In Defense of Suicide Prevention

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..