Self-killing : the ultimate act of self-harming ?

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7 June

The word suicide itself defies us : if we know the word homicide, we are still stumped without a knowledge of Latin that sui means the particular, the self.

But the word gets heard - and used - often enough for us to know the meaning, without needing to know that it is an act of self-killing, and it even appeared, when Céline Deon took a career-break (for motherhood ?), in a French headline sa suicide incroyable (I quote from memory). The word, just now referring to 'career suicide', is with us in such manifestations as 'financial suicide' and 'intellectual suicide', and, if I am honest, it has become a little too cheap for my liking, a glib notion when what is embodied is that of choosing to end one's life.


And there we come against the taboos, the misconceptions, the prejudice.

We all know about 'suicides' (as, equally cheaply, those who carried through that choice are sometimes unfeelingly called) not being buried 'in consecrated ground', and so we have a lasting sense of the shame and crime that ecclesiastical law deemed this act to be. We will know also of the shame and penalty of bastardy, of 'being born out of wedlock', and the stigma is quite similar in origin, the shame of the state of affairs, but different in how the twentieth century came to view illegitimacy and suicide :

Legislation enacted by the UK Parliament in 1925 repealed the consequences of being born to parents who happened not to be married, and, in my view, the prevalence of people living together in the last thirty years suggests that little or no societal disapproval attaches to being unmarried parents (as against a young single mother, it must be said). The inability to inherit in certain situations had been swept away by the reforming legislation, and, with it, the negative and hampering limitations of being illegitimate, a notion also done away with. (All that survives are the feeble jokes about doubting my parenthood when the speaker has been called a bastard, etc.)

With suicide, we had to wait until only fifty-two years ago for Parliament to pass the Suicide Act 1961, and thereby decriminalize someone trying and failing to kill him- or herself : before then, because the act was a criminal offence, someone known to be a survivor of the attempt was open to prosecution.


I know only when the two changes that I refer to, not (for want of having researched the matter) what the policy and other considerations were that led to the disparity in timing : more than 35 years to correct the injustice of being open to prosecution for wanting to end one's life, as against remedying the things that a person born to an unmarried couple was prohibited from doing.

In both cases, the history of the law's disapproval of illegitimacy and of suicide lay in Christian theology, with a Biblical notion of birthright (and of the primacy of the legitimate first male child), and a belief that suicide was the unforgiveable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Yet (as I have said), why decriminalizing suicide was less of a priority is not known to me : by analogy, I can say only that, under the law prior to the Mental Health Act 1983, being an unmarried mother made one liable to be detained under the predecessor Act, which is an almost incredible time for repealing such a policy.

Looking back to Greek mythology, whatever we think of Oedipus, it is clear enough in Sophocles' The Theban Plays that there is a taboo against suicide. There were also The Fates, whose Greek name (Moirai) means 'the apportioners', from which we partly get the idea of an allotted span on Earth, maybe three score years and ten : the strand representing each human life was spun by Clotho, measured out by Lachesis, and cut to length by Atropos.

You have your allotted span, and you don't seek to defy the Gods by prematurely shortening it, because there are penalties, if you do. Christian doctrine that this unforgiveable sin was that of suicide involved similar notions that God determines the length of one's life.


All of this history feeds in to the attitudes towards - the words used to describe - suicide now, and many object to the words 'commit[ted] suicide' on the basis that 'to commit' suggests a criminal offence. Whether that usage is a real hang-over from the days before the 1961 Act, I do not know, but it is not unlikely.

All in all, the public is so confused by the messages about suicide, assisted suicide, whether the former is a crime, or whether either is an act of courage or of cowardice (no neutral view here), that is no wonder that those who feel death to be the only way out are hurt and hindered sometimes by them : amongst which, they have the fear of being thrown into Dante's Inferno, of the stigma that will attach, and of being perceived as having acted selfishly.


To be continued


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Why can't people write 'commit / committed / commits suicide' ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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4 September

According to those who know that suicide was once a criminal offence, using the word 'commit' to describe the action of carrying out suicide suggests that it is a crime.

The Suicide Act 1961*, in section 1, enacted as this Tweet says :

Suicide Act 1961 : The rule of law whereby it is a crime for a person to commit suicide is hereby abrogated (s. 1), but crimes in s. 2 ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 5, 2013

Aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring is what section 2 is concerned with, or as this Tweet says :

1961 Act : s. 2(1) refers to 'an attempt by another to commit suicide' - s. 1 says it's not a crime, so how is 'commit' saying otherwise ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 5, 2013

In essence, what I am trying to use a Tweet to say is this :

If section 1 makes clear that committing suicide is not a crime any longer, because of the passing of the Act, how can anyone construe the use of the phrase 'commit suicide' in sections 1 and 2 as saying that it is a crime (or that it suggests that it is) ?

Was Parliament really incapable of saying what it meant in 1961 ? If no one since the last few years thought that the phrase commit suicide suggested a crime was involved, why do we suddenly need to infer a conscience about what 'commit' + 'suicide' means fifty odd years later ?


Training courses once had it that people had to say thought-shower or some such on the basis that brainstorm was a term offensive to those with epilepsy or similar conditions - this was taught, that those using the word 'brainstorm' were, albeit unwittingly, hurting others. Except that other trainers, who worked with such people liable to be offended, said that it was nonsense, a myth - a myth that gave some trainers power over those attending their courses by making them seem wise...

I no more see any basis for saying that commit suicide is insensitive and needs to be avoided than in the case of brainstorm - it is an attempt to reclaim a non-criminalizing feel for suicide when it is, after all, an act in the way that bankruptcy is an act. People believe in debtors' prisons and in owing money as punishable by the criminal courts, but there is nothing that can be pointed to that suggests it, other than people not knowing what criminal justice and civil justice are.

If people believe that suicide is a crime, some religions may teach that it is, but I cannot see how an Act of Parliament that abolished a crime can be wrong in referring to the act of suicide as something that one commits, just as one commits an act of folly, an act of bankruptcy, an act of kindness.

Does anyone really believe committing a selfless act is a crime, because of the word 'commit' ? I honestly do not think so.


End-notes

* Its full title is 'An Act to amend the law of England and Wales relating to suicide, and for purposes connected therewith', but section 3 lets us shorten it.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)