I think because suicide is a form of secular blasphemy. For the most part civilization, culture, art, life, etc revolve around 2 goals.
Make sure we keep physically surviving and avoid death
Make sure we get pleasure, fulfillment and enjoyment from life
Economics, art, medicine, education, etc. are all more or less devoted to these 2 goals. Suicide is the willful rejection of both. Not only do you embrace death (as opposed to the trillions spent annually on things like medicine, shelter and agriculture to avoid death), but you do not find all the art, socialization, education, economics, etc. that we create to make life worth living worth holding onto or important enough to change your decision.
I think it makes people realize that the entire crux of their life is rejected by others. And maybe as someone like George Carlin would say ‘it would make people think, and we/they don’t want to do that’. Better to label someone crazy or sick than to admit that everything we devote our existence to isn’t enough to make many people feel life is worth living. Maybe labeling people who think about suicide as mentally ill is no different than how theocracies label those who reject religion as demented or possessed. There can be no valid reason to reject the prevailing orthodoxy. The rejection has to be due to some character flaw. That is also considered a sign you are in a cult, if any rejection of the doctrine is blamed on personal weakness rather than seen as valid problems with the doctrine.
As far as suicide I think you need several categories of suicidal behavior, each category bigger than the one above it.
Those who commit suicide
Those who attempt it
Those who seriously consider it
Those who flirt with the idea
Those with subtle suicide ideation
Group 5 supposedly consists of endless millions in the US alone. They are people who have found life traumatic, unpredictable and painful enough that they can’t really muster the energy to be proactive about survival. They won’t go out and buy a gun to kil themselves. But they will not go to a doctor to get preventative therapy and they will not take as many safety precations when driving, as examples. If they are diagnosed with cancer they won’t run to the doctors every chance they get, they will more or less have to be dragged to chemo. It is more a form of passive, apathetic suicide rather than the active form of suicide we label suicide in this culture.
Supposedly (no idea if it is true) suicide and depression are more common now than in the past. But is that due to the fact that these issues were not paid attention to in the past, that people have other more pressing problems, or something else? I’ve heard the claim that in the past or in other cultures people’s attitudes towards life is more communal and less on-upmanship and competitive. But Japan’s military culture in WW2 fit that bill, and once suicide helped the group people committed it too a la kamikaze missions.
It is not only people “depending on you for sustenance” who are harmed if you commit suicide. It harms everyone who knew you to some degree, especially family and friends. Imagine the family members who live with you having to continue living in the house where you killed yourself.
Suicide survivors don’t have to have seen you kill yourself to have PTSD and their PTSD can last twenty years or more. Imagine twenty years of being hit in the gut many times a day by thoughts of the last horrible act of someone you loved. Imagine a lifetime of closing their eyes or walking out of a theater when they sense a suicide scene coming up. Suicide survivors can sense those scenes very well. You sentence them to all that and more with your suicide.
Think about those things before you think seriously of killing yourself. Do you really want to hurt people that much?
Suicide is inherently evil because of what it does to other people. Cultures condemn it because of what it does to other people. I wouldn’t wish being a suicide survivor on the worst person in the world.
There are not too many ways to commit suicide without affecting someone. It is better that the people left behind know that the person is dead, not just “out there somewhere”.
I have given some thought as to how to go about it that would affect the least people. I can only say that I would try to find a way that a medical person or police officer found me instead of an average person.
The other problem is that if you committ suicide and you have any insurance, you can’t let it look like suicide if someone is to get the money. In those cases, it is really hard to not have the wrong person find you.
I had someone tell me that if a certain member of her family committed suicide she would be relieved that the suicidal person was no longer hurting. People need to see that suicidal people don’t see any other choice. As to living in the house of the suical act - some of us are working on ways to ahve it occur away from home. Does that help you any?
Who pays for the help? For the medication? I have medicine that costs $115/month. Counselling costs $80 an hour and in one hour I am just able to cover an idea. My husband wants to separate. He has the medical plan. He has the great job. I do not. The job I have education for gives me nightmares to consider going back to, hives across my body and tears when I think if only I could do that job i could afford help - the help that may or may not get me out of this “why bother” mode that has occurred for so long. BTW, the separation did not start all of this. It just happens to be occurring along with it all.
My husband shot himself in the head five years ago in our garage. We had a three week old son.
It would have been hard to handle even if I hadn’t found his body. But I did, and it’s an image I see every time I close my eyes.
I get now why he did it, and I don’t hate him anymore. But I did hate him for a very long time. I couldn’t sleep. I could barely care for the baby. It was hell.
ducchessofdork: sympathies. I’ve been there. My mother shot herself, and I was the one who first found the body. My own psychological coping mechanism was anger: I was furious with her for it, and it took me years to get over it. My point of view, today, is a little more nuanced, but, for a long time, it wasn’t.
As for the actual mechanics of suicide, I don’t think there is a “good way” to do it.
(Supposedly, John Donne, in Biothanatos, said that the soul could be voluntarily emitted from the body. Yeah, sure…)