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Undergraduate Writing



Control of Suicide

by


Melissa Marth
American University
Washington, DC
November 29, 2000

Once upon a time things were different. People lived how they wanted to live without worrying that others, meaning the government, might interfere. They could eat what they wanted, get the level of education they wanted, and do the activities they wanted without worrying about what everyone else was doing. But oh, how times change. Now people are cautious as to what they eat, they make sure they get the appropriate level of education that is acceptable, and have changed their activities because the government has interfered with their private lives. The government has publicized everything people used to do in the privacy of their own homes. People are being told what is good and what is not good for the public as a whole by the government and they are altering their private lives to make sure that they are not doing something to harm the public. People are slowly losing control of how to live their own lives. Sadly, one of the most important aspects of control people have in their lives is starting to diminish and that is making the decision to take their own lives if they want to, also known as suicide. The government is now realizing that suicide is the only aspect of their citizens' lives that they cannot directly control and they cannot live with that. It enfuriates them that they cannot have complete control over its citizens so they figure they have to do something about it.

Suicide is one of those issues that no one likes to discuss, but it is unfortunately all around us and it is something we have to accept exists in our lives. "Killing oneself is generally viewed with abhorrence (sometimes with reverence) and the act of deliberately causing one's own death is treated as spooky, defying understanding, something "abnormal" or better not spoken or thought about" (Szasz 1999, p.1). People avoid the subject as much as they can partly because they do not understand it. They see suicide as an unnatural way of dying and because it is unnatural, they feel it will disrupt order in society by calling it suicide. Society does this in one of two ways. The first is that they call suicide by different names than actually call it suicide. Terms such as "self-killing" or "self-mutilation" are used to avoid using the word suicide. But do these terms help people understand and accept suicide or do they just make the act sound even worse than it really is? Hearing these words does not help people accept the issue of suicide any better than the word suicide does because at least when you use the word suicide, it does not sound like the person has committed a horrible crime.

The other way society tries to avoid suicide is by denying that suicide exists. People go around attributing suicide to everything else in society, saying that there are certain aspects in society that cause people to commit the act. They are forgetting one big factor: the person who has committed to attempt suicide. "As long as we view suicide as unnatural - that is, wrongful - we must blame someone or something for it...We deny suicide by attributing its cause to nearly everything else but the subject's own decision" (Szasz 1999, p. 23). By blaming suicide on everything else but the person himself, society diffuses the responsibility of the person to other causes, unwilling "to accept suicide as suicide" (Szasz 1999, P. 24).

Suicide is a choice that only one person can make on his or her own. However, those who attempt suicide, whether they succeed or not, are said to have a disease or a "mental illness" and are doomed to a life of labeling, hospitalization, and treatment from numerous people and doctors. They will never be able to return to the free lives they once had and will be constantly watched by various people for the rest of their lives.

By labeling suicide a disease, people automatically believe that it is a diagnosable disease and something can be done to cure it. The subject unwillingly becomes the patient because the disease allegedly caused the unwanted feelings of suicide. Those feelings are then transformed into symptoms of the so-called patient. Once the feelings are labeled as symptoms, doctors or psychiatrists feel that they are authorized to treat the "patient" with or without the patient's consent (Szasz 1999, p. 18). This shows exactly what can happen to a person who attempts suicide and is not successful. Whether he wants to be or not, the person is considered a patient because a disease, or the suicide attempt, caused the person to have those feelings of suicide and he has to be treated by a doctor or psychiatrist, with or without his consent so as not to spread the disease. This person is deprived of his liberty to choose whether he wants or he feels he needs treatment, all because he expressed his own personal liberty to choose to take his own life.

Not only is suicide labeled a disease, the people that attempt suicide are also labeled. These people are considered to have a "mental illness" and are labeled that way by society whether a person successfully completes the act or not. However, those who do commit suicide successfully do not have to face what those who do not successfully attempt suicide have to face. Since they are considered to be "mentally ill," everyone treats them that way even when they themselves do not think that they have a "mental illness:"

The view that suicide is a manifestation of mental illness is presented as if it were not only true but also beneficial for patient and public alike. This is not so. This interpretation is double-edged: It exonerates the actor from wrongdoing, but stigmatizes him as crazy. (Szasz 1999, p. 19)

The psychiatrist deems the patient unable to make correct decisions on his own and has the potential to cause harm to himself or others due to the person's decision to try to commit suicide. It is because of this that the psychiatrist to deems him "mentally ill" and decides, without the patient's consent, that he needs treatment.

As soon as the psychiatrist has deemed the person not competent enough to make his own decisions and function well in society, he has deprived the person of the personal liberty of making his own decisions. The psychiatrist decided what treatment is necessary for the patient without the patient's consent and that is called involuntary psychiatric treatment. So can this treatment really be considered a treatment if it is involuntary? Wouldn't it be considered more of a punishment if the treatment were not wanted or not requested by the patient? According to the government it is not. Since mental health has been made such a huge public concern by the government, any kind of treatment given to a person deemed to be "mentally ill" by a psychiatrist is acceptable because it is being done for the good of the public. Sure the government may have good intentions by doing this, but who protects the person whose liberty has been taken away?

Unfortunately it is not just the psychiatrists who coerce people into getting treatment. Sometimes the subject's family makes the decision for the person that he needs to get treatment. The person's family finds that the person is not competent enough to make decisions for himself, so they make the decision for him that he needs to get treatment without consulting the person himself. If the person refuses to get the treatment that his family says he needs, the family may go to court to make it so he legally has to go get treatment. Just as in the case where the court forced a child's parents to give the child medicine to control his behavior in school or else the child would not be allowed to return to school. In both cases, the person is being deprived of his personal liberty to make his own choices.

So what can be done to prevent this type of deprivation of liberty from continuing? A possible solution would be to take away the authority of the psychiatrists to determine whether someone is "mentally ill" and the power to coerce that person into treatment without his consent. By giving psychiatrists the authority to do this, it allows them to deprive certain people of their personal liberty to choose even when they might not be accurate in doing so. Taking this authority away would allow people to make their own decisions without being called "mentally ill" and would allow them to avoid any kind of treatment they feel they do not need.

People turn to psychiatrists to find out if someone is "mentally ill" because psychiatrists have been labeled that they are the only people qualified enough to answer such a question. We trust them because they have studied for many years and have a degree in a field that studies the mind and we believe that they allegedly know what is going on in peoples' minds. But are they really qualified enough to determine who is "mentally ill" and who is not? The answer is not really. They cannot accurately determine who is suffering from a "mental illness" and who is not for two reasons. The first being that there have been no objective tests done to prove who is mentally healthy and who is not. The only way psychiatrists determine whether a person is "mentally ill" or not is through observing the person's symptoms. There are no physical signs that actually show the person to be "mentally ill," so they have to go by the symptoms that the person is showing. By determining a person's mental health solely based on their symptoms, there is more room for error on the psychiatrist's part for diagnosing a patient with a "mental illness" than there would be if the psychiatrist found some actual evidence or signs that the person does have a "mental illness" (Szasz 1997, p. 92)

The second reason is that the mind cannot be sick. The mind is not an actual functioning organ in the body that helps people live. It is more of a metaphor. Only actual organs in the body can be sick or ridden with a disease and since the mind is not an organ that can be seen, it cannot be sick. So, if the mind cannot be sick, then psychiatrists cannot classify a person as "mentally ill." "Mental illness" is only a metaphorical disease. The psychiatrists cannot diagnose the mind with a disease if the mind does not even exist (Szasz 1997, p. 163).

The power to determine whether a person is "mentally ill" in turn leads to the power of giving treatment. The psychiatrist has the power to decide that the person is not competent enough to function well in society and that treatment is needed and they can do this without the person's consent to do so. If the power to determine the mental welfare of people is taken away, then so is the power to decide that the person needs treatment without consulting the patient beforehand. This leaves the person with his personal liberty to make his own decisions and lets him live freely, the way everyone should be able to live.

Every solution always has problems to it. The saying, "You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time" comes to mind when examining this possible solution. Not everyone is going to be pleased by this solution and that is, of course, to be expected. While it may please some of the public, the other part may see it as dangerous for society. Psychiatrists would not like it because it shows them as incompetent and the government would not like it because they would not be able to justify putting suicidal people away from the rest of society.

This solution may please part of the public because it gives people their personal liberty of choice, the other part may see it as dangerous for society as a whole. They may see it as dangerous because if the suicidal people were left out on the streets, they might cause harm to themselves or to other people. There will be no one to diagnose them or to help them with their suicidal tendencies, so they could take a turn for the worse and those suicidal tendencies could turn into homicidal tendencies. They might also start influencing other people with their suicidal thoughts. They may influence the people who may never thought of suicide in their whole lives until this suicidal person entered into their lives. Having suicidal people out of society helps keep order in society and that is the way that most people would like to keep it.

By taking away this power to determine the mental health of a person, psychiatrists may feel incompetent and they would be losing money. They may feel they went to school and got a degree for absolutely nothing. If they start losing money, then they will more than likely go into another profession that pays them more money. This also discourages other people from becoming psychiatrists in the future because there is no power to it anymore. This also discourages people to turn to them for help because they do not feel that they can turn to psychiatrists to answer their questions anymore.

The government would have the most problems with this solution because now they cannot rightly justify controlling suicidal people and keep them out of society. They would no longer be able to force them into treatment because there is nothing that can diagnosed as needing treatment. Therefore, the government would no longer be in full control of its citizens' lives. They would know that citizens would have full control in whether they wanted to commit suicide or not and that they have no power to label them as "mentally ill" and put them into treatment without the person's consent.

A person who chooses to take his or her own life has made a personal choice and no one should be allowed to interfere with that decision:

No right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded by the common law, than the right of every individual to possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference from others...The right to one's person may be said to be a right of complete immunity: to be let alone. (Szasz 1999, p. 108)

The Court declared this statement in 1891. It means that everyone owns their own body and has the right to do with it what they want without any interference from others. Suicide is no one else's choice but the person wanting to do it. If a person chooses suicide, then that is a private decision made by that person and no one else should be allowed to interfere. By allowing others to interfere and label suicidal people as "mentally ill," we are depriving those people of their personal liberty to make their own choices. The person who chooses to take his own life is obviously competent enough to know that he is making the decision to end his life, so why do people see the need to step in and take control? It would be so much easier if everyone, meaning the government, would just butt out and give everyone the right to lead his or her own private lives.

WORKS CITED

Szasz, Thomas. (1999). Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

Szasz, Thomas. (1997). Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences. New York: Syracuse University Press.

Copyright 2000, Melissa Marth

Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility:
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