Suicide is Selfish?

I have seen in a number of places over the past week or two the claim that suicide is selfish, sometimes referred to as the ultimate selfish act. This is not a big public debate, but rather one of those random coincidences of several people saying a similar thing over a short while. This is something that really pisses me off, and I will explain why.

The reasoning for suicide being a selfish act is that it is something done for oneself, and it results in other people suffering. When someone commits suicide (a rather repugnant term for it as it suggests a crime) the person who kills them self does it to solve their own problem, but the result for other people is negative. Those who care about the person are saddened by their death. In these terms suicide is selfish, but then under those circumstances almost everything we do is selfish.

If you have money, if you don't give your money to someone else then by this definition of selfish, you are selfish. Someone else would be happy by getting money, you didn't give it to them, therefore you are selfish. Eating that pizza, having a house, driving a car, all selfish acts. By this definition of something being selfish, that you do something for yourself rather than others, almost everything that anyone does is selfish. In order to not be considered a selfish person under these circumstances one would need to be a saint of the highest order.

I don't think this is what people mean when they make the statement that suicide is selfish. I think what they mean is that suicide is particularly selfish something that rises above the basic definition. The meaning is that suicide is egregiously selfish, that the harm to others is very large, and the benefit gained is relatively small. This, I believe, comes from the school of thought that thinks suicide is "The easy way out." This school of thought is that those who commit suicide generally don't have insurmountable problems, their situation really isn't intolerable, or even extremely unpleasant, and that suicide is an easy thing to do. These are appallingly wrong.

When someone is depressed enough to commit suicide their situation is horrendous. Suicidal people don't just decide to do it in one day. It usually takes months or years of thinking about it, of worrying on the problem, of living in literal misery. I have experienced major depression, and I'll take someone breaking my leg with a baseball bat to the experience every single time. To be depressed means that nothing provides pleasure. Food has little or no taste, you have no sense of humor, nothing is funny, nothing is beautiful, nobody really cares for you. You feel entirely isolated, alone, incompetent, ugly, useless. If you have not experienced it then all I can say is that it is worse than you imagine. Whatever you are imagining of what it is like, it is worse than that. It isn't the situation that you are in. It isn't finances, or the loss of a loved one, or unemployment, or any other life situation. It is that and the complete inability to be happy, and the certainty that you will never experience happiness ever again in your life.

As for suicide being the easy way out, this is nonsense. The human body comes equipped with a desperation to remain alive. The basic instincts are entirely built around the survival and reproduction of individuals. That shot of adrenaline, the panting, desperate fear that happens when you just avoid a car accident, or when you slip near a large fall is built into a person. Someone who wants to kill themself is not free from these instincts. The thought of dying is terrifying. Someone who points a gun at their own head feels the same fear that someone who is getting a gun pointed at their head feels. Someone about to jump off a bridge feels the exact same fear of heights that someone who has slipped and is hanging on for dear life feels. Could you break your own leg deliberately? How hard would that be for you to do? Standing there with a baseball bat, feeling the adrenaline pumping, imagining the pain, the sound of it, worrying about whether you'll do it right or whether you'll have to try twice.

Being depressed to the point of suicide is an appalling situation. It's as bad as chemotherapy, but without the hope that you might recover. One of the most egregious things about depression is the hopelessness. The hopelessness is so prevalent, so enormous, that a leading reason why very depressed people don't commit suicide is the belief that they'll screw it up, that they are so useless that they couldn't even do that right. Most suicides happen as people are getting better, because at that point they have the motivation and self-belief to do it.

Committing suicide is an act of extreme willpower, an act of enormous physical courage, in my eyes the same as a war hero risking gunfire to rescue a fallen comrade. The goals are different, he outcome different, but the act of will required is the same. It is not easy to commit suicide, is diabolically hard. It is the willful denial of all the dreams and hopes you ever had for your life. It is an act of physical courage. It is hard, really hard. In fact, it is so hard that the only reason I am alive is that it was too hard for me to do it. I know for an absolute fact that I am too much of a coward, too mentally weak to do it. I remember standing in a grocery store simply weeping in misery because I didn't have the strength to kill myself. I know for a fact that suicide is not the easy way out.

What the thought that suicide is selfish really comes down to is that those who hold the position think that themselves, or the relatives and friends around the person who kills themselves, are more important than the person who commits suicide. Their misery as a result of the suicide is more important than the misery of the person who was depressed. That their happiness is worth the other person suffering by living. It is a position that holds the person who commits suicide in contempt. It assumes that they know the position of the person who is depressed better than that person. It assumes that they can evaluate the situation better, that they have thought more about the consequences, that they love the person more than they are loved. This is all bullshit. Nobody knows more about the situation than the person who is depressed.

When people undergo chemotherapy, or get very sick, or lose someone they love, they are often very sad or miserable. Anyone with any empathy feels pain because of what they are going through. But we don't deride these people as selfish because their situation hurts us. We are sympathetic towards them, we wish their pain to end. We don't call someone crying in public because they are frightened of dying from the cancer they just contracted selfish, even though their misery and fear hurts us. Depression is a disease that nobody asks for either.

The opinion that suicide is selfish makes me very angry. It is deeply ignorant, a hold over from times when mental illness was contemptible. The belief shows contempt and a complete lack of sympathy for someone in a horrendous situation. But most of all, it is a deeply selfish position, a position that puts one's own sadness at the death of a loved one over and above the release from misery of the loved one. My feelings are more importnat than your feelings.


Who does this opinion effect? What is it for? It doesn't effect someone who has committed suicide, they are dead. The expression of this statement is for two groups of people, those thinking about suicide, and those who will be around someone in that situation. The results are that it adds to the guilt that a person thinking about suicide will feel, it adds to the loss of self-esteem, it confirms that the person is useless and awful. For those around someone with intense depression it relieves responsibility for helping them out, it relieves the guilt (I couldn't stop them from being selfish), it allows us to love the person a little less which helps the pain.

The statement, in my opinion, reaches the level of being evil. It hurts those in the most need of help, and if it helps anyone, it does so only by denigrating others and supporting the worst in people.