"died by suicide" is just a modern replacement for "committed suicide", because that phrase dates back to when it was a crime, so it's regarded as making the victim look bad.
I say this as someone whose father killed himself when I was in 5th grade:
The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand.
The person is dead either way. There's literally no way to sugarcoat this fact. We'd rather you just speak in plain, honest language than trying to make it sound less bad somehow.
I don't have a big issue with that particular phrase itself. Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here. Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly. Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.
But really it's the transparent and ham-handed attempts by some others to smooth over the sharp edges of reality merely by re-phrasing how things are written.
People generally don't want pity, but these re-phrasings accomplish nothing other than to make clear that one person feels sorry for another.
> Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly.
No one is an island. We’re all deeply intertwined/interconnected. We’re the sum total of our lived experiences and without a doubt some have lived far more challenging lives than others and are influenced by factors that would lead just about anyone down a dark path.
The grief felt by those left behind is the result of that aforementioned interconnectedness.
Getting back to the quoted bit, isn’t this a bit like saying “attributing grief to anyone other than the person experiencing it is oxymoronic”?
My point is not to diminish the impact on those left behind in any way. Clearly this is a traumatic event that causes excruciating grief.
But I think we also need to be honest about the environmental factors that lead to suicide. Hopelessness is one of the large causes. If there are systemic reasons causing people to feel hopeless, and if those systemic problems could theoretically be changed/improved, and such improvement lowered the suicide rate, there’s a strong case to be made that the systemic factors share the responsibility.
> Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.
I don’t think it’s a given. Clearly some lives are far more complicated than others. There exists a subset of people for whom that complication will become an insurmountable problem. Often those people have been traumatized, or have never learned the tools necessary to work through their feelings.
Some people are bullied into killing themselves. Should that be attributed wholly to the person who was bullied?
Yes I already said that life is complicate because I KNEW that someone would write this very comment. But reminding people that life isn't simple isn't the PSA that you believe it to be.
Yes, everything causes everything, there is no one single thing to blame. Life is hard and complicated. Every rule has exceptions. Every truth has contradictions. Every one is a hypocrite. The world is big and complex.
We all know this already. We don't need this disclaimer to every statement that anyone makes. At a certain point, it just becomes noise.
> Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here.
No, passive voice is not in general designed to conceal or obscure the actor. Especially not in the sentence here.
There were valid similar complains about crime reporting. But the language there was different. The sentence "The innocent McKay family was inadvertently affected by this enforcement operation" is trying to hide culpability. We can discuss that. These two are incomparable:
- A deputy-involved shooting occurred. (Ok, we are avoiding the actor. We do not know who was shooting.)
- A person died by Suicide. (Clear to anyone who done what.)
The latter implies that suicide just happened to the person, like they got hit by a bus.
The former correctly attributes the action to the person who killed themselves. Certainly the motivations and causes that drive people to suicide are complex, but ultimately it is a choice the person makes.
"Committed" is perhaps not the best word, since it's associated with crimes (and suicide is not a crime in many places anymore), but it's at least more active.
Think about it this way: I have relative who is vegan, so she has been trying to convince me to kill myself for many years now.
I can still choose whether I do it though, and obviously I chose not to so far, although during COVID I didn’t have much other social interaction, so I nearly went through with it.
I had agency throughout though. I’m not dead because I chose not to go through with it.
Many vegans think everyone else is evil/demonic for eating meat. “Meat is murder” etc etc. So the natural conclusion to that is, according to several vegans I know, that everyone who eats meat should be forced to either stop being a mass murderer or kill themselves.
Keep in mind there was a point where I was vegan, I know several vegans, so I know what I’m talking about.
They’re not shy about it either—look up That Vegan Teacher on YouTube for relatively middle-of-the-road vegan behavior in action.
Comparing nagging from a relative to wrongful prosecution is asinine. You might as well say that you had heartburn and it didn't kill you, so what's with all these people dying from heart attacks?
Agency is the ability to act. If someone dies against their own will, they don’t have agency, which is why we don’t use language like “they committed their own death” to refer to such instances.
Because there often is an external attribute, especially if you consider illness to be “external” as is conventional for most deaths caused by illness.
Healthy, sane people in good situations don't kill themselves.
It follows from that fact that if someone kills themselves, at least one of those things was not true. And those things can and often are thrust on people, or at least occur against the will of the person.
In this case, a bad situation was thrust on a whole bunch of people, and it ended up killing some of them.
> Healthy, sane people in good situations don't kill themselves.
Correct. This has no bearing.
> it ended up killing some of them.
No, and it's irresponsible and unhelpful to act like agency and choice is not part of the equation. As if to say that basically everyone chooses the same way (euthanasia) in the face of terminal illness, or depression.
Tautologically, if you want to convey that help is out there and that a better life is possible, then you're saying people have a choice to make.
There's a lot of agency in heart attacks too, but we still say that the heart attack killed them, not that they killed themselves with a heart attack.
There is agency, but it's equally irresponsible and unhelpful to act like outside factors are not part of the equation, and that someone who drives a person to suicide is blameless.
Let's say someone jumps out of a burning building and they're killed by the fall. Did they have agency? Responsibility? Should we describe that as "committed suicide"?
Heart attacks can and do happen regardless of optimal diet and lifestyle, but notwithstanding, indeed CVd can be likened to a slow-motion suicide, like cigarettes, given modern knowledge most people are aware of.
No one is saying outside factors aren't part of it. But you cannot negate or mitigate the fact that people make a choice with suicide that is not inevitable.
Because its obvious. The margin case of escaping certain and imminent painful death in favour of another kind is not working in your favor. Yes they are responsible for their actions, yes they have agency. It is still suicide but that is a moot point when you are choosing between deaths. Here too, jumping is not something that invariably happens. That doesnt make it a bad thing. That is a value judgment that depends on the circumstance of the alternative being factually and irreparably worse.
