Did you know that in the UK September is a month devoted to suicide prevention? And that on the 10th of this month, it’s World Suicide Prevention Day (WSPD)? No, neither did I. And neither did any of my friends. Yet we’re all aware that suicide is a serious problem. Every 90 minutes someone in the UK or Ireland dies that way. It’s the biggest killer of men under 45. And suicides among teenage girls and young women have almost doubled in recent years.
We’ve been having these suicide prevention events every September for more than two decades and yet the rates are not going down. Maybe it’s time to challenge what I’d call the suicide prevention consensus.
This is the belief that along with increased government funding for mental health, we need more ‘openness’ and ‘honesty’ around the subject. According to the mission statement from the organisers of World Suicide Prevention Day, we need to move ‘from a culture of silence and stigma to one of openness, understanding and support’.
To suggest that suicide is wrong makes some campaigners shudder in horror
Suicide campaigners are very keen on ‘openness’, ‘honest conversations’ and getting rid of the ‘stigma’. And who could be against that? Not me. The trouble is that our ‘open’ and ‘honest’ conversations aren’t as open and honest as they need to be. Today, the taboo topic we never talk about is the morality of suicide. In our enlightened and open-minded age we can say whatever we want – as long as we don’t say that suicide is wrong.
I’m not talking about assisted suicide – that’s a different debate. I’m talking about the kind of suicides we read about in the news every day. The teenager found dead in their bedroom because of a bad exam result or broken heart; the fiftysomething businessman faced with financial ruin. Suicide as a result of emotional or psychological suffering – not a terminal medical condition.
To suggest that suicide is wrong makes some campaigners shudder in horror. It’s as if you’re advocating a return to the bad old days when the church saw suicide as a mortal sin and the law regarded attempting it as a crime – punishable with imprisonment – until its decriminalisation in August 1961.
No one wants that. But could it be we have swung too far the other way, so that now suicide is really a matter of individual choice, one that should never be exposed to moral or ethical debate?
I’m not advocating that we subject those with suicidal thoughts to stern sermons. I lost my son Jack to suicide in 2015. When he first told me about wanting to take his life, I tried various arguments as to why he shouldn’t. ‘Because I love you,’ I said. ‘Because I will support you. Because you can be happy.’ Because this and because that. I could see I was making no headway. Finally, I said: ‘Because suicide is just wrong! Don’t do it! Please!’ Jack just sniggered and said: ‘Yeah, whatever.’ A year later he was dead.
What we need is a cultural shift away from viewing suicide as a personal choice. So, just as we grow up believing that killing other people is wrong, we need to understand that killing yourself is wrong too. Maybe this could deter some people from taking their own life. After all, moral inhibitions, social customs, norms and notions of right and wrong do influence human behaviour. We prevent all sorts of bad actions by convincing people that it is wrong to murder, steal or commit sexual offences. Why not suicide?
To be honest, I don’t know if such an approach would change anything substantially. But how can we know, when we’re so fearful of appearing moralistic or judgmental that we stay silent instead? We don’t even have the means of having this sort of conversation. In her history of the subject, Stay, the American academic Jennifer Michael Hecht notes that outside of religion, ‘our society today has no coherent argument against suicide’. On the contrary, what you find are coherent arguments for suicide as a moral right. In his monumental study of depression, The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon writes: ‘The right to suicide should be a basic civil liberty.’
Today, then, suicide is a lifestyle choice – or maybe that should be a death-style choice? – and one that’s up to the individual. We may say please don’t do it or suggest alternatives. We can offer help and hope. But we can’t say directly and unambiguously that suicide is wrong. This is not to suggest that the people who take their own lives are deserving of moral censure or a lack of care and empathy. No: it’s the practice of suicide that is morally bad and not the person. And there are numerous good arguments as to why. The terrible pain you inflict upon family and friends is one. That every suicide increases the likelihood of another by someone else is a second. But these sorts of considerations are excluded from the national conversation about how we prevent suicide.
My worry is that an unwanted side effect of our ‘openness’ and ‘honesty’ is that the act itself is no longer perceived as something too terrible to contemplate, never mind actually do. Suicide has lost much of the stigma that once surrounded it, but it has lost its horror too. So instead of being the last, most desperate act during a time of difficulty, it’s become the go-to option. Put simply, suicide has become normalised.
Worse still, suicide has acquired a kind of coolness. Consider the cult surrounding the likes of Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain. You find among artists and intellectuals a celebration of suicide. Damien Hirst is quoted as saying: ‘I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.’
It’s clear that despite our best efforts to prevent suicide, something is missing in our approach. Maybe it’s time to break the last taboo – and talk about right and wrong.
Comments