How We Talk About Suicide

Obviously an emotionally intense topic, if it's not for you today, hit delete and move on. It'll be in the archives if you ever want to look.

My topic today is choices we have specifically in the way that we speak about suicide, which is a very small part of a much bigger topic, but one that we can actually control. As I’ve mentioned in the blurb, I have no illusions that every reader here will want to delve into this topic today, or ever.

Here’s a link to Julie Davis at Happy Catholic, one of my all-time favorite blogging heroes, who keeps up a steady stream of the true, beautiful, and good. Maybe that’s a better place for you to be today. Probably it’s a better place for most of us, most days.

Okay last chance.

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Things We Don’t Control

It’s been a busy year for suicides in my circle of acquaintance — only one close to home, the other two rippling into my life much more distantly. The circumstances of each were all completely different, though all three cases were men, which is statistically the most probable.

Often with suicide the final psychological drive that leads to the act is not one we control.

Severe, persistent depression? No one chooses to be engulfed in the black hole, and one of the side effects of medications prescribed to treat depression is decreased inhibition towards risk-taking behaviors.

Psychotic break? You are literally not in your right mind.

End of life fears and concerns? Certain terminal illnesses can directly cause brain damage that increases suicidal ideation, medications for serious neurological conditions (among others) can increase risk-taking behavior . . . it’s not necessarily the fact of being sick that is depressing the patient, but rather the illness or its treatments can cause the suicidal behavior directly.

These are situations we can attempt to avert and mitigate, but no amount of what we say or how we say it can change the biological facts.

—> Even if we ourselves know and believe with all our hearts the truths I will outline below, we are all of us vulnerable to the possibility of suffering a physical illness that robs of us of our rational free will and drives us to unchosen, self-destroying acts. It happens.

We are not all-knowing and all-powerful.

When someone we love commits suicide, the instinctive response is: Could I have done something differently to prevent this?

This is a normal question to ask, because our survival as a species depends on us seriously analyzing any disastrous situation and trying to figure out how a repeat might be avoided. Furthermore, we know stories of people who were on the verge of a suicide and just the right intervention talked them off the ledge (often literally, in the anecdotes I’ve seen).

But in the cases I’ve been close enough to over the years to have any insight into the situation, close friends or family members were actively working to try to save this person’s life. Loving people, reaching out with support, trying to be there. I don’t know of any suicide in my own circle of real survivors I've actually spoken to where there is any reason for the survivors to believe they were at fault in some way.

We can’t know everything and we can’t do everything. Our attempts to help our loved ones are always going to be limited by the God-ordained limits of our mortal existence. There will always be, in the world of beloved people with self-destructive behaviors, “the one that got away.”

—> Sometimes that will be due to our loved one’s free will in making a long series of terrible decisions leading to the final, life-ending conditions; other times it will be due to psychological disorders too immense and all-consuming for anyone to have conquered.

In the wider world of self-destructive behaviors generally, I have seen cases where the medical advice on offer at the time was either wrong (and later corrected), or where known, effective treatments were simply not available to the individual in need.

We muddle through as best we can.

That’s a long, discouraging preface, but I lay it out because I don’t want any misunderstanding about what comes next.

Things We Do Control

Obviously I hope you are doing everything you can to help you and your loved ones live as physically and emotionally and spiritually healthy lives as you can. That’s something you have a little bit of control over.

Something you have a lot of control over (certain medical conditions excepting) are the words that come out of your mouth. What we say in turn affects our own spiritual state and our ability to withstand edge-cases of temptations, and it builds our wider culture.

While the data are not necessarily complete enough to have absolute accuracy, there do seem to exist notable variations in suicide rates both by ethnicity and country, including global variations in the male/female disparity, suggesting that culture may indeed play an influencing role in whether someone commits suicide.

Even if our words had no physical impact on suicide rates, what we say about suffering, death, and despair is in fact an objective matter of sin or virtue. So for the good of our own souls if nothing else, how we speak about suicide matters.

Lies We’ve Been Sold

I am not suggesting that we be falsely optimistic about the real suffering that human life involves at times. But there are some lies about suicide that are very pervasive, and we have to do everything we can to beat our way back to the truth.

Here are some truths:

Everyone around you is seriously and permanently harmed by your suicide.

I know this isn’t going to be super convincing in the moment, but it’s a fact we need to insist on and hold tight to. The lie of profound, suicidal depression is “everyone would be better off without me.” It’s as diabolical a lie as you can get, because it’s not only life-destroying, it’s exactly false. Suicide doesn’t help your aggravated family who gets cranky about your various foibles, some of them serious; suicide permanently and gravely harms the people you love (and other people as well).

It is more harmful to commit suicide than to continue struggling through your unrelenting problems, even when those problems seem overwhelming and insurmountable. Even when those problems cause other people to have to struggle with you.

It’s fine and normal to have times in life when you are dependent on others for extensive, even exhausting, levels of help.

If you are a polite, considerate person, then you don’t like to inconvenience others. Good. Work very hard at being as kind and pleasant a soul as you possibly can be, so that those who have to care for you will take up the work in a spirit of joy and gratitude, thankful for the opportunity to give back some small fraction of all you have given them.

Furthermore, work hard while you can at taking care of yourself physically and mentally, so that you don’t become a source of extra work for others before your rightful time.

But the time is probably going to come. The “I don’t want to be a burden” rationale for suicide is another diabolical lie. This lie (a) denies loved ones the graces that come from giving of themselves selflessly, and (b) brings about the real and permanent harms that suicide always causes.

Just because you are old, sick, or old-and-sick does not change the fact that suicide gravely and permanently damages the people around you.

Your life has value even when you can’t do the things you think you should be able to do.

Once again I refer you to Christina Chase’s seminal meditation on the topic of the beauty and goodness of human life, It’s Good to Be Here (Sophia Institute Press, 2019).

The pervasive lie of our culture (and many others) going back generations is that our lives only worthwhile if we are smart enough, capable enough, healthy enough, happy enough, able to “contribute” in some tangible way. If your life is only valuable for the work you can do? You are a slave. That’s literally what a slave is.

Slavery is evil.

Be free.

You are capable of persevering through intense suffering.

There is no obligation to artificially extend life beyond its natural course, nor to undergo extraordinary medical treatments that only draw out suffering. Further, it is good and right to do all that we can to help those who are dying to be as comfortable as possible.

—> Pain and sleep deprivation are each in themselves sufficient to drive even the healthiest, heartiest soul to the absolute depths of despair, no matter the stage of life. Combined, they kill the will to live even more quickly. So doing all we reasonably can to ease pain and improve sleep are together the two-fold foundations of easing suffering.

And yes, of course it’s normal to be afraid of scary things — whatever it is about your current or looming difficulties that particularly terrifies you, which seems to vary a lot from person to person.

But it is possible to be brave, and it is okay (often helpful, even) if part of being brave includes giving voice to our pain when we experience it.

We are rightly humble about our own weakness. We can admit that there may come a time that only by the grace of God and the help of others will we somehow get through the very worst life has for us. But also we can be humble about our courage.

I don’t know how I am going to get through this, but other people have done it so I guess God will help me through it as well.

Again, the diabolical lie is that somehow suicide is necessary because we are unable to be courageous enough to face the fullness of life. Says who?

We can give purpose to our suffering.

It’s a fallen world. Suffering is inevitable. But we can choose, if we desire, to give meaning to the otherwise meaningless misery that daily afflicts us, and to the final suffering that will be our last trial in this life.

We should speak of this. Not “offer it up” said as a casual dismissal of others’ (or our own) various complaints. But rather: Wow. We humans are body and soul, immortal souls, capable of taking the darkest, hardest, most excruciating experiences of life and by simple act of the will imbuing them with creative, life-saving power.

And we can do this even in our despair. Even when we are thoroughly broken. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is the model for how to die well. A death not chosen but accepted, words giving voice to the all-engulfing darkness that is the opening of a hymn of triumph.

The death of Jesus was the result of petty fears and callous cruelty, physically meaningless in so many ways, and yet spiritually, for to be fully human is to be both body and spirit, and Jesus had made himself fully human while also remaining fully divine, it saved the whole world.

We who are made in the image of God can likewise unleash, if we choose, immense spiritual power the deeper our lives sink towards darkness. We should mention this frequently.

Photo: Our campfire this Easter. It was a good time.