After the verdict

Rethinking one of our oldest moral accusations

For centuries the medieval Church had a policy for people who killed themselves: you did not get a grave in consecrated ground. The body was sometimes buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through it, so the soul could not find its way home to trouble the living. In England, the Crown could seize the dead person’s estate, a practice that survived in some form into the nineteenth century. The logic was simple and theological. Your life belonged to God. Ending it was a kind of theft, and that theft stripped you of the right to rest among the faithful.

We tell ourselves we have moved beyond this. We have not moved as far as we think. We have simply changed the language. Where the medieval world said sin, we say selfish. It sounds softer, more secular, but it serves much the same purpose: it takes the most agonised act a human being can commit and quietly recasts it as a moral failure.

You do not die alone, even when you die by yourself. When someone kills themselves, the damage does not stop with them. A partner reaches across the bed for years. Children carry the loss, not only emotionally but in ways that reshape the course of their own lives. So a person is not simply leaving. They are leaving others to carry something unimaginably heavy.

This is why the accusation of selfishness has such force. It recognises a truth: suicide devastates the people left behind. Philosophers such as Kant gave that intuition moral weight. He argued that suicide is wrong because it treats one’s own humanity as a means of escaping suffering rather than as something of absolute worth. Beneath that lies an older idea: we owe obligations to those who depend on us, and we cannot dissolve those obligations by ourselves. On that view, calling suicide selfish is not merely emotional; it rests on a coherent moral argument.

But the argument depends on one assumption: that the person making the decision is reasoning freely. Kant’s case relies on an autonomous will. Remove that, and the moral judgement becomes much harder to sustain. That is exactly what modern evidence forces us to confront.

Thomas Joiner’s interpersonal theory of suicide argues that the desire to die emerges when two beliefs coincide. The first is thwarted belongingness: the feeling of being fundamentally alone, cut off from other people. The second is perceived burdensomeness: the conviction that the people you love would genuinely be better off without you.

That second belief changes everything.

The belief driving many suicides is not, “I matter more than you.” It is the opposite: “I am a burden, and my removal is a gift.” That belief is false, tragic and produced by illness, but it is not selfishness in any recognisable sense. The person is not failing to consider those they leave behind; they are thinking about them constantly and, through a poisoned logic, conclude that leaving is the generous thing to do.

Roy Baumeister described suicide as an escape from the self: a desperate attempt to shut off unbearable self-awareness rather than a calculated decision to bring about death. The person is not calmly weighing their life against their family’s future and choosing themselves. They are trying to make an intolerable inner state stop, and death has become the only exit they can see.

Edwin Shneidman, who helped found the modern study of suicide, placed the phenomenon on a single foundation: psychache, or unbearable psychological pain.

Once the discussion is centred there, the moral vocabulary starts to look misplaced. We do not call someone selfish for pulling their hand from a hot stove. The impulse to escape overwhelming pain is one of the most universally human responses there is. The suicidal person is responding to the same impulse, only the injury is one nobody else can see.

There is one place where this becomes more difficult. Not everyone who dies by suicide is in an acute, chaotic state. Some plan for months. They write careful letters, put their affairs in order, and appear entirely lucid.

The honest response is that lucidity is not the same as freedom. This is where Kant’s rational agent slips through our fingers. Someone can reason flawlessly from a premise that illness has installed. Joiner’s perceived burdensomeness is exactly that kind of premise. If you genuinely believe your existence harms everyone you love, then calmly planning your own death is not evidence of clear judgement. It is evidence of how completely the distortion has taken hold. The reasoning may remain intact; the foundation beneath it has been poisoned and in a way the cold preparedness of some suicide cases is representative of a sort of miscalculated love, where the person who ends up ending their own life is trying to minimise the damage their departure will inflict of those they love.

Does that explain every case across human history, including genuinely rational exceptions such as terminal illness with unmanageable pain? No. Pretending otherwise would weaken the argument. But those rare cases are not what people mean when they call suicide selfish after an ordinary death.

Émile Durkheim demonstrated something that should not exist if suicide were simply an individual act of selfishness. Suicide rates are remarkably stable within societies and differ predictably between them. If suicide were only the product of personal weakness or selfishness, we would expect far greater randomness.

Durkheim traced those differences to social integration. The weaker a person’s connection to family, community and shared institutions, the greater the risk. He called one form egoistic suicide, but the egoism he described was not selfishness. It was the collapse of social connection.

More than a century later, that insight remains strikingly relevant. Male suicide rates, in particular, reflect a profoundly Durkheimian story: men stripped of role, community and any socially acceptable language for admitting they are struggling. If suicide rises alongside unemployment, isolation and social fragmentation, then it is responding, at least in part, to conditions created collectively. Every time we call it selfish, we place responsibility on the one person with the least control over those conditions and ignore the society that helped produce them.

Why, then, does the word survive?

Because it serves the living. If the act can be explained as a defect in the dead person’s character, then it was not a hand we failed to take or a warning we failed to notice. Their supposed selfishness quietly absolves everyone else. But that comfort comes at a cost. The people who pay for it are those still alive and still suffering, learning what will be said about them if they ever admit how desperate they have become. Call despair selfish often enough, and you teach people to hide it until they no longer can.

On the weight of what we understand today, suicide is not selfish.

Not because the survivors’ pain is unreal. It is the most real thing here. But that pain also reveals why the accusation fails. Genuinely selfish people do not spend months or years convinced that those they love would be better off without them. They do not overwhelmingly arrive at death believing their absence is a gift. That belief is not self-interest. It is a catastrophic distortion created by illness.

From the inside, suicide can feel less like abandoning the people you love than sacrificing yourself for them. The tragedy is that the sacrifice rests on a lie. The pain convinces the person that everyone else will be better off once they are gone.

The medieval world drove a stake through the body to stop the dead from wandering back to trouble the living. We drive the word selfish through the memory of our lost ones for a similar reason: to make the grief easier to explain, to close the story, to believe there was a moral failing rather than an illness we could not reach in time.

But neither response gets at the truth. The humane response to someone destroyed by psychological pain was never condemnation, and the accurate one is not either. It is something closer to this:

You were ill. The pain lied to you about what your absence would mean. We only wish we had reached you in time.