Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine

4. Separation: Emigration, Secession, Suicide

75 4 Separation Emigration, Secession, Suicide 1 Why do people kill themselves? Because they are mentally ill. Death from suicide, experts on mental health insist and the press repeats, is the result of mental illness, just as death from cancer is the result of bodily illness.1 This is nonsense—mindless belief in a literalized metaphor endowed with the power of agency: “Suicide kills.” According to prevailing psychiatric dogma, answering the question, “Why did X kill himself?” with “Because he wanted to die” is empirically and statistically wrong. I believe it is a priori right. Declared famous Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BCE–AD 18): “Spectemur agendo” (Let us be judged by our acts). Although most people today might say and believe that they agree with that principle, in fact they do not: they do not judge people by their acts; they judge them by the politically correct interpretation of the meaning of their acts. Thus, killing oneself does not signify wanting to die. It signifies mental illness, religious fanaticism, sometimes even heroism in an admirable cause. Never a decision to leave life. Thus, when a “researcher” of Islamic suicide bombers “discovers” that his subjects want to kill themselves, his contrarian “findings” are “news.” From a 2010 report in the Boston Globe, titled “The Truth About Suicide Bombers,” we learn: 76 • Suicide Prohibition Qari Sami [a suicide bomber] was a young man who kept to himself, a brooder. He was upset by the US forces’ ouster of the Taliban in the months following 9/11—but mostly Sami was just upset. He took antidepressants daily. One of Sami’s few friends told the media he was “depressed.” . . . Brian Williams , associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, was in Afghanistan at the time. Williams thinks that “Sami never really cared for martyrdom; more likely, he was suicidal.” The traditional view of suicide bombers is well established, and backed by the scholars who study them. . . . But Williams is among a small cadre of scholars from across the world pushing the rather contentious idea that some suicide bombers may in fact be suicidal.2 In the United States, 10.9 out of 100,000 persons die by suicide . For persons between twenty and twenty-four, the figure is 12.5, and for those persons above sixty-five, it is 14.2. In short, the persons most likely to kill themselves are the young and the old. After listing these prevalence rates, the Web site of the National Institute of Mental Health adds, “A person who appears suicidal should not be left alone and needs immediate mentalhealth treatment. . . . [B]ecause research has shown that mental and substance-abuse disorders are major risk factors for suicide, many programs also focus on treating these disorders as well as addressing suicide risk directly.”3 Like virtually all so-called mental health information, this statement is false, intended to distract attention from the reasons people choose death over life. What are the reasons? Simply put, escaping a life they view as worse than death. Although each person ’s reason for killing himself is uniquely personal, we might say that the young choose voluntary death to escape the pain and responsibility of having to make a life for themselves, the old to escape the loss of autonomy owing to age, disease, and disability. Separation: Emigration, Secession, Suicide • 77 In short, the simplest and most plausible explanation-motive for suicide at any age is the desire to separate oneself from “it,” the nature of “it” differing among age groups, socioeconomic classes, cultures, and nations. As always, the actions of the suicide speak louder than the words of the persons who presume to speak for them, while seeking to deprive them of liberty. The suicidal person wants to get away from his life, his social environment . His action is best viewed as a form of emigration or secession. As Jean Améry, the Austrian “Jewish” Holocaust survivor and bitter opponent of suicide prevention, put it, “I don’t like the word Selbstmord (self-murder). . . . I prefer to speak of Freitod (voluntary death). . . . [T]here is no carcinoma that devours me, no infarction that fells me, no uremic crisis that takes away my breath. I am that which lays hands upon me, who dies after taking barbiturates, ‘from hand to mouth.’”4 Webster’s defines emigration as “leav[ing] one’s place of residence...