If we want to keep ourselves from becoming a suicide culture, we have to work to prevent all suicides, not just of the young and those that are based on impulse.
But we don’t. Increasingly, many support some suicides, particularly of the seriously and terminally ill.
Not only that, some states and countries have put the imprimatur of the government on some suicides by allowing doctors–of all people–to facilitate these deaths through a lethal prescription or injection.
An article in Scientific American about preventing gun suicides is true to type. From, “A Plan to Prevent Gun Suicides:”
National data speak to the other half of this deadly combination. Although guns are not the most popular way that people try to take their life (this dubious distinction belongs to pills), they are the most deadly.
Statistics show that 85 percent of attempts with a gun are fatal, compared with 69 percent for hanging and 2 percent for self-poisoning. Mass shootings and murders dominate the news, but 21,334—or nearly two thirds—of the 33,599 gun deaths that occurred in the U.S. in 2014 were suicides. Another 10,945 were homicides.
Guns, then, take what is often an ambivalent decision and turn it into an irrevocable one.
So do pills prescribed for suicide and lethal injections. And yet, they are lauded by many in such circumstances as “death with dignity.”
At best, that sends a mixed message. But I think it is worse than that, I think assisted suicide advocacy tells all suicidal people that “dying on your own terms” is right for whatever reason you think worth dying over.
There is a major effort on in some states to finds ways to prevent the use of guns in suicides:
“Concerned about a family member or friend?” one poster asks. “Suicides in NH far outnumber homicides.” In the photograph, one gray-haired man rests his hand on the shoulder of another. A handgun lies on the kitchen table between them. “Hold on to their guns,” the poster continues. “Putting time and distance between a suicidal person and a gun may save a life.”
I’m all for it. But note what happened in the Michael Freeland case in Oregon. Freeland had been prescribed poison for suicide by a death doctor, who believed–wrongly, as it turned out–that he had six months left to live.
Freeland became psychotic. His guns were removed from his home by the authorities to prevent him from harming himself or others, and yet his own psychiatrist left his lethal prescription “safely at home” in case he wanted to use it!
Assisted suicide advocates will respond by saying that there is a difference between “rational” and “irrational suicide. The article gets into the irrational part of that supposed dichotomy:
Won’t people who are stopped from killing themselves today just find another way to complete the act later?
Some number will, unfortunately. Yet most who survive do not keep trying until they succeed. Instead, studies show, the majority of survivors die a natural death many years after failing to kill themselves. The period of greatest vulnerability seems to be in the first year after an attempt, a time when treatment for those who try to end their life is critically important, experts say.
But studies show that many times, suicidal terminally ill and disabled people who don’t or fail to kill themselves, are also very glad later that they are still alive. And yet, for assisted suicide supporters that doesn’t matter.
And here’s another irony: One reason to support doctor-prescribed suicide, we are told repeatedly, is to prevent the terminally ill from committing gun suicides.
But suicide is suicide.
If we want to reduce our appalling suicide rate, we need to try and prevent all suicides, not just those with which we disagree.
When we deny suicide prevention services to a suicidal persons because they are terminally ill, we, in effect say, “You are right. Your life is not worth living.”
And we send a broader, if unintended, message to other suicidal people that self-killing is a proper answer to what has driven them to existential despair.
Ignoring the Ill and Disabled in Suicide Prevention