Date: June 1, 2025 at 01:03
This was the title of a Substack article I saw linked in a Discord thread a few days ago. It was presented as "a really good article about how any legitimacy given to suicide harms potentially suicidal people." Someone else called it "moving." I clicked on it with an optimistic attitude.
My opinion quickly soured as I read on.
Arguments against assisted suicide have been made from many quarters; here, I want to focus on one which has received less attention and which is personally significant for me—the danger that legalisation would pose to chronically suicidal people.
This is already a strange statement, as danger is the point of suicide. Danger is intentionally chosen. This already seems to assume that suicide in and of itself should be prevented, from a kind of paternalist standpoint.
The passage of this bill would be a catastrophic and irreversible cultural shift which would endanger many more lives than those of the terminally ill people directly implicated. Overnight, suicide would go from a worst case scenario, something which the state is tasked with preventing, to a justifiable and understandable option, just one possibility among many—perhaps even the best option, if suffering is unbearable and if one feels a burden to one’s family or to the state.
This actually flirts with the real, terrifying insight about assisted suicide here: the issue doesn't start and end with the fact that mentally ill people might be more likely to choose death; that's the symptom of a greater problem. It's that legalizing assisted suicide in a society which is fundamentally hostile to human well-being (that is, our society) is not some sort of neutral move but actually an entrenchment of our existing social structures, which, in turn, would further enable suicide.
It legitimizes a framework where suffering isn't a sign that society is failing its people but rather that the person in question is failing society.
It's inverse revolution. Suicide is no longer rebellion; it's reconciliation. Not "I can't live in this world so it must be changed," but "I can't live in this world, so I must be removed." That's the horror.
When that framework becomes official policy, when it becomes law, what you get is a cultural kill switch for the most dispossessed. It's a smooth and quiet culling of the evidence that we live in such a fundamentally sick world that people would bootleg their own deaths out of desperation for an end to suffering. It's a way of maintaining a system that has already condemned people to death, but it did so in a way that maintains the appearance of agency and freedom.
The problem is not that people are going to start committing suicide because it's more legal; the problem is that this becomes yet another method of social control. You have to understand that when you give people "options" like this in a context that is fundamentally oppressive, what you're actually doing is giving the system another way to get rid of people that it has no interest in supporting.
This isn't just about mentally ill people; it's about everyone who would rather die than face another day of living under this capitalist hellhole of a system. It's about all the people who are not terminally ill but are exhausted, who are tired of barely being able to afford rent and food and who can't face the bleak reality that they won't be able to retire before they die.
But that's not what the author is talking about.
[Cue for you to read the article if you haven't already, since I don't feel myself qualified to summarize the author's personal story for her, and there are some other, correct things she says that I don't go over.]
A few months ago, I posted this tweet:
one of the most helpful things I read on here is that if you genuinely want to kill yourself you might as well change your life in the most radical and ridiculous way because any risk is better than dying. quit your job, move to mexico, take out a loan and buy a boat, etc
Besides the assumption that anything is better than death, there are a number of problems with this. Many follow a certain pattern that will continue to haunt this article. See if you can spot it.
The first problem is that this advice is fundamentally inaccessible. The idea that people trapped in grinding poverty, untreated illness, or crippling social circumstances are going to suddenly find the resources to buy a boat or even move to Mexico (assuming they had the body, the wherewithal, or ability to emigrate), isn't based on reality.
The second problem is the assumption that it's all on the individual: if you're unhappy, or you want to die, it's because you haven't taken bold enough action. You haven't disrupted your own life creatively. It's your job to keep trying to change everything about yourself until it works out. This may be inspiring to some, but it's frankly cruel and unhelpful for everyone who's hanging on by a thread, not because they need a quirky life reboot, but because they’ve been systematically crushed. What if you're trapped, sick, and alone? It amounts to saying, "if you're drowning, you just need to swim harder."
It's unhelpful because it sells fantasy in place of solidarity. It doesn't say, "let's gather up and dismantle the shit that makes life unbearable." It says, "why don't you just rebrand your despair as adventure? Maybe then things will be okay."
But what if rebranding your despair doesn't make things okay? What if the only thing that could make things okay is a radical societal shift that addresses the systemic problems that are driving people to suicide in the first place?
Third, it flattens death into this universalized, interchangeable event--as if a gun shot to the head is the same thing as dying slowly of hypothermia because you were carwrecked halfway through your cross-country road trip. One is a crisis of existence; the other is the tragic conclusion of a desperate gambit that never should have had to have been taken, based on reckless advice that ended in drawn out, harrowingly painful, and politically invisible obliteration.
One is called suicide, the other misadventure, but the message we should be asking ourselves regardless of which is this: why do people need to flee their entire lives just to survive another day? Why is death a closer option than therapy, housing, and safety? Why do people call on other people to improvise a Hail Mary escape with no safety net just to keep breathing?
This [thinking of suicide as an option among other options—not ideal, but maybe better than extreme poverty, prolonged suffering, disability and other negative circumstances] is not a view I hold anymore. In the intervening decade, I’ve lost three friends to suicide and comforted others after their friends or family members killed themselves. I’ve also seen friends whose lives were nothing more than years of inpatient hospitalisations and trauma go on to recover, go to university, find love, start families, and have lives beyond anything we could have imagined as teenagers. I can no longer think of suicide as an option among others. It’s the end of all options, the end of hope. It denies all the infinite possibilities of the future, the ways that life can change and improve in ways we can never foretell. One friend, given a terminal cancer diagnosis as a teenager, is still here a decade later.
This is the core of the essay's emotional engine, and also the moment where it collapses as a piece of ethical reasoning. It's also similar to the same kind of logic that I analyzed in my first blog post. There are two things that I gather could be happening here. Either:
The author is cherry-picking. She takes a statistical outlier and elevates it into proof positive that things could always get better: after all, look at this person, they lived! But the thing is: that's an exception, not the norm. She's confusing the possibility of hope with its inevitability.
Or it's a non-sequitur, where she's arguing that because some people endured and things eventually got better, that means the endurance itself is always justifiable. Which is frankly deranged. It's like telling someone who's bleeding out that they shouldn't die because some other injured person over in Myanmar managed to find a bandage.
She effectively implies, if I got the enthymeme correct, that any choice to commit suicide is a failure of imagination. That suicide is a tragic misunderstanding of what life could be, rather than a coherent response to what life is. Somehow it doesn't penetrate our skulls, that one. Who knew people commit suicide because of how the world treats them?
There's an admittedly lucid concern here: the "You're confused. You're overwhelmed. You just can't see clearly."
It's not wrong. It's just incomplete. It's not that the pain isn't distorting. It's that the distortion itself is a reaction to something in the world. The pain itself is real.
A schizophrenic doesn't speak in metaphors. When they say the CIA has bugs in their teeth or the devil is whispering through light fixtures, that's not poetic. That's the raw sensory experience of a nervous system blown wide open by trauma, genetics, and a world that actively worsens their condition with cruel laws, lack of care, isolation and contempt.
They have an entirely different world, and an entirely different way of perceiving reality, very possibly born of the unending assault their nervous system is under. The voices are real. The pain is real. The crushing dread is real.
It's true that when someone decides to kill themselves, their perception can be skewed. How do you suggest un-skewing that? Coping mechanisms? Cognitive behavioral therapy? Antidepressants? Do you also prevent weeds from overtaking your garden with a modest trim of the leaves?
There are reasons for the pain, and reasons for the skewed perception. When the world itself is so thoroughly poisonous that you've decided you'd rather not live to see yourself get ground up by its gears any longer, nor stick around for the light at the end of the tunnel (if any), that isn't just a distortion. It's a rational response to an irrational situation.
The message of the "just hold on" crowd also leads to this very predictable place where people are essentially coerced into clinging onto life out of fear of losing all possibilities, rather than a deep and abiding sense that being alive is fundamentally meaningful or worth it.
Which is not, by and large, what keeps people going. What keeps people going is community, love, safety, and security. If you're lucky. The author has this weirdly inverted way of thinking that's like: "people should not kill themselves because things might get better and wouldn't that be just the most wonderful and perfect thing!" Well it's like, no, actually. Most people would like to be alive and have a life that's worth living, and it's a sad indictment of our society that we can't provide that for so many people. We should do better than telling them to just hold on.
Even so, all possibility of cognitive distortion considered, the fact remains: there are some conditions, and some lives, for which no hope of improvement exists. There are lives that will not be made better or improved by the mere passage of time. But there is a specific reason why the author chooses time and time again to resort to absolutes like "suicide should never be on the table".
The most important defence I have against suicidal ideation is making it completely unthinkable, banishing it to the realm of taboo and never, ever considering it as a plausible option.
In other words: she solves the existential problem of the world by erasing it from her imagination. She goes to great lengths to maintain this little oubliette.
By this logic, just as how we can prevent suicides by guilting people into never performing it or speaking up about it, we can make global warming cease to be a threat by pretending it's a lie, and make hunger history by just closing our eyes whenever someone asks for food. This is not the kind of thinking that should inform policy. This is the same magical thinking that underlies all sorts of feel-good, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy: if we just don't think about it, it won't be real. We can just ignore it away!
If you can't see it, it doesn't exist. What happens then when the world itself forces that thought into your head, day after day, like water torture? What then?
It is dangerous to let this kind of simplistic, decontextualized analysis guide public discourse on a subject as complex as this. It is even more dangerous to export your private coping mechanism onto a blog post as a call to action for your platform of thousands to read and politically act on.
What if some people's suicidal thoughts aren't a cognitive distortion, but an accurate perception of the world? What if the reason we need to talk about this is because the world itself is driving people to despair, to the point where they don't want to live anymore?
For me, a spiritual framework, like that outlined in Dignitas Infinita, has been essential. But most people aren’t spiritual and their only bulwark is the social consensus that life is preferable to death. This consensus is what’s up for debate tomorrow.
God forbid we ever interrogate that consensus. God forbid we ever examine the reasons why people might actually prefer death. God forbid we take a level-headed approach that isn't adopting a medieval panic response the second we have to confront the idea that the world is just not working, and not for a lot of people.
The consensus she speaks of, for many, may not be a bulwark at all. But a prison. What's up for debate ought to be whether we as a collective will do anything meaningful, anything concrete, to actually remedy the circumstances that drive people to this point.
There is hardly a greater harm than forcing someone to live against their will and calling it compassion.
MAS is extremely difficult to correctly implement in a capitalist society. The only way it could ever be acceptable is if we limited it to terminally ill patients (and even that is a vague term).
Point is, we can't let the rupture of suicide in the social fabric to be normalized and trivialized. Such a high bar for independent, individual suicide is necessary so that people don't resign the rest of their lives without a visceral understanding of the finality of the act.
But in the same breath, the horrors of Alzheimer's and late-stage cancer are real. People should not be forced to live themselves a corpse on a hospital bed, with no dignity or self-determination.
The tension is obvious. It's not an easy issue.
In the current system, any expansion of MAS beyond the terminally ill is beyond the pale. We cannot, in this cruel society, lower the bar for opting out without effectively telling entire classes of people--disabled, poor, mentally ill, chronically suffering--that their deaths are advisable. Because that's exactly what happens when you legalize MAS in a system already built to neglect those people. You don't create more "options," you just make abandonment look like autonomy.
I live because I don't believe in inverse revolution. I believe the world should be changed, that there are still so many narratives to correct, and that my thoughts could help people live more honest lives.
Although I live as chronically suicidal, it hasn't gotten to the point where I would go through with it. But for others, I know it's not so easy.