it respects their autonomy and human dignity…”
That comment, by a reader named Zara, raises good points. It is just one comment among many that have caused me to question myself:
By advocating for stopping people from suicide except in the context of terminal illness, am I wrong?
Why don’t people, regardless of terminal illness, have the right to end their own life, without anybody interfering, interrupting, or otherwise intervening?
What if the suicidal person’s mental or physical suffering truly is intolerable and with no end coming soon, if ever?
Is it inhumane to stop a suffering person from ending their life?
Why?
Why not?
The Most Difficult, if Fleeting, Question
People who long for suicide typically want to escape unbearable torment. They experience deep emotional or physical pain, or existential malaise, or fear, or trauma, or psychosis, or material hardships like poverty, or something else so powerful that it snuffs out the biologically ingrained will to live.
They feel hopeless that things will ever change. Indeed, they do not simply feel hopeless. They are convinced their situation is hopeless.
People intent on suicide often want to end their lives for very compelling reasons.
I think of all this, and a troubling question settles on me. I dedicate my work to suicide prevention, but even I wonder, if momentarily:
Why not let them die by suicide?
Suicide Prevention and the Greater Good
In preventing suicide, yes, we are trying to help the suicidal person. We know, based on years of research about suicide attempt survivors, that even intensely suicidal people are likely to regain the desire to live. As I describe in the post “Where Are They Now?: The Fate of Suicide Attempt Survivors,” most people who survive a suicide attempt do not later die by suicide.
But we are not only helping the suicidal person by working hard to prevent suicide. We also are helping people who care about the suicidal person.
Suicide hurts the living. We strive to prevent suicide not only to save the suicidal person from dying prematurely and unnecessarily. We also strive to prevent suicide to save children from losing parents, parents from losing children, partners from losing love, and communities from losing valued individuals.
As Jennifer Michael Hecht wrote in her book, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It: “The whole of humanity suffers when someone opts out.”
In seeking to prevent one person’s suicide, we also seek to prevent even more suicides. People who lose someone they love to suicide are at higher risk for suicide themselves. One suicide can lead to another, what is called “suicide contagion.”
Please let me be clear: In describing the harm that suicide does to others, I am not blaming the suicidal person. Rather, I blame the forces that lead to suicide, just as the blame for a person’s death to cancer belongs to the cancer, not to the person who died. In this regard, the person who died by suicide is suicide’s victim – but not the only one.
A World Without Suicide Prevention
Some people lament that suicide prevention measures deprive people of the ultimate liberty – that is, the freedom to die on one’s own terms.
Consider the alternative: A society where people are not stopped from dying by suicide. Where parents and children and friends and lovers watch, without recourse, as tragedy unfolds. Where there is no pathway for keeping a suicidal person safe without the person’s consent, even though the chances are very high that the person will recover the will to live if given the chance. Where friends, family, and professionals are not allowed to prevent what might be preventable.
A society that tries to prevent suicide sends the message to people who suffer, and to those who love them, that their lives matter. That suicide is not the answer. That people care and can try to help. That things have a good chance of getting better.
No doubt, we need to do more as a society. On a large scale, people need more resources and more reasons to want to stay alive. If society treated people better – if there were more jobs, better access to health care, and less violence, for example – fewer people would want to die.
Society needs to do more for suicidal people besides keep them alive and miserable. But letting people kill themselves without providing any means for prevention isn’t a solution, either.
Questions In Search of Answers
More emails from strangers will come to me, missives full of challenges, perhaps even anger. I know this. I anticipate some of the comments:
You are selfish. Why should one person suffer so that others don’t?
Why should people stay alive to help society when society doesn’t provide enough help to people who stay alive?
Who decides what is best for the suicidal person? For society?
Those are good questions, and maybe I will tackle them in future posts.
What are your answers?
Copyright 2018 by Stacey Freedenthal, PhD, LCSW. Written for SpeakingOfSuicide..
Consider the case of the meddling grandmother who desperately wants her grandson to become a priest, even though the grandson is an atheist. Should he endure an intolerable life in a profession he finds meaningless and burdensome just to please his grandmother? Of course not. Our society respects the individual autonomy of people to make their own decisions about matters affecting their own personal, vital interests, even if these choices have major impacts on other people. Now the argument against suicide presented here is mainly that people shouldn’t commit suicide because it may influence others badly or hurt them in some way, but this is foolish, given the way our society recognizes the boundaries between individual autonomy regarding essential and intimate personal decisions and the influence those decisions may have on others. So what your argument is recommending is that those boundaries be suspended solely in the case of suicide, so even though Mr. A loathes his life and eagerly wants to escape it, he has to keep living because his mailman will be irritated at having to cross A’s name off the parcel delivery list, or because some other ridiculous, minor interest of a third party will be negatively impacted by A’s decision. The desire of A to die is twenty trillion times greater than the interest of others that A live, so any rational utilitarian calculus, and any culturally appropriate respect for human autonomy and personhood, has to recognize the autonomous claim of each person to decide for himself or herself whether to continue living, regardless of its affect on others. The reductio ad absurdum of your argument is that the atheist grandson would have to become a priest to please his grandmother!
It is important to keep in mind that there are many cases of rational suicide where situations will never get any better and the fact that they will never improve can clearly be calculated at this moment. If someone has lived alone with a sole caregiver for her entire life and is now aged and infirm and has no other human contacts yet that caregiver dies, there is clearly no realistic prospect of that lost beloved person ever being replaced, for example. So if this loss is intolerable, why continue to tolerate it? If you were strapped to a bed being slowly tortured to death in some Middle Eastern prison where your tormentors have announced their intention to kill you and I give you some poison to end your torture now should you take it? Of course, that is only rational. Life is full of hopeless traps which can never be escaped and which will never get any better, so when we find ourselves in those situations, our rationality tells us to leave life if there are no other avenues of escape.
So much of the irrational opposition to suicide which exists is an inheritancee of the Christian myth, that an infinitely good, infinitely wise, and infintely powerful God (who somehow permits terrible evils not caused by human agency) has given you your life so you have no right to end it before He says so. Although this whole mythology is dying out, it leaves its modern remnants in the irrational fear many authors have of the rational self-deliverance of suicide.
I have been kept alive for over 30 years. I have given up on suicide and now just wait to die naturally. Am I alive? No. People that prevent suicide are just plain selfish.
There’s nothing stopping you from committing suicide. If you are talking about suicide it means you are sick of your life and considering death which means you want to live you are just looking for a good reason to keep going and having a hard time finding one.
No one can truly prevent you from suicide. Thinking anyone can prevent you from killing yourself is you fooling yourself into thinking you can’t do it.
If you can’t kill yourself it means you want to live. Things happen only if you want them to happen.
So stop pretending you want to die and live.
[This comment was edited, per the Comments Policy. — SF]
“No one can truly prevent you from suicide”
That’s an obvious falsehood. Suicide requires tools. And one certainly can be blocked from obtaining those tools for any reason. So why don’t you stop pretending people want to live. If a simple stress free, maybe even pleasurable method of suicide was discovered/offered as a service, you can bet your ass people would choose it in droves. The sad fact is that all of the “tragic, painful” suicides that happen only happen because people are shamed/pushed to the darkest methods available.
The central point your analysis is missing is the following: Since we all have an enormous instinctual drive to continue living, just because we are biological entities and are programmed to persist, we must have an even greater drive to die if we have reached a point where we wish to commit suicide. But a drive massive enough to overcome the instinctual desire to live will inevitably be much greater than the mere interest of others around us that we continue to live. Therefore, your entire argument that suicide should be prevented to avoid the harm it causes others collapses, since it is anti-utilitarian to require that suicidal individuals continue to suffer the much greater pain of continuing to live so that others can avoid their much smaller pain at the death of those who prefer to die.
But further, a decent respect for human autonomy requires that we allow people to chart their own course with respect to the matters which most intimately concern them and are within what the U.S. Supreme Court identified as the ‘right to a private sphere’ in cases such as Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade. The total weight of the community’s desire that a woman not have an abortion may be greater than a single woman’s desire for an abortion, but this utilitarian calculus is trumped by the fact that her choice in this matter relates to what most intimately concerns her own life, where her decision must rule. To try to prevent suicides by pointing to community interests against this is wrong in exactly the same way that preventing abortions is wrong: it allows the community to invade a matter too deeply personal for the community’s interests to count.
Oskar, you do have a point there. There are many that have posted here that their quality of life is the major reason behind their desire to leave this place. In fact if you read Psalms, this world is the valley of the shadow of death. Satanism also promotes life, and self. Unless one us ever increasingly suffering to the point that they can no longer go on.
I have lost friends and family to illnesses, and I know a number that have given up the fight against death, but most are not considered suicide. Yet I do have at least one distant relative that comitted suicide because he was in severe pain due to cancer, and it was just to end his suffering. He did not have any pain medications strong enough for him so he found another way to end the pain.
What some people fail to realize and that is they are the cause of many suicides in this country, ones that make reports to the CDC and others that it is just a psychological drug abuse problem that needs treatment, yet the physical and biological evidence says otherwise. Cancer is not the only thing to cause horrible debilitating pain to people. Problem with many doctors and the way they are taught is not conducive to preventing suffering or unneeded pain. If someone has a serious infection that needs treatment they need treatment for that to get rid of the pain. I have someone close to me that is suffering from pain, and I help in ways that doctors usually do not. That is because they are more interested in going by the book more than looking at the whole person, or looking at more than one thing at a time.
It is the closed mindedness and saying to people they can just live with the pain, but it is more than they can handle. This I feel is the main cause of many to give up on life. I worry about my wife as she is in pain, and yet no pain medications help her. Yet I can tell that it is real by more than what I am told, I know it is a nerve problem that is not helped with any of the regular pain medications. I’m not sure who will help her, and worried for her. I find it crazy the difficulty that it is to get disability these days, yet it is easier for those that have little wrong with them other than wrong job training, yet those of us with medical problems that are the problem it is more difficult, and even over 62 unable to get SS.
I wonder what is out there that could help us.
I offer nothing in this life. I’ve been disabled due to amputation and due to a disease I got as a kid and my own neglect to take care of myself, my teeth have fallen out.
So what do I live for? That’s the whole thing, all of my life screw-ups have always been my own fault.
Why live? I will answer that when I leave my current home before I’m forced to “live” where I don’t want to.
Why not leave this world to the living?
I’m not living I’m existing!
To A.B. You said it well. I like the comparison to the abortion debate. No one should involuntarily force someone to get treatment or stay alive– especially if that’s all they do for them.
The part that gets me is when it is acceptable to a country to let people get away with felonies against others that leave them permanently injured where they are not able to take care of themselves any longer, yet they worry about suicide far more and are willing to do something about that instead. That is very sick and cruel. I know Buddha said life is suffering but he was referring to life challenges.
Sadly the only reason this world even functions is because of the sufferings of the underdog (those on top know this quite well) and even more pathetic is how we create inane religions that glorify and justify the suffering archetype such as in Christianity. It fills me with indescribable contempt. There would be no “haves” if “have-nots” did not exist. Imo, one has one of two options, either accept suicide or adopt an Antinatalist philosophy. Otherwise any claims of wanting to help end suffering are invalid/false.
To the author of this article, it must be emotionally daunting receiving negative comments often. I wish you strength in dealing with these. It’s encouraging that you and others care about suicidal people–about wanting their pain to end.
That said, imagine if society decided to make abortion illegal under all circumstances despite the way many of us women feel about our own bodies. There are a lot of pro-life women, too. But the women who feel society wants to control their bodies and lives would understandably be incensed if articles online proclaimed–and laws supported this–that a woman, once pregnant, must bring the pregnancy to term. I’m not trying to argue pro-choice or pro-life. I only mean that in any instance in which the state assumes the power to coerce people as regards their private lives, many people are going to be very, very upset. We should expect this. We even owe our freedoms in many senses to this kind of behavior as a shocking number of our liberties resulted from cantankerous troublemakers who refused to be silent in the face of perceived injustices.
So I don’t think people are sending you specifically angry comments. They’re responding to what they feel is an absolute injustice that those in mental health either directly or through available legal and enforcement channels can force them to do what they do not want to do with their own lives. I get that you don’t think suicide is usually the “right” decision. But we will never be able to answer the question of whether suicide is right or wrong. If someone disagrees with that, the burden is on them to prove it.
Interestingly enough, academic and clinical psychology are putting out a number of papers challenging the clinical illness models of psychiatry and clinical psychology which the courts use to justify forcing people to do what they don’t want to in regards to their private lives. So if there is no reliable philosophical argument or hard science evidence that what otherwise amounts to a personal decision is “wrong,” it’s very, very, very dangerous for our culture to set national policy and laws on this basis. And that is what so many people are angry about.
You probably remember a time when gay and lesbian people were thought to be “mentally ill” just because the majority disagreed with their lifestyle. The courts allowed doctors and therapists to torture these poor people because of a judgment of “mental illness.” Imagine where we’d be today if enough people had not reacted angrily to these abuses of power over others’ private lives. Only recently have clinical psychology and psychiatry removed homosexuality as a mental illness in the US DSM. But today we can force “treatment” on the suicidal on the basis of the judgment of “mental illness.” It’s disheartening we don’t seem to have learned our lesson.
One last point: governments already know how to decrease suicide. You must have read the WHO’s, the UN’s, and other reputable organizations’ reports about how building people-centered governments that provide robust security nets for citizens produces far better mental health and far fewer suicides. People who are adamant that suicide is “wrong” should, then, follow evidence-based principles and realize the kinds of large government changes that have proven effective at reducing suicide risks. It seems a shame to force treatment on people even though they eventually have to go back out into communities we already know increase suicide risks, especially since suicides here in the US have for years been on the increase.
I think therapists are great. They devote their lives, often for very little financial compensation, to helping the emotionally distraught. What a tragedy that many in this otherwise compassionate field stray down the path of controlling others because they (therapists…) know what’s best for them (the suicidal). What horrifies so many is that courts allow and even encourage this. I can think of few things more worthy of outrage and fighting against.
Just wanted to offer my two cents as a biomedical ethicist about why many people react so very strongly to anti-suicide publications in particular.
how do you cope up in a situation where u are reminded every day of the biggest blunder of your life? The one thing which used to give comfort and now that thing is the biggest cause of your pain now? It is so painful that you can not get out of it? it is sucking the life out of you.
Nice article on suicide prevention. Keep posting.
Well I’ve been dealing with thoughts and feelings of ending it for 18 years. The only reason I stayed all this time is because I kept hearing people tell me hang in there things are going to get better and shit like that. But in reality it’s only getting worst. So why live? I started hearing all the mojo b.s. when I was 6 years old now I’m about to be 35 next month and that would be 19 years.
If you want to prevent suicide, fix the actual social problems that make it happen. Start with addressing the fact that people breed needlessly. With so many people in existence already needing help, what aside from raw ego would possess one to think it’s a good idea to reproduce. It’s a sad testament to what the human species is all about.
Brandon, as easy as it sounds, not reproducing isn’t that simple. There are mental health illnesses that have increased sexual drive and risky behaviors. I had three unplanned pregnancies and chose to keep my children. Without the proper medications and education not knowing how the mental illness affects the sex drive and the genetics involved in the mental illness, along with being young, I was not aware of the consequences. However, I have taken responsibility for my children and educated them. I did not choose abortion because it was not the right choice for me. In order to accomplish not reproducing maybe we should go back to sterilizing the mentally ill? Or not be so racist and sterilize all young women? Give it 20 years and then let the population reproduce again. Then would we go back to having families with 10 children? Society has already gone from having large families to small ones. How is not reproducing an answer for allowing suicide or not? I appreciate your passion but I don’t feel that it is an answer to mental illness and the issue of the pain a suicidal person goes through that makes them want to die. You never know if the person next to you has a mental illness or not. There are many great people in this world with mental illness and there are many bad people without mental illness.
I highly doubt that the majority of people having children are those with cognitive issues that prevent them from knowing the consequences of their actions. If all the people who can take responsibility, took it, that would make a huge difference. Not sure why you predict that large families would happen in the future. The whole point of slowing reproduction is to increase motivation for problem solving not mere problem tranference. The irony is that this is often the argument against suicide, when in fact it’s breeding that attempts to lay a past burden on a innocent furure. On a macro level, it’s a perfect recipe for disaster or hmm depression.
Couldn’t agree with you more Brandon, people don’t even think about what their kid will have to go through-except after they are born it’s suddenly like “Ooh I worry for my kids future in this world” as if those problems didn’t exist before they had a kid. People are just selfish egomaniacs and society heaps praise on them for breeding which most people get off on because of the attention they get. Which is amazing since it’s the most mundane least special thing that can happen and people are popping rugrats out everywhere ALL the time. People don’t wanna make anything of their own life they want to live through their kids.
Ask any parent what their biggest proudest achievement is they’ll probably come out with drivel like “becoming a parent” because it’s all they’ve done in their sad life. I hate parents, I literally HATE them, they’ve created this world we all have to suffer in, and to make it even more ironic they’re probably the majority who are depressed and hate life but can’t wait to inflict it on someone else. I’m going to die in agony of cancer thanks to my parents passing it onto me-they’re evil.
Thank you for expressing that. It should be said more often. Parents also guilt trip their kids by pretending that your existence, something that happened because they were selfishly having a good time one day is somehow something you should be grateful for. There is no reason to be grateful about the ability to work for someone else, pay taxes on that hard work, deal with other people’s maddening quirks on a daily basis, risk being attacked by muggers or a wild animal, being homeless or starving or becoming a criminal because you just can’t get along with society and its petty bullshit, or maybe even if you’re lucky, you get impaled in a freak accident, only to get sick and die in the end anyway. It’s becoming more and more obvious to me everyday that suicide prevention is the parent’s cry on a wide scale. Well the time has come for the child’s cry. You don’t want to lose me, yet you leave me first. Such a profound illustration of how effed up life is on a fundamental level.