Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine

1. Suicide Prohibition

13 Suicide Prohibition 1 Diseases are prevented. Crimes are prohibited. Our systematic mislabeling of suicide prohibition as suicide prevention is incontrovertible evidence of linguistic distortion in the service of medical -statist ideology. The essay “Youth Suicide” on the Web site of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention begins with this declarative statement: “Suicide (i.e., taking one’s own life) is a serious public health problem that affects even young people.” Neither that statement nor Camus’ famous declaration that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide ” is literally true, and every educated person knows it.1 Both are recommendations concerning how the speaker wants us to view the phenomenon before us. Why is it important to call coercive-punitive interference with taking one’s own life “suicide prohibition”? Because suicide is action-doing, not disease-enduring; because the basic tool of the state is coercion, not care; and because the principal method of suicide prevention is incarceration, not information. Preventive measures are aimed at keeping undesirable events, such as accidents and diseases, from happening. Prohibitions are aimed at preventing persons from engaging in behaviors defined as “dangerous,” such as deliberate harm to others (“crime”) or to self (“mental illness”). The difference between these two modes of 14 • Suicide Prohibition influencing others is illustrated by the difference between the “war on drugs” and the “war on cancer.” The former is fought with guns and prisons, the latter with medical technology and advertising. Suicide is no longer illegal. But it is forbidden. We have decriminalized it and transferred its control to psychiatry. We deal with suicide and “suicidality” as mental health problems and “treat” them with deprivation of liberty called “hospitalization.” However, suicidality is an inclination, not a fact, much less a medical condition. Neither the act of killing onself nor the inclination to commit the deed is a disease. Driving while intoxicated (DWI) and killing oneself are both acts or deeds. The inclination-intention to engage in drunk driving is neither a crime nor a mental illness. We have neither criminal nor mental health laws aimed at its prevention. Laws against DWI punish the deed, not the inclination. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this was also the case with respect to suicide: the act was punished; the inclination was ignored.2 We have inverted that situation, penalizing the inclination, but not the deed, though we still stigmatize it. In a more liberal-libertarian society, neither would be the business of the law, the doctor, or the politician. Today, once a person enters into a professional relationship with a psychiatrist, he becomes, ipso facto, a “mental patient” and ceases to be a person possessing normal rights and responsibilities. Such a person forfeits his right of self-ownership, and the psychiatrist acquires the duty to protect him from himself and others from him. Should the psychiatrist deem the patient to be a danger to himself or others, the psychiatrist is professionally obligated to initiate violence against him, called “suicide prevention” and “civil commitment.” As a result, the psychiatrist also becomes subject to the desires of the patient’s relatives. Although professional jargon and social convention conceal it, one of the psychiatrist’s functions is to help family members with more power to control their relatives with Suicide Prohibition • 15 less power, traditionally by confinement in an asylum, sanatorium , madhouse, or mental hospital and, today, also by coercively drugging them with domesticating chemicals.3 Many people recognize that our everyday language refracts social reality in accordance with the prevailing zeitgeist. However , as long as a person remains unentangled in the state’s psychiatric control system and is not directly exposed to its actual functioning, he is unlikely to appreciate its threat to basic human rights. Once he becomes a “mental health consumer,” he is considered credible only if he praises the system. If he criticizes it, he is dismissed as lacking insight into his illness. The psychiatric perspective on life began to seep into the zeitgeist of modern Western culture toward the end of the eighteenth century and was ripe when Freud arrived on the scene, in the 1880s. His influence lay mainly in his successful elaboration and popularization of the language of psychopathology and psychotherapy . By the time Freud died, in 1939, W. H. Auden was moved to offer this perceptive tribute to him: if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd...