Suicide, Economics, and Reason

This article in Slate is interesting but too short, and it raises many questions.

That the lives of unsuccessful suicides become financially better after the attempt is interesting. They are often forced into psychiatric treatment that may have been unavailable to them before. It's worth considering how mental illness is a drain on society, since you have all these people (more suicides than murders and 20 times more attempted suicides than successful ones) living pained, disorganized lives. From a rational economic view, this may be a good case for more funding of public mental health.

Also, the Suicide Prevention movement has spent the last decades advocating that suicide must never be considered rational.

Constructing suicide as a momentary loss of reason is vitally important to the suicide-prevention movement because it suggests that men and women who have attempted self-murder should be allowed to shrug off social stigmas. If suicidal instincts are just momentary delusions, they are easily explained and dismissed. The suicide-prevention movement fears that if suicide is deemed the rational product of someone's mind, we may feel justified in suspecting that mind forever.

I understand why we would want to prevent people from being handicapped by a social stigma. Yet, it's obvious that suicide can be a rational decision. It's certainly not, as G.K. Chesterton said, "the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence." I love Chesterton, but this is one of those times when his innate intelligence is warped by his Catholicism.

Interest in existence has its limits. Sometimes it's not worth the trouble. A rational view of death and suicide acknowledges that life ends sooner or later, and that some ends are preferable to others. However, many Americans seem to think life must be extended at all costs, and that death is something we succumb to after everything has been tried. This is stupid and causes unnecessary suffering.