Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Yale University Press, 2013

"In my opinion," wrote Josephus in a version of his work widely circulating throughout the Middle Ages, "there could be no more arrant coward than the pilot who, for fear of a tempest, deliberately sinks his ship before the storm. No: suicide is alike repugnant to that nature which all creatures share and an act of impiety toward God who created us."

If Josephus could manage such high dudgeon on the subject two thousand years ago, he'd be apoplectic in 2013. As Jennifer Micheal Hecht points out in her extremely thoughtful new book Stay, the suicide statistics for the 21st century are nothing less than staggering: more than 38,000 people take their own lives in the United States every year, a number exceeding in some demographics the deaths from heart and liver disease. "Worldwide," Hecht reports, "more die of suicide every year than by drowning, or fire, or maternal hemorrhage." In 2010, the suicide rate among U.S. veterans reached twenty-two a day. In almost every societal group, these numbers are steadily increasing each year - more and more people are deciding to scuttle their ship rather than weather the storm.

Hecht wants to bring attention to what she calls "this epidemic," but she also wants to do more than that: she wants to stop it. She devotes sections of her book to a quick tour of suicide and its significance throughout history (although this can a bit too readily morph into "throughout literature" and display too little awareness that the morphing has happened at all), but the real core of her Stay is a glowing optimism coming not from statistics but from Hecht herself. "If suicide has a pernicious influence on others, then, staying alive has the opposite influence: it helps keep people alive," she writes with genuine if unconvincing passion, "By staying alive, we are contributing something precious to the world."

Though personally stirring, this conception is, to put it gently, at odds with the many historical examples she brings up, and she has to work hard to get around the fact that the ancient Greeks and especially the ancient Romans saw no "pernicious influence" in suicide and often prized it as a person's last and ultimate ability to uphold a conviction or make a statement. That all changes when her narrative reaches the advent of Christianity and the quick spread of that tag from Josephus about suicide being "an act of impiety toward God." In the Christian world-view, life's pain and suffering is part of "God's plan," which humans are forbidden to question, much less obstruct. Suicide - in the face of terminal painful illness, or the certain prospect of begging poverty, or even out of remorse for some heinous deed - was abhorred by the Church because people who kill themselves are wresting control of their lives away from God, and Hecht fills her narrative with stories of medieval suicides whose bodies were dug up by Church officials, put on trial, and then hanged for their sin.

When the Enlightenment began to change the reading world's conception of the individual, the floodgates opened to suicide, and Hecht would clearly like to close them again. Although she disavows - as how could she not - the hysterical barbarity of the pre-modern Church, she shares at least its conviction that suicide represents a moral failure:

Surely if barriers to physical, actual means of suicide can make a difference, then conceptual barriers to the whole idea can also make a difference. Arguments against suicide can provide such a conceptual barrier. We have only to spread the word, make suicide resistance part of our culture, attach a sense of honor to perseverance. The hope is that these ideas can take suicide off one's list of options, preempt it as an emotional possibility the way a physical barrier can preempt the physical act of jumping. If we can take suicide off the docket for the moment, that moment may turn out to be enough.

This defiantly positive note - this striving for hope - is the most uplifting part of Stay; it compensates for the too-brisk overview of suicide's history, and it almost compensates for the rather ham-handed assessments of suicide in literature (the world's most famous passage on suicide, the "to be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet, is given a less-than-scintillating analysis, and the climax of Dante's Inferno gets a reading that would have had its author angrily gesticulating in the audience). It's surely no coincidence that the most compassionate parts of Hecht's book are the most eloquent:

We sometimes need to be reminded that life is where everything happens, all forgiveness and all reunions. We can forget that we live in a web of significance and emotional interdependence with hundreds of other people Sometimes the web is subtle, even imperceptible, but it is real. We forget to thank each other for staying.

And if her empathy for those in despair sometimes causes her to overstate (there is simply no point in saying things like "suicidal influence is strong enough that a suicide might also be considered a homicide") or oversimplify (the book's editor should have reminded her that there is no equivalence whatsoever between a person contemplating suicide out of extreme mental agitation and a person contemplating suicide in the cold light of reason), one of her main contentions is certainly true: any potential suicide really should, in addition to thinking of their loved ones and friends, also think about themself - not the self caught up in the day's seemingly hopeless turmoil, but the self five years from now: "Another main argument that I hope to resurrect from history," Hecht writes, "is that the suicidal person owes something to his or her future self; a future self who might feel better and be grateful that the person who he or she once was fought through the terrible times to make it to something better."

The cries of that future self to exist should be proof against suicides done out of momentary despair, and Stay is acutely alert to those cries. Current statistics clearly show that few of Hecht's potential readers will have lives completely untouched by suicide; all of those potential readers will find a great deal to interest them in these pages.