Suicide is Never the Answer

Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

There’s a debate about what to call suicide and how it happens. For ages we’ve said a person “commits suicide.” This is accurate, since they have to perform some act that leads to their own death. But does this language minimize the role mental illness has in most suicides?

Some people in the mental health community are insisting on saying that a person “dies by suicide” instead. This is language that acknowledges the role serious mental illness plays in suicide and doesn’t blame the individual with mental illness for the role they play in their own death. Advocates of this language insist that no one “commits cancer, or heart attack, or complications of diabetes” as they cause death, so why should we prejudice those who die by suicide?

Well, in fact, through lifestyle choices and bad habits many people do commit some forms of cancer and heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Their actions lead to their own deaths, yet we live in a culture so focused on medication and normalizing all behavior and lifestyles that we have let people with these conditions off the hook, and relieved them of all blame for their ill health.

Well here we go with suicide, down the slippery slope, until we see it as a reasonable and rational choice to a bad situation.

When suicide occurs to people with severe mental illness it is most often an impulsive act. Rarely are there plans involved, let alone careful plans, and rarely are there notes and arrangements and the tying up of loose ends. Darkness descends, pain becomes unbearable, surrender crushes the soul, and a person acts. Acts. Suicide doesn’t happen without some choice to do it, and certainly not without an action,

Ask those of us who survived attempts. We’ll let you know right up front that we made a choice and took an action to end our lives. We’re comfortable in saying we attempted to “commit suicide.” Because that’s what we did. And lots of us regret it and choose to live lives that prevent us from attempting again. Illness, yes. Irrationality, yes. But a choice nonetheless.

Worldwide there are movements to make this choice reasonable and moral. In Canada the Medical Assistance In Dying law (MAID) enables anyone who is 18 and suffering from a serious disease to choose to die (commit suicide – the law acknowledges it is a choice) by intravenous methods even if their condition is treatable by other medical interventions. Several European countries have similar laws, and there are movements to enact such laws in several states in the US.

These laws egregiously injure the sanctity of life. We have cheapened life at its beginning by applying arbitrary limits to when it begins and couching its end as healthcare. Now we move toward similar specious permissions to destroy life at its end. As if for some it is less valuable, less desirable, and less necessary than it is for others.

In Canada in February an amendment was added to the MAID law. There is now an exemption for people with mental illness until March of 2027. So people with mental illness, those most likely to “die by suicide,” can’t get medical assistance to do it. Obviously, we are confused by what life is, how it should end, when it should end, and who, if anyone, gets to end it. These are all choices to be made.

Given many very old sources of ethics, morality, and theology, some of these choices are not ours to make. New thinking is not always desirable, and new thinking that shortens still vital lives is reprehensible. Suicide is not normal. Never was. Never will be. We are less of a society for pretending otherwise.