Soon after deciding to write about this, we discovered that it was going to be easier said than done. A book to help people in distress certainly seemed like a fine idea; but would anyone actually buy a self-help book about suicide? And would anyone actually read it? After all, suicide is an ugly word!

No one seems to mind buying a book about how to have a healthy heart, read faster, or develop a winning personality, but in most cultures suicide carries a stigma not seen with most other human problems. Take a look at your newspaper’s obituary section. It is known that 1.4 percent of all deaths are self-inflicted – more than the number of deaths caused by liver disease, kidney disease, or even homicide. But if you newspaper is like most, its policy is not to report suicide as a cause of death.

While this might be motivated by a well-meaning wish to protect the feelings of surviving family members, why is a death by suicide cause for shame or embarrassment any more than some other cause of death? Answers to this question have many roots and go back hundreds of years. As early as the fifth century, St. Augustine denounced suicide as self-murder and a certain road to eternal damnation. By the Middle Ages, legal sanctions had come into play in England, where committing suicide meant that the family lost all claims to the deceased’s possessions. As recently as the early 1800s, the French hung the body of a suicide victim from a gallows, and the English pounded a stake through the heart and buried the body at a crossroads. Fortunately, these horrific examples of "blaming the victim" are things of the past. Unfortunately, the stigma of suicide is far from gone. Witness the fact that five states still include suicide in their criminal codes (although these laws are rarely applied).

You may ask, "Well, shouldn’t suicide and suicidal behavior be stigmatized? Isn’t it sinful, after all? Besides, we surely want to do everything we can to discourage self-destructive behavior."

True, we want to do all we can to prevent suicide and suicidal behaviors, but it is unlikely that laying guilt trips on depressed people will be helpful. Aren’t depressed people already some of the guiltiest-feeling people around? If guilt were an effective strategy, we would expect depressed people rarely, if ever, to commit suicide. Most depressed people already feel bad about themselves. A threat of moral condemnation is unlikely to have any positive impact on someone who already believes he or she is bad.

Most religions now view suicide as a symptom of an illness rather than a deliberately sinful act. Therefore, they no longer consider it appropriate to condemn a person for an act that was chosen under a cloud of emotional upset and impaired judgment. Moreover, you may be surprised to know that suicide is not specifically prohibited in the Bible (although murder is clearly forbidden, we cannot assume that suicide is a form of murder). If suicide were such a grave transgression, we would expect to see larger sections specifically devoted to it.

So, how shall we view suicide? We'll discuss that in the next entry.

Excerpt from Choosing to Live: How to Defeat Suicide Through Cognitive Therapy by Thomas E. Ellis.