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A new book argues that suicide can be a rational response to an intolerable world -- and says that by medicalizing suicides, we rob them of their free will.
May 13, 2003 | Suicide has come down in the world. In the past -- in ancient Greece and Rome, for example, or 19th century France -- it was a powerful act, a gesture that struck the world like a bell, with a peal that might ring down through the ages. Now it's the unfortunate final symptom of mental illness and neurochemical imbalance. Self-destruction was once considered tragic in the classical sense, the result of an inevitable, if not outright fated clash between the noblest aspirations of the human spirit and the limits of reality; think of Socrates or Cleopatra. Now, it's "tragic" in the newspaper sense of the word, a sad accident caused by insufficient or incorrect medication.
Is this state of affairs to be lamented? That's the question that Lisa Lieberman, an American scholar of modern European cultural and intellectual history, asks with "Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide." Her book is a slender and elegantly written consideration of the different ways suicides and their survivors have interpreted this drastic act. Lieberman wants to argue that by defining suicide as something only done by "sick people" who "deserve compassion, not blame" and who with treatment might be cured, we are "removing morality from the equation," and with it "volition." As a result, "individuals at risk of destroying themselves [are] deprived of the right to determine their own behavior."
The right to die is something most Westerners support when it comes to people with terminal, agonizing illnesses. But Lieberman isn't just talking about preserving this right for those with AIDS or cancer; she asks whether suicide can't also be a considered, rational choice made by an individual who for one reason or another just can't go on. Can we safely assume that a physically healthy person who intends to kill himself must be out of his mind? Lieberman examines the cases of many suicides -- some famous, some obscure, some fictional, some actual -- and suspects that we can't.
Lieberman is not disinterested. Her manic-depressive mother threatened to kill herself during mood downswings, and her paternal grandfather ended his life after losing all his savings in a Depression-era bank collapse. She also worked as a volunteer on a suicide hot line, where she found that "every call was a story with a mystery at its heart: The question of why the person at the other end wanted to die." Some suicides seek nothing more than relief from intolerable emotional pain, but others also want to make some kind of point. "Melancholic or angry, cowardly or heroic: suicide is a statement that cries out to be deciphered, yet the cultural history of self-destruction consists of a series of attempts to evade this truth by depriving suicide of its broader implications."
"Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide"
By Lisa Lieberman
Ivan R. Dee Publisher
176 pages
Nonfiction
As Lieberman points out, no one wants to admit that suicide might be more than a merely insane action because of "the disruptive potential of self-destruction, the power of individuals to use death as a weapon in order to undermine the authority of states or to bring into question the cherished values of societies and institutions." It can be "both an act of aggression and a powerful public statement," as suicide bombers demonstrate nearly every week. If suicide can have a meaning, the meaning is almost certainly a variation on "Fuck you!"
And if suicide can have a meaning, something beyond the malfunctioning of brain chemistry, then it must also have a history. It makes sense; what could be more cultural than killing yourself, the most radical violation of every biological and evolutionary mandate? Lieberman teases out this history, from the "suicide of honor" practiced by the Roman elites -- such as the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who killed himself at the command of the emperor Nero, and Brutus, who fell on his sword when the Republic was lost -- to what can only be called a suicide fad kicked off in the early 19th century after the publication of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther," the overwrought story of an artistic type who shoots himself out of unrequited love for a married woman. In between there were early Christians so eager to achieve martyrdom that church officials had to crack down and the philosophes of the French Revolution, who saw suicide as "a political act: a proud affirmation of personal freedom," in defiance of the church that had decreed it a sin.
Too much of "Leaving You" is devoted to examinations of the sort of multivolume, now-unread, sentimental novels that were all the rage during the 18th and 19th century, written by the likes of Rousseau, Madame de Staîl and George Sand. (One of the hazards of reading cultural histories is having to hear about Rousseau over and over again.) But Lieberman also dug up records on actual suicides that occurred in France during the years when those books were popular. The influence of the Romantic cult of suicide on these real people cannot be denied: "The thwarted passion that figured so prominently in the works of the Romantics was apparently perceived as the most justifiable grounds for self-destruction, judging from the predominance of the motif both in the suicides' own characterization of their plight and the ways in which their situations were described by outside observers," Lieberman writes. One young man's note read, "At 14 I knew love, at 20 I became its slave and at 24 it has driven me mad."
But, as Lieberman points out, a closer look reveals that many of these suicides were more spiteful and petulant than they were illuminated by the splendor of great passion. Before ending their lives, these (generally young) men and women took time to inform those who had wronged them -- cruel love objects, but just as often parents and guardians -- of exactly who was to blame for their pitiful fates. Lieberman, who is enjoyably uninclined to let anyone get away with anything, observes that "the dishonesty, self-pity, and sheer malice that seem so obvious to me were camouflaged, to the apparent satisfaction of the actors and actresses involved, by the Romantic language they employed."
