Suicide can be an exercise of one's sovereignty

Biomedicine has two answers: therapeutic counselling and/or the antidepressant armoury of what is now "pharmacopsychiatry". Pills don't kill the idea of suicide: they merely numb the emotions and the senses. They enable one to tread water and to cope but they are hardly a royal jelly of optimism.

English scholar Colin Pritchard asks whether suicide isn't simply a matter of "the ultimate rejection", the tail-end of "unwantedness". He may be right. But no one really knows or understands the soul of the suicide, despite the hundreds of thousands of studies, books, theses and learned articles in the past 150 years.

We have enormous profiles of the "at-risk" people - people with suicide in the family, domestic violence, substance abuse, previous attempts and so on - but do we really know why? I think not, at least in the case of younger people.

Why do we react so badly to young suicide? The young suicide is particularly unacceptable: he or she appears to engage in the reverse of Pritchard's ultimate rejection - it is not we who are rejecting the individual suicide so much as the young suicide cohorts who are rejecting us - our love, family, faith, imagination, creativity, culture, civilisation. We are, in many senses, as much affronted as confronted by each such event. But this is essentially because we view the individual as belonging to us, to our society. For some religions, life and death belong only to God.

We need to reflect that even the most rejected, lonely, desperate, hopeless and helpless individual still has one little domain of sovereignty: his or her physical being. Continuation or cessation of that physicality is the only decision they can make - and who are we to deny them that exercise?