Just because someone is suicidal doesn’t mean they want to die

Many people have an ambivalent attitude towards suicide. They often leave the decision to others or to fate.

A young man, heavily intoxicated and depressed, walks along the promenade of the Golden Gate Bridge. “If even one person smiles at me,” he writes in a note he leaves on the dresser, “I won’t jump.” A coroner finds a note in a man’s sparsely furnished apartment after his suicide. (1)

Behind the closed door of her bedroom, a teenager swallows a handful of pills. She doesn’t know if it’s a lethal amount, but she accepts whatever may happen because she’s tired of suffering. If someone finds her in time, she will wake up in a hospital bed, no better than before, but no worse either. If she doesn’t wake up, her pain will go away.

Several boys play Russian roulette with a loaded gun that one of the boys stole from their father. It’s a bold play of chance that could have disastrous consequences. None of the boys are particularly eager to die, but they share a bottle, come from broken homes, have a bleak future ahead of them and see little meaning in life.

In 1975, San Francisco psychiatrist David Rosen interviewed six people who had survived jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Rosen admitted it was a small sample, but few people survived after jumping from a bridge. Rosen discovered that the six had several things in common. Each was young – under 30, in most cases closer to 20. Each struck their watery feet first and at a slight angle so that their bodies arced back to the surface, which prevented them from drowning. And most importantly, each of them, as soon as they went overboard, said they wanted to live. Moreover, they had no plan B; it was the Golden Gate Bridge or nothing. (2)

Thinking that people who display suicide wanting to die is a way of writing them off before they happen, as if they deserved no further consideration. “Jump!” some onlookers shout at a man sitting on the ledge of a tall building. Stop it. That’s a cruel thing to say, and something they undoubtedly wouldn’t say if it was someone they knew and cared about. The fact that he is a stranger makes what happens to him irrelevant to many people in the crowd. They are somewhat fascinated by his plight and wonder what led him to the ledge, but often that is all.

Thinking that someone wants to die often serves as an excuse to do nothing about it. If a person believes that someone who is suicidal cannot be talked out of it, or that it is their life and they can do whatever they want with it – including ending it – then intervention seems pointless. Just mind your own business and let others worry about theirs, without thinking or interfering.

Whenever life becomes unbearable, death is an option – but that does not mean that the person voluntarily chooses death. Even people diagnosed with a terminal illness rarely resort to suicide. (3) People are not programmed that way. From an early age we are taught to resist death as long as possible. “It beats the alternative” is a common remark when someone comments on the agonies of aging: Living may be a challenge, but dying is worse.

If we suffer, we want the pain to go away, and the sharper and deeper it is, the more we want to be free from it. If the situation becomes really serious, death seems not only a viable alternative, but in some cases the only option. However, this does not mean that people want to die. They don’t really want to live, at least the way they live right now. It is believed that everything – even death – is better.