The Debate About Suicide Is Only Starting

There was a time, not so long ago, that suicide couldn’t even be mentioned in polite society. For a start Catholic dogma had it that it was a sin to take your own life, and a mortal one at that, which would condemn the perpetrator to the terrors of an eternity in hell.

But that was not all. In the here and now, there was a stigma attached to suicide, the effect of which was that anything that could be done was done not just by the famiies of those who decided to take their own lives, but also by the authorities, to ensure that it was never, or almost never, named as such.
Someone went for a swim and didn’t come back: it was death by misadventure. A car drove over a pier: it was a tragic accident. A body was discovered at the bottom of a cliff: he or she must have slipped. A young man was found with a noose around his neck: he was probably experimenting...
It is hard to blame families for wanting to hang on, as so many did, to whatever small vestige of hope they could conjure, no matter how faint, that it wasn’t what they knew in their hearts it really must have been. But I do not believe in the long run that it makes sense to paper over the cracks.
There is no getting away from the fact that it is an extremely difficult and painful issue. The suicide of a close relative, a friend or a family member can leave the bereaved feeling brutally wounded, confused, bereft and vulnerable for years. Especially where the suicide of a young person is concerned, it can be and usually is desperately, ferociously hard for everyone to come to terms with the howling sense of loss.
Inevitably, it is most difficult for parents, who have brought the fruit of their loins and their love into the world and helped him or her to grow and develop though the various stages of childhood: to witness all of the hope, the energy and the optimism that a young person shows in getting from the delivery ward to the age of fifteen or sixteen being instantaneously extinguished, frequently without warning, can be a crushing blow for those who are confronted by the terrible responsibility of having to call the ambulance or identify the poor, sad, broken body, all the breath extinguished forever from it.
It is hard, hard, hard. But suicide has always been a fact of human experience. The circumstances vary hugely. Some instances are more tragic and more heart-rending than others. It is never easy. But there is no point either in attempting collectively to evade the truth of it: people take their own lives. We know that there is nothing new in this. So what was the real basis for the desperate attempts that were made in Ireland, and indeed elsewhere too, year in year out until very recently, to hide or disguise it at all costs?
The UK campaigner, Tony Nicklinson, had no doubt about the origin of the opposition which mounted against him, in his battle to establish the right to assisted suicide in the country of his birth, England. It was all, he believed, down to religion.
“As an atheist, Dad resented his life being governed by a faith system that he had no belief in,” his daughter Lauren explained after his death. “Why should his rights be denied and his views discounted because of someone else’s beliefs?”
Tony was a remarkably courageous man. On June 25, 2005, he suffered a brain-stem stroke which resulted in locked-in syndrome. The fact that the damage was to the lower part of his brain meant that he was fully aware, with his cognitive function intact, but he had no ability either to move or to communicate verbally. He was quite clear from a relatively early stage that he wanted the freedom to die, but he was incapable of carrying out the necessary act himself – and so he took his case to the High Court in London. Lauren described her father’s condition very movingly.
“In an Athens hotel room seven years ago, a stroke destroyed his body, but left his mind intact,” she wrote in 2012. “Mum, (sister) Beth and I learned how to hoist him from his bed to his wheelchair, feed him pulverised food and wipe away his tears. Far too quickly we forgot the sound of his voice, and we grieved for the man who had become buried so deep within his own body: we knew he was never going to reach the surface again. Together, the four of us tried to accept, adapt and adjust to our new family set-up and carry on with our lives the best we could. Mum, Beth and I kept our tears to ourselves while we watched the man we loved most in the world try his hardest to love his locked-in life.”
That proved to be a bridge too far for Tony Nicklinson. And who are we to disagree with or disapprove of what he felt? I certainly don’t believe for a moment that I would react differently.
“He could not stand the limitations of his condition,” Lauren wrote, “and he deemed his life intolerable. I appreciate that many people live happy, fulfilling lives with a range of disabilities, and we support their right to life. But we also supported Dad’s right to die.”
Tony was unequivocal in his assertion that he should be free to end his life at a time and in a manner of his own choosing. In a series of tweets that lacerated those who insisted that the choice was not his to make, his anger was palpable.
“I resent being told by the State what I can and can’t do with my life,” he said. “State intrudes too much.”
The notion of a trip to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland was taken as an insult.
“I don’t see why I should go abroad to die,” he reasoned, “just to save our gutless MPs some embarrassment.”
He was scathing too about the idea that we have to defer in matters of life and death to a divine agency of any sort.
“Please explain,” he asked those of a religious disposition, “why your god’s plan for me requires that I suffer needlessly?”
When he lost the case, Tony was devastated. He refused food, contracted pneumonia, declined antibiotics and died soon afterwards. He had already predicted how he might finally engineer his own endgame in a tweet.
“I’ve given it (starving myself) much thought,” he explained, “and concluded that a few weeks of discomfort are better than 30 years like this.”
In the end, because of the infection, it took less than a week for him to go.
“By refusing antibiotics and succumbing to pneumonia, he had some control over his death,” Lauren recalled. “When he was diagnosed with a chest infection, he saw the opportunity to die and took it. He was 58 and the thought of another 30 years locked in really frightened him. Seven years ago, a stroke broke Dad’s body, but it was the British legal system that broke his heart.”
And now, the Irish legal system seems determined to do the same to Marie Fleming and her family.
Last week, Marie – who suffers from Multiple Sclerosis – lost the case she had taken to the High Court seeking the right to assisted suicide. The reasons given for the refusal were predictable.
“In the eyes of the constitution,” the President of the High Court, Justice Nicholas Kearns wrote in his judgement, “the last days of the life of a terminally ill and disabled person facing death have the same value, possess the same intrinsic human dignity and naturally enjoy the same protection as the life of a healthy young person.”
No Right to Die campaigner disagrees with that proposition. There is, however, a strange logical leap involved in the conclusion which Judge Kearns draws. It is as if he is unaware that, according to the official figures, about 500 people commit suicide in Ireland every year.
“It would be impossible,” he states, “to ensure the aged, the disabled, the poor, the unwanted, the rejected, the lonely, the impulsive, the financially compromised and emotionally vulnerable would not avail of this option in order to avoid a sense of being a burden on their family and society.”
It is as if he had been asked to adjudicate on whether or not people should be invited, as a matter of course, to decide when to end their own lives. The stark reality is that those listed by the Judge – the impulsive, the financially compromised, the emotionally vulnerable – already have the option of committing suicide and a proportion of them use it. Some fail. Others are not recorded as such. But denying an individual like Marie Fleming the right to assisted suicide is a different matter entirely.
All of the evidence is that the availability of assisted suicide is not something that generally shortens someone’s life (though in Tony Hicklinson’s case it probably would have). On the contrary, if a person feels that he or she can wait, past the point when it is possible to commit suicide personally, in the knowledge that assistance can legally be given by a partner or a loved one, then that is likely to prolong the life of the individual. It also greatly improves the quality of life for however long the individual does live.
Either way, particular religious scruples should not come into the issue. On a philosophical level, it is fundamentally incontrovertible that people have a right, which can only be taken away from them by the use of a straight-jacket, to decide to end their own lives if that is what they want.
It is the mark of a civilised society that, to the very greatest extent possible, it will do everything to create a community of genuinely equal citizens, and put the best imaginable support systems in place in terms of health, education, welfare, sustenance, accommodation and so on, in order to minimise the incidence of the kind of alienation that can trigger suicidal feelings and actions. And where people are demonstrably vulnerable or marginalised, then in a decent country, efforts will be doubled and redoubled to try to remedy whatever circumstances might lead to individuals or groups feeling sufficiently lonely, isolated or worthless that these feelings become the cause of suicide.
But a society of equals must also recognise that what people call the gift of life is one that others – for reasons of their own that they may believe are perfectly clear and rational, or that they have come to only after a long period of weighing up what the future might hold for them – for better or worse, want to end.
This is a debate that is only starting.