When I was practicing law full time from the mid 1970s into the 1980s, there was tremendous on emphasis suicide prevention. Hotlines proliferated, anti suicide billboards were ubiquitous, and a great deal of attention was paid to the issue throughout society.
Then, the assisted suicide movement began arguing that some suicides were good. The corrosive effect of the movement, among other factors, has enervated the suicide prevention movement, to the point that when someone sent me a suicide threat on email several years ago, I couldn’t find a prevention center to help him in his area code!
And now, Suicide Prevention Week has come and almost gone, without making a sound. Indeed, I wouldn’t have known that tomorrow is Suicide Prevention Day but for an excellent blog post by Not Dead Yet’s Steve Drake. From”Why Is There So Much Suicide Promotion During Suicide Prevention Week?”
You’d never know it’s National Suicide Prevention Week (Sept. 4 – 10), or that Saturday, Sept. 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day. But then again, as I’ve written before, it’s been increasingly clear that the Suicide Prevention Community has washed its hands of old, ill and disabled people – and surrendered at risk individuals in those groups to suicide and euthanasia advocacy groups.
Who can deny it? Pro suicide billboards are almost as common as anti. The late Jack Kevorkian has been lionized in some of the most blatant historical revisionism since Stalin air brushed Trotsky out of the history of the Bolshevik Revolution. How to commit suicide books are sold in bookstores and assisted suicide advocacy groups are treated with respect, bordering on awe, by many in the media, to the point that the anti doctor prescribed death side’s perspectives often aren’t included in stories about the issue. And when government promotes suicide prevention, it remains silent about assisted suicide advocacy.
In the UK, prosecutors routinely shrug at blatant assisted suicides. For pay suicide clinics have become magnets to the suicidal ill, disabled, and elderly in Switzerland. Meanwhile, some mental health professionals promote the odious notion of “rational suicide,” in which the psychologist or psychiatrists are told not to be judgmental about suicide. A Vermont newspaper has promoted assisted suicide as a way to help pay for the state’s new single payer health plan. Family members support the suicides of their elderly loved ones’, and proudly proclaim their role in their deaths to the media. We are developing, nay already have become, a pro suicide culture.
Drake discusses these matters and closes with a cogent note about the abdication of suicide prevention specialists to speak up against suicide promotion:
I don’t know what’s makes me angrier – that all of this assisted suicide advocacy goes on during a period in which suicide prevention is supposed to be promoted…Or the deadly, consistent and determined silence of the (cough) suicide prevention community when suicide is actively promoted as praiseworthy and deserving of “assistance” for old, ill and disabled people. Would it be too much to ask to just cancel the whole Suicide Prevention Week/Day thing? Right now, all those events are accomplishing is to highlight just how selectively the whole concept of “prevention” is being applied.
Quite right. In their silence over assisted suicide, the suicide prevention community has badly undermined its own mission. In effect, they are saying that only some suicides are bad. Once you do that, the list of “good” suicides grows. At the very least, it is like telling someone not to smoke, but if you do, use a filter cigarette. No wonder Suicide Prevention Week has become invisible.
September 9th, 2011 | 11:51 am
[...] itself must shoulder part of the blame because it has remained generally silent about the issue. I provide details over at Secondhand Smoke. Comments [...]
September 9th, 2011 | 12:05 pm
Evansville Indiana has a very intensive anti-suicide program with heavy media saturation. It’s spearheaded by the local coroner. It was begun over a year ago because of an alarming rise in teen suicides.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
September 9th, 2011 at 12:20 pm
Good to hear. But that’s the exception these days, alas.
September 9th, 2011 | 4:52 pm
As the mother of a 30 year old suicide victim who used an assisted suicide technique, I completely agree with Stephen Drake and Wesley! It’s appalling that most suicide prevention and mental health organizations refuse to address the promotion of assisted suicide while criticizing the media for glamorizing celebrity suicides.
September 10th, 2011 | 8:00 am
[...] Continue… 0 [...]
September 10th, 2011 | 2:29 pm
Hi Wesley!
It’s been awhile and I can see that you’re still doing what you believe is right in your heart of heart and you follow that with the gifts that God has given you.
(At the very least, it is like telling someone not to smoke, but if you do, use a filter cigarette. No wonder Suicide Prevention Week has become invisible.)
Some will call me crazy but the ones who believe in death have already lived and are still living backward with The Devil and long story short, God is for real and/or He’s The Biggest liar that ever walked this earth.
I could say that Jesus gave refuge to some of the weakest strongest godly cells who walked with Him in the flesh over two thousand years ago, thinking that they were true gods, which is but a moment of Time for His Blessed Trinity but I don’t want to go off on a tangent trying to prove “IT” so I’ll just say that this article and or post reminds me of a movie called “Quantum Leap” where a few people travel from one dimention to another on earth. Long story short, one time, they came across a world who would have a draw and pick out names of people who were to be killed, kindly you might say. Anyway, call me a sinner but back then, I thought that “IT” was not such a bad idea but that was when my so called godly cells thought that they were really incharge of all my cells of humanity.
I’ll close by saying that if there’s something in the box then there ain’t really nothing in “IT” for The Devil. Right? :)
SHALOM
September 10th, 2011 | 7:17 pm
The freakonomics podcast did an episode on suicide recently. It was excellent. Sobering but informative.
September 11th, 2011 | 11:26 pm
Hey, times change, the pendulum swings, the worm turns. If people want to commit suicide they’ll do it. It’s kind of like your kids having sex;you KNOW it’s going to happen if that’s what they want, whether you like it or not. Please tell us you’re not advocating another “just say no” solution.
HW
September 12th, 2011 | 2:24 pm
HW, you just eviscerated the foundation of all civilization, which is a millenia-long “just say no” campaign for a multitude of things. Heck, let’s let Norway go back to pillaging the coast of England, because they like doing it any they’ll just do it anyway. Slavery was a very common practice in various forms in a great many societies, let’s go back to live and let live, right? You have to do better than that…
September 12th, 2011 | 10:20 pm
I received an email today at my work account–in a suburban Catholic school–from a suicide prevention event that said it sought to “remove the stigma” from depression, bipolar disorder, other mental disorders, and suicide itself. They had me and they lost me in one sentence. Isn’t the entirety of the suicide prevention cause predicated on the notion that suicide is, you know, something to be avoided? I’m all for an end to judging people for mental illness, but isn’t de-stigmatizing suicide more or less the same thing as normalizing it?
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
September 12th, 2011 at 11:41 pm
Bingo.
September 13th, 2011 | 9:07 pm
Well, what should we expect in a world where people complain about having too much to eat.
September 23rd, 2011 | 12:59 pm
I don’t know how I missed this particular blog. I guess I was too busy blogging over at Professor Pope’s Medical Futility Blog.
Of course, Wesley Smith has been right since the beginning about passive euthanasia and the fact that fiscal expediency sooner or later would push for public policy to unilaterally euthanize the elderly with the shorter life expectancies as a mater of fiscal expediency. The justification and rationalization, of course, would be “medical futility” and “compassion” which, of course is not defined under law and only under policy.
The sanctify of “money” will so often surpass “sanctity of life” concerns. The pro-suicide folks are usually the pro-unilateral crowd who wants physicians to have the right to unilaterally decide when it is time for patients to die.
I wonder if Wesley Smith is aware that the policy of Medicare/Tricare/Medicade/Private Insurers concerning reimbursement to the hospitals is pushing unilateral euthanasia of the elderly whose due process rights to make an informed decision about how to die is removed –as a matter of fiscal expediency for the insurance companies and the hospitals who are not reimbursed for ICU time for the elderly under the under-the-table public policy made possible by Administrative law.
The slippery slope Wesley Smith talked about years ago is iced with propaganda about the “right to commit suicide” and this ugly under-the-radar public policy continues to grow in the shadows of the bureaucracy that has been created to protect the for-profit health care industry and the large insurance companies.
October 13th, 2011 | 12:57 pm
[...] not just some. Mixed messages makes it difficult to maintain a robust anti suicide policy. (Remember “Invisible Suicide Prevention Week?”) You can’t say, in effect, “Don’t jump off a bridge,” and then when told, [...]
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