I do not have depression,
I am not depressed,
I come from a happy, financially sound home,
my relationships are functional,
and I'm physically able.
But suicide has always affected me.
I have struggled with it since I was 13,
and I’ve known several people—
probably more than I could count on one hand
—who have had similar struggles,
all with varying degrees of severity and symptoms ranging from
depression, to anger, to fear.
They’ve always told me that suicide is selfish.
They’ve said that they can’t justify the tragedy that follows a death—
a suicide especially—
that they can’t justify the effect it has on
relatives, friends, and acquaintances.
For them to inflict that kind of pain by ending their life
would be prioritizing their own self interest at the expense of others;
it would be selfish.
But
suicide Isn’t selfish.
And that’s a scary prospect, right?
We’re slashing a reason off the
“why suicide is bad” list.
We’re buttressing suicide:
this scary, horrifying, event:
a form of death with impact and implications different than a natural one.
Natural deaths often occur later in life,
acutely, and, sometimes, relatively painlessly.
We can describe them away—
say things like:
“She reached her time for heaven—
the end of the cycle.”
But, suicide,
by its premature, premeditated, and painful nature,
we can’t so easily euphemize or diminish.
Someone deeply troubled set out to kill themselves.
You can’t step around that.
Because of its undeniability, our society
(already poorly adjusted to emotions)
has trouble looking it in the eye.
It always made some kind of sense to me that suicide is selfish.
It clicked in some way.
But, when I heard the idea that self-hatred is narcissistic,
it struck me.
I felt attacked, almost.
“Narcissism” pokes at the regrettably romantic idea I have of mental illness—
the one I’ve seen countless times in media:
Theodore Finch, Hannah Baker,
even Romeo and Juliet all depict death romantically.
Compartmentalizing suicide into neat, clean ideas
of how people grapple with their emotions
prevented me from accepting the idea that a component of suicidal thought:
self hatred, is narcissistic.
The idea definitely didn’t click with me.
But I acclimated,
I reflected a little,
and I saw that when you get into a certain mindset of repetitive self hatred
it becomes self-obsessive.
You get stuck inside your own head when you
spend so much time staring at your own deeds
and scrutinizing them to try and put yourself down.
You narcissistically prioritize your actions,
feelings, and behaviors over others without realizing.
In that bed of narcissism,
you want to feel special; you want to feel important;
you want to feel selfless for living with the pain,
so you say that suicide is selfish—
that dying is selfish, so by living you are selfless.
We martyr ourselves at times partially due to narcissism
but foremost due to the fact that staying alive can feel impossible.
We take solace in the idea that,
by living, we generate some kind of positivity—
or, at least, prevent tragedy.
Ideas like that make living bearable
because you do it for a reason.
We desperately need a motive to keep living
even when we want to stop.
We have a deep, essential desire to survive
that suicidality has trouble completely corrupting.
Nobody really wants to die;
we want to live free from suffering;
we just see death as the solution.
To justify our latent desire to keep going,
we craft reasons for why our lives still mean something to us
even if those reasons don’t stand up to scrutiny.
We say that suicide is selfish to deflect from the true reason we’re alive:
we don’t want to die.
But we aren’t comfortable saying that.
We need language that steps around that premise
even if that language, in the process, strips us of our autonomy.
People should control their lives.
We have the right to do what we want with our bodies,
and, uncomfortably, that includes suicide.
We can easily point out the benefits of policies like legalizing marijuana
or providing access to certain medical operations—
including assisted death for the terminally ill
—but suicide has no benefits.
For that reason,
we don’t want to accept that people have the right to kill themselves.
However, as a fundamental human right, they do,
and to call a human right “selfish”
reduces and degrades it
by declaring that other people determine our right to exercise it.
Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson posed in 1971 the following hypothetical:
say that a group of doctors kidnapped you
and hooked your bloodstream to another person to keep them alive.
She argues that in that situation
you have the right to unhook yourself from the system
as an exercise of bodily autonomy.
You did not consent to the scenario
and you owe no one your life.
But, I think it’s pretty obvious that that’s scary;
that it’s weird and upsetting—
the fact that people have the right to suicide.
So, we sweep that away.
We call it “selfish.”
We use language to push it aside
despite any implications,
including the implication that the word “selfish” brings.
When you think of something selfish,
you might say stealing, or lying, or cheating—
actions that clearly have a benefit to one party at the expense of another:
you steal from someone, you lie to someone,
you cheat to undermine someone,
but suicide is completely personal and isolated;
suicide isn’t at the direct expense of other people.
Again, the question of bodily autonomy arises;
other people shouldn’t determine the actions we take with our bodies.
In addition,
suicide doesn’t grant a benefit like the word “selfish” suggests.
The people who say that suicide is selfish,
sometimes suicidal themselves,
see suicide as a valid solution and use their language to reinforce that idea,
So we use the word “selfish” to frame the situation
as abstaining from a benefit to ourselves.
The suicidal need language that reaffirms the goodness of suicide—
empowers it and places it above all else to bolster a destructive state of mind.
Sometimes, I think about how Iain Reid opened his 2017 novel:
[On screen text]
He highlights that feeling of total
encroaching dread where escaping it feels impossible,
but, of course,
suicide distorts the truth and lies to you.
We lie in saying that suicide dominates us,
we lie in saying that we can’t beat it,
and we lie in saying that it can’t get better.
On the subreddit r/suicidewatch,
people struggling with suicide gather to share their
thoughts and experiences with a supportive community,
and one post has always stuck in my mind:
[On screen text]
I feel a lot when I read this post.
I feel sad, relieved, scared, happy:
a wide range of emotions.
I feel sad because the post represents the fact that so many people attempt
suicide,
1.6 million people attempting in 2022 alone.
I feel relieved because only about 49,000 victims in the US died that year.
But I feel scared because the relatively low death rate shows
how far the problem reaches.
10% of surveyed highschoolers reported
that they had made a suicide attempt in the last year,
meaning you can walk in the halls of a populated school building and see
dozens of people who have attempted suicide—
see the 97% who tried to end their life but then got back up.
The post also makes me happy.
It makes me hopeful.
The post makes me think about how people do get back up—
that suicide doesn’t really dominate us—
that the moment passes,
and that it gets better.
We often call suicide selfish as a deflection.
We can’t just say that life will improve,
because what if it doesn’t?
What if things just get worse?
What if everything shatters, and nothing means anything?
On August 29th of 2020,
I first considered suicide,
but I think it really could have happened on March 14th of 2024,
a Thursday night, when I tore down my curtains and began drinking vodka in my room.
I was too scared to, but for the next two months I truly believed I would.
I was certain.
But I’m alive.
I’m still here.
And I promise,
it’s going to be okay even though we have so few moral barriers between us and
suicide.
We don’t need them because it gets better.
I promise.