“Completes suicide” threw me. I don’t remember ever seeing that usage before. A little Googling quickly told me that it’s a term used instead of “committed suicide” to reduce the stigma of suicide.
Before you jump all over this newfangled fad of political correctness, I did more searching and found that it’s been in use in journalism for at least a decade and in medical use for a half a century. The earliest hit comes from The Irish Temperance League Journal of July 1864, as part of a chart that reads:
Is this usage widespread and I’ve just been missing it?
For bonus points, speak to the hypocrisy of HuffPo’s coverage of the story on its front page, where the headline is “College Student Commits Suicide After Cyberbullying Over Porn”. How is this usage going to gain traction if it isn’t used in clickbait?
I’d have guessed it was a type/spellcheck/autocorrect mishap. I don’t like it. It makes it sound like she ‘won’. “Yea me! I didn’t ‘attempt’ it, I completed, I’m so not a failure”. (like the opposite of that ‘I can’t even do this right’ half joke thing you hear when someone tries to kill themself and doesn’t).
Mind you, I have always thought that “commit suicide” is a rather peculiar, and not altogether apt idiom. “Completed suicide” (as though the person has been working towards it for a long time, or as if the rest of us shiftless living people just can’t get the job properly finished) does not seem like an improvement, however, and I am at a loss to understand why it wold cause less stigma. If there is any stigma, it is in the act itself, or the word “suicide”, not the verb we chose to go with it.
One typically commits a crime. Up here, and I think south of the border, suicide is not a crime. I am not arguing the fact that “commit suicide” is perfectly valid English, but to me it conveys an implication of doing something bad. For that reason I tend to use suicide as a verb (he suicided last night) even though I don’t think that has really entered proper English yet. I’m guessing “completed suicide” is used instead of “committed suicide” for a similar reason.
It’s not in widespread use, but the recent Caustic Soda podcast discussed using different terms not only due to stigma but to discourage suicide itself through use of language. They recommend “non-fatal suicide” for attempts. I recommend a listen.
In the mental health world, into which I have recently (and unfortunately) been introduced, the terminology is used to represent suicide fatality, as opposed to attempts. For example, when my depressed son was prescribed an anti-depressant, I was supposed to be reassured that, although the introduction of the medication DOES cause suicidal actions, there have been almost no “COMPLETED SUICIDES” while taking the medication. Yeah, that sounds GREAT…sign us up.
I don’t consider it a crime, exactly, but I DO consider suicide to be doing something bad so I’m OK with language that makes it sound bad. It IS bad. It is extremely hurtful to those still living after the suicide occurs.
I also think it’s a bad thing that anyone can get into such a state, but once they’re dead, well, their problems are over.
I can see “completed suicide” as useful in making a distinction from attempted suicides and parasuicides. But “complete” there is adjectival.
The usage in which “complete” is a verb just strikes me as . . . wrong.
I get that “commit” has negative connotations, but it’s not confined to crimes. (We commit adultery, for example.) And we do, in general, have negative attitudes towards suicide. The fact that the college student in the OP killed herself after being bullied is a Bad Thing; this is not a morally neutral story.
If you want to avoid “commit”, though, I think using “suicide” as a verb is acceptable. It’s a verb in French (which is where English got it from) and the OED has citations for it as a verb in English going back to 1840.
It’s usually reflexive; a man does not suicide - he suicides himself.
I didn’t listen to the podcast, so maybe their rationalization is more sound, but “non-fatal suicide” is a contradiction in terms. The definition of suicide includes actual death. That’s the “cide” part. You can’t qualify it as “non-fatal.” That’s like saying “non-fatal death.”
I heard it one in the context of a man who was caught mid-suicide, hospitalized on a 5150 and completed the suicide despite the watch. In that context (suicide interruptus) it made sense.
My personal opinion is against this. I hate seeing suicide used as a verb even if it does go back over a century. It just looks wrong to me - like seeing somebody say “the shooter homicided five people before turning the gun on himself.”
Some months ago, I was waiting for a friend in a clinic office, and among the piles of old golfing magazines, they had pamphlets for various drugs. One was for a well-known smoking cessation aid, and more pages were taken up by cautions than by any other info (this particular drug is apparently well-known for causing suicidal ideation). Each of the warnings mentioned “completed suicide” as one of the potential side effects. So this phrase has made it into the manufacturer literatuire.
I recall a Law & Order episode where the perp says “I didn’t homicide nobody” and Lennie Briscoe responds “So, your friend there is homiciding somebody” while pointing to a video of the crime. Cite
My wife used to work in the field of suicide prevention as a librarian at a research group (so, not a crisis center). She explained to me once that “committed” tended to place a moral shading on the act, and they wanted to look at it as a public health issue rather than a moral issue, in the same way that we don’t tend to think of smoking as “immoral” but it’s still a negative action that we’d like to prevent.
They also wanted to carefully distinguish between attempts and completed suicides because there are differences in demographics involved (for example, women are more likely to attempt suicide, but men are more likely to complete the act because they tend to pick more effective means). So, in the academic literature, “completed suicide” or “died by suicide” are both used.
