![\"staysuicide\"](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/staysuicide.jpg\")
<\/a>If you\u2019ve ever known someone who committed suicide, or have contemplated it yourself, or have admired a personal hero who died by his or her own hand, please oh please read this. Because, as Jennifer Michael Hecht<\/b> so stirringly argues in Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It<\/i><\/b><\/a> (public library<\/i><\/a>), numerous social science studies indicate that one of the best predictors of committing suicide is knowing suicide \u2014 a fact especially chilling given more people die of suicide than murder every year, and have been for centuries. Suicide kills more people than AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or liver disease, more men and women between the ages of 15 and 44 than war, more young people than anything but accident. And beneath all these impersonal statistics lie exponential human tragedies \u2014 of those who died, and of those who were left to live with their haunting void.<\/p>\nTo be sure, Hecht\u2019s interest in the subject is far from the detached preachiness such narratives tend to exude \u2014 after two of her dear friends, both fellow writers, committed suicide in close succession, she was left devastated and desperate to make sense of this deceptively personal act, which cuts so deep into surrounding souls and scars the heart of a community. So she immersed herself in the science, philosophy, and history of suicide searching for answers, emerging with an eye-opening sense of everything we\u2019ve gotten wrong about suicide and its prevention. She writes:<\/p>\n
As I examine the history of how, in the West, we have understood self-killing, I also will put forward what might seem to be a contrarian position, a nonreligious argument against suicide. It is a philosophical argument but parts of it can or even must be told in terms of history, and parts must be demonstrated through modern statistics. One of the arguments I hope to bring to light is that suicidal influence is strong enough that a suicide might also be considered a homicide. Whether you call it contagion, suicidal clusters, or sociocultural modeling, our social sciences demonstrate that suicide causes more suicide, both among those who knew the person and among the strangers who somehow identified with the victim. If suicide has a pernicious influence on others, then staying alive has the opposite influence: it helps keep people alive. By staying alive, we are contributing something precious to the world.<\/i><\/p>\n
Hecht argues that, historically, our ideologies around suicide have set us up for \u201can unwinnable battle\u201d: First, the moralistic doctrines of the major Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam condemned suicide as a sin that \u201cGod\u201d forbids, one more offensive than even murder because you were stealing directly from divinity with no time left for repentance \u2014 a strategy based on negative reinforcement, which modern psychology has demonstrated time and again is largely ineffective. Then came The Enlightenment, whose secular philosophy championed individual agency and, in rebelling against the blind religiosity of the past, framed suicide as some sort of moral freedom \u2014 a toxic proposition Hecht decries as a cultural wrong turn. Reflecting on such attitudes \u2014 take, for instance, Patti Smith\u2019s beautiful yet heartbreaking tribute to Virginia Woolf\u2019s suicide<\/a> \u2014 Hecht makes the case, instead, for two of history\u2019s relatively unknown but potent arguments against suicide: That we owe it to society and to our personal communities to stay alive, and that we owe it to our future selves:<\/p>\n Both religious and philosophical writers have written marvelous things about both these ideas, but they are often in the background. The reason is that a foreground argument has gotten all the press: Religious people have tended to lean heavily on the argument that God forbids suicide. Meanwhile, in response, secular, philosophical people have insisted that we are free to take our own lives. In my experience, outside the idea that God forbids it, our society today has no coherent argument against suicide. Instead, many self-described open-minded, rationalist, sophisticated thinkers emphatically defend people\u2019s right to do it. How did the secular philosophical worldview come to claim people\u2019s right to suicide? How did those in the modern world \u2014 who fight death so fiercely elsewhere \u2014 come to accept or at least leave unchallenged an ideology that kills? The answer is a fascinating story of a reaction against religion that somewhat accidentally led to a dark fatalism.<\/i><\/p>\n She traces the evolution of these attitudes:<\/p>\n Religion took a wrong turn by relying so heavily on divine disapproval of suicide, and on corporal (even postmortem) punishment of the offender, and secular philosophy took a wrong turn when it concluded that without God and religion, man was his own master and thus people should be free to kill themselves.<\/i><\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/i><\/p>\n The Enlightenment enhanced the value of the self above that of community and tradition and made of each man and woman an independent being. \u2026 Thus, built right into the world\u2019s most momentous revolution about the value of average individual human beings was a mechanism by which they were invited to judge their own lives, possibly to find them without value or worth, and to end them.<\/i><\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/i><\/p>\n The advance of modernity brought new concern for individual rights and private property, and these, as well as the rise of the scientific medical profession, began to have an effect on government policies. In the seventeenth century suicide had still been seen, in part, as the work of the devil. By the eighteenth, \u201cmelancholia\u201d was the dominant term in discussing suicide \u2014 and melancholia was the purview of doctors. From the worst sin possible, suicide became relatively value neutral; it could even be seen as virtuous when enacted in protest against an insult to one\u2019s ideals. By the twentieth century, there was a general sense among secularists that people had a right to suicide, and a right to make the decision on their own.<\/i><\/p>\n And yet our deep-seated unease about suicide is as old as antiquity can record: Even Plato, in crafting history\u2019s best-known image of a suicide \u2014 Socrates\u2019s famous death scene \u2014 paradoxically had Socrates state in that very same dialogue that suicide is wrong. Plato\u2019s Socrates also urged his countrymen to stay alive because of what they owed their country and their fellow citizens. Even among the Enlightenment philosophers who condoned suicide as honorable, there were the essential voices of dissent, perhaps most notable of whom was Immanuel Kant with his moving meditations on the important relationship between the individual and society \u2014 he condemned suicide as an assault against humanity, an act by which you rob the universe of your own potential goodness. Hecht synthesizes:<\/p>\n We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to \u201crenounce his personality,\u201d and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering. In one of the most crucial statements in the history of suicide, Kant writes: \u201cTo annihilate the subject of morality in one\u2019s person is to root out the existence of morality itself from the world as far as one can, even though morality is an end in itself. Consequently, disposing of oneself as a mere means to some discretionary end is debasing humanity in one\u2019s person.\u201d Human beings must understand themselves as a force of good, a force of morality. As human beings, it is our job to preserve these ideals. This goes a step beyond Aristotle\u2019s community or Rousseau\u2019s reminder of survivor\u2019s pain, and speaks instead of something larger. To be human is a powerful, profound thing that deserves a lot of patience.<\/i><\/p>\n Victor Hugo made that point even more poignantly when he wrote in Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/i>:<\/p>\n Die, so be it, but don\u2019t make others die. \u2026 Suicide is restricted. \u2026 As soon as it touches those next to you the name of suicide is murder.<\/i><\/p>\n Hecht also points to John Milton, whose meditations on staying alive are among history\u2019s \u201cmost subtle yet robustly useful.\u201d Left by his first wife and widowed by his second, he was almost as unlucky in love as he was in politics when he sided with Oliver Cromwell and ended up going into hiding to avoid execution, then went fully blind at the age of 44. And yet his stirring sonnet \u201cOn His Blindness\u201d speaks to everything Hecht argues for:<\/p>\n When I consider how my light is spent, Hecht extracts from it eloquent affirmation for her own argument against suicide:<\/p>\n Often people demand a great deal from themselves and their lives and are despondent when reality does not measure up. Milton has long been understood as having offered consolation for this affliction, reminding us that we do not always have a say in the role that we play in the world and that sometimes we must learn to see the service we are giving when we are doing nothing but waiting.<\/i><\/p>\n One particularly glaring modern disconnect Hecht points out is that while many people today don\u2019t subscribe to any religion, our culture\u2019s main argument against suicide remains about God. Instead, she seeks to excavate and reinstate those saner, sager historical arguments about suicide asserting \u201cthat it is wrong, that it harms the community, that it damages humanity, that it unfairly preempts your future self.\u201d Even the title of the book speaks to this conviction and the moral firmness with which Hecht believes we should address suicide, in such stark contrast with the Enlightenment\u2019s negligent permissiveness \u2014 it isn\u2019t titled Please, Stay<\/i>, like a gentle invitation encouraging the desired behavior, but simply Stay<\/i>, like a strict directive against the undesirable, a command issued to a dog who is about to do the wrong thing. (She offers, however, one important disclaimer: Her argument is about what\u2019s known as \u201cdespair suicide,\u201d or what she calls \u201cdarkness in the midst of life,\u201d and not about end-of-life management for the fatally ill. Nor is she passing judgment on those who have committed suicide. \u201cI assign no blame to those already lost, I only feel sorrow for them,\u201d<\/i> she writes.)<\/p>\n The firmness of Hecht\u2019s argument befits the findings of modern psychology \u2014 suicide is<\/i> exceptionally socially harmful:<\/p>\n Throughout history an optimistic cavalcade of people has sidestepped the religious debate and put forward sound reasons to resist suicide based on each of our relationships to humanity, especially friends and family. Today\u2019s sociological studies back up the historical claim that we need one another \u2014 or, rather, the specific claim that suicide causes suicides.<\/i><\/p>\n This is true not only of suicides we know directly, but also of ones we witness in popular culture. She cites the work of sociologist David Phillips, who found that in the month after Marilyn Monroe\u2019s overdose, there was a 12% spike in suicides in America \u2014 a phenomenon Phillips called the \u201cWerther Effect,\u201d after Goethe\u2019s novel. This effect is only amplified in small, close-knit communities: Recently revealed Pentagon data showed that in 2012, Americans were killing themselves at the mind-boggling rate of nearly one a day, leading to more deaths by suicide than in combat. To put this in even more alarming perspective, since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, more soldiers have died by their own hand than fighting.<\/p>\n The most profound and chilling contagion of all, however, happens during childhood \u2014 Hecht cites a Johns Hopkins University study, which found that if a parent commits suicide before their child is 18, that child is threefold as likely to commit suicide at some future point as her peers with non-suicidal parents. (For some heartbreaking anecdotal evidence, look no further than Sylvia Plath<\/a> \u2014 her son Nicholas, despite the timelessly life-affirming letters<\/a> his father sent him and the charming children\u2019s books<\/a> his mother wrote for him, took his own life at the age of 46; Plath had gassed herself to death when he was a year old.) Childhood incest survivors are also found to be particularly vulnerable to suicide, as are female rape victims, who are 13 times more likely to attempt suicide than the average women.<\/p>\n Even for those with no first-hand vulnerabilities, media reports of suicide can pose a significant danger, especially if they identify with the victims in some way. Hecht considers the fascinating findings of social contagion research:<\/p>\n One insight from this research is that \u201clike affects like.\u201d Suicide influence is strongest on those who are close to the victim in some way, or like them, in all meanings of that word. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that the report of suicide results in a rise in suicides of those similar to the victim in age and gender. Beyond the sociological and epidemiological studies, the notion of suicide influence is a common truth of clinical psychology. Counselors consider it a risk factor for suicide when a person reports having known someone who died this way. The sociological fact that suicide influences suicide leads to a philosophical idea: that it is morally wrong to kill oneself. A key predictor of suicide is knowing a suicide, and that means that in killing yourself you are likely to be killing someone else too, by influence. This claim can be shown to be valid in poetic as well as scientific terms.<\/i><\/p>\n Reflecting on the social contagion of suicide, Hecht writes:<\/p>\n Rejecting suicide is a huge act within a community. I also think it changes the universe. Either the universe is a cold dead place with a little growth of sentient but atomized beings each all by him- or herself trying to generate meaning, or we are in a universe that is alive with a growth of sentient beings whose members have made a pact with each other to persevere.<\/i><\/p>\n Additionally, Hecht argues that the tenacity we develop as we endure even the most blinding of that \u201cdarkness in the midst of life\u201d blossoms into a most valuable kind of character-building. She cites Keats, who called the world a \u201cveil of soul-making\u201d:<\/p>\n Keats saw the terrible pain of life as necessary to the development of a full human being. While the heart suffers acutely, the mind is nurtured and matured through the information garnered by the anguished heart. In his extended metaphor there is no other way for a human being to be tempered into personhood. In that sense the world, with all its difficulties, is a school.<\/i><\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/i><\/p>\n Childhood formed us all, and the more we suffered then, the harder it can be to accept ourselves as adults. True, the road to self-awareness is arduous. Some realizations bring us to low feelings much like grief, and much like grief the only solution is to live through it. We come out wiser on the other side. As Robert Frost wrote, \u201cThe only way around is through.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Nietzsche, too, argued that human suffering is necessary for the soul\u2019s growth and admonished against \u201cthe religion of comfortableness,\u201d which he believed hindered true happiness. Like Albert Camus<\/a>, he envisioned happiness and unhappiness as \u201csisters and even twins that either grow up together or \u2026 remain small together\u201d:<\/p>\n Nietzsche urges us to see that human suffering is necessary, but what is not necessary is painfully regretting that suffering. Our condition hands us difficulty, and unless we are careful to stop ourselves, we add more difficulty to our lot by fearing and loathing that difficulty. We suffer and then hate ourselves for suffering. We are much better off accepting the pain, seeing it as universal, noting that it can be borne, and, when possible, expressing it.<\/i><\/p>\n Returning to those Enlightenment philosophers like Hume and Rousseau who opposed suicide as socially unjust, Hecht writes:<\/p>\n If you have any energy at all for participating in this world, perhaps live now only for those small kindnesses and consolations you can render. Perhaps seek to help those equally burdened by sadness. Confess your own sadness to those in sorrow. Your ability to console may be profound. The texts urge human beings to try to know that they are needed and loved. We all deserve each other\u2019s gratitude for whatever optimism and joy we can hustle into this strange life by sheer force of personality, even by that most basic contribution, staying alive.<\/i><\/p>\n She later adds, referencing Hamlet\u2019s famous contemplation of suicide by way of \u201ca bare bodkin\u201d:<\/p>\n It is an intellectual and moral mistake to see the idea of suicide as an open choice that each of us is free to make. The arguments against suicide ask us to commit ourselves to the human project. They ask humanity to set down its daggers and cups of hemlock and walk away from them forever. Let us be done with bare bodkins.<\/i><\/p>\n Citing David Foster Wallace<\/a> \u2014 one of modern history\u2019s most worshipped, even fetishized fallen heroes, who shared some of the most memorable wisdom on life<\/a> yet took his own at the age of 44 \u2014 Hecht points to his famous words on heroism<\/a> and reframes it:<\/p>\n Often our courage is needed not to dramatically change reality but to accept it and persist in it.<\/i><\/p>\n She cites another celebrated author who took her own life, Anne Sexton<\/a>, and this heartbreaking note on the pain of life, found in one of her letters<\/a>:<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want to live. \u2026 Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can\u2019t Live It. I can\u2019t even explain. I know how silly it sounds \u2026 but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that\u2019s the rub. I am like a stone that lives \u2026 locked outside of all that\u2019s real. \u2026 I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet \u2026 and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can\u2019t, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong \u2026 to do it all wrong \u2026 believe me, (can you?) \u2026 what\u2019s wrong. I want to belong. \u2026 I\u2019m not a part. I\u2019m not a member. I\u2019m frozen.<\/i><\/p>\n Hecht pulls from it a universality that lies at the heart of her case against suicide:<\/p>\n Sexton\u2019s expression of anguish is extraordinary. Yet such feelings are not uncommon. To live through this painful feeling is hard work and requires prodigious courage. That courage comes first from recognizing that we are not alone. Sexton\u2019s confession here is of feeling cut off from community, yet she expresses something that a huge number of people experience. If we can grasp that commonality, the pain can become easier to bear.<\/i><\/p>\n Ultimately, Hecht argues for cultivating a culture of suicide resistance and attaching honor not to the act of suicide, as some Enlightenment philosophers did, but to perseverance itself. By equipping ourselves with alternative responses to life\u2019s suffering, she proposes, we\u2019ll work towards removing suicide from our list of options \u2014 a strategy that hopes to bar it as a psychoemotional possibility much like a barrier on a bridge can preempt the physical act of jumping. Optimizing for such a moment of pause, Hecht suggests, might be the small miracle that allows us to catch our breath and persevere:<\/p>\n If we can take suicide off the docket for the moment, that moment may turn out to be enough.<\/i><\/p>\n The very reason to do that, Hecht reiterates in returning to her core argument, is not for our present suffering selves but for each other. She puts it beautifully:<\/p>\n We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith \u2014 a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.<\/i><\/p>\n Stay<\/i><\/b><\/a> is more than a must-read \u2014 it\u2019s a cultural necessity. Complement it with what the psychology of suicide prevention teaches us about controlling our everyday worries<\/a>.<\/p>\n _____________________________<\/p>\n Brain Pickings<\/i><\/a><\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova<\/a>, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for Wired<\/em> UK<\/a> and The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nEre half my days in this dark world and wide,
\nAnd that one Talent which is death to hide,
\nLodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
\nTo serve therewith my Maker, and present
\nMy true account, lest he returning chide,
\n\u201cDoth God exact day-labour, light denied?\u201d
\nI fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
\nThat murmur, soon replies, \u201cGod doth not need
\nEither man\u2019s work or his own gifts. Who best
\nBear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His State
\nIs kingly: thousands at his bidding speed
\nAnd post o\u2019er land and ocean without rest;
\nThey also serve who only stand and wait.<\/i><\/p>\n