Liam Hunt | Deputy Opinion Editor
On 11th January 2015 Frank Van den Bleeken, a convicted murdered and serial rapist was due to be executed at his own request, following a successful plea that he could not face life in prison. Immediately prior to the procedure doctors decided to stop the process for as yet undisclosed reasons.
At the beginning of January, very shortly after many of us were celebrating the dawn of a new year, a close friend of mine from school tragically took his own life.
(Attempted) suicides are a topic much skirted around and rarely addressed. When they are, invariably the commentary is moralising and/or unhelpful. The ways in which we talk about mental illness and suicide wholly obfuscate the interaction between them, whilst debates about access to death for prisoners and the mentally ill also frequently miss the the most important questions within those discussions.
Assisted Suicide and Prisoners
Van den Bleeken’s initially successful plea has reignited the embers of a debate that have been steadily smouldering for decades. Should prisoners with life sentences be allowed to translate that sentence to death?
Access to assisted suicide for prisoners is challenged in two ways. First, prisoners should not be allowed to take ‘the easy way out’. This particular strain of logic baffles me. It is quite impossible to quantify the suffering engendered by any given punishment, not least because subjective experience is the one thing that prisoners still own.
There is, however, a more persuasive concern. Simultaneously offering assisted suicide to prisoners without addressing the structural issues that plague prison systems would be utterly coercive. Recent studies estimate that there may be as many as 3,660 men and women in the UK prison system who are so severely ill that they require a bed in a psychiatric ward, yet they stay trapped in prison either for want of space or for institutional negligence and incompetence. Rape and sexual violence are endemic in the U.S. prison system. At any given time around one third of the 3,800-4,000 strong prison population in Ireland is kept in protective custody for fear of violent attacks. To begin to offer assisted suicide to prisoners under the status quo, within environments that manufacture mental and physical anguish would be misguided. That should not, however, be conflated with the idea that there are no grounds on which a prisoner might legitimately ask to be allowed to die.
Suicide and Mental Health
The case of my friend is, of course, markedly different from that of Van den Bleeken. Yet in both cases, people talk about suicide. For many of us doing so is a rarity, and incredibly difficult when we do. Falling back on what we know to be factually true therefore becomes a comfort in a time when anything else seems quite uncertain.
By doing so however, we obfuscate the true nature of so many suicides behind a veil of supposed free choice. ‘(S)He committed suicide’. In other words, (s)he chose to take their own lives. Before I go further, note that we have as yet been unable to decouple the act of suicide from the religiously, condemnatory language of sin (‘commit’). Returning to the phrase, a problem should be obvious. Individuals who suffer for extended periods of time with mental illnesses that either make their lives a living hell or totally impede their ability to conceive of a positive future for themselves do not simply choose to kill themselves. Rather, they are the victims of and die from a disease that is no less real than any physical ailment. This problem is central to the misunderstanding of mental health. Depression related suicides, like so many others, are not ‘selfish’, ‘short-sighted’ or more tragic because the person ‘had everything going for them’. They are the tragic end to a torturous disease made all the worse by the constant need for suffers to reaffirm their victimhood and plea for the treatment as patients so often denied to them.
Assisted Suicide and the Terminally Ill
The notable failing of the opinion expressed above is that it robs the people in question of their agency. That is to say, the above would suggest that those who choose to die really have no choice at all. Those who are terminally ill, like the late and immeasurably courageous Debbie Purdy, can of course make informed decisions about the trajectory of their remaining time. To decide to die because the life that is yours alone can no longer provide any happiness to you is no less legitimate or ‘rational’ than any other choice.
We are afforded the right to free and safe lives, devoid of slavery, torture and discrimination. Reality consistently falls short of that high bar and yet, I hope, we all sincerely believe in the value of the goal. A corollary of a right to life must be a right to death: to end the life that can and should be yours alone to live and define with dignity. Very few of us will be offered the chance to decide the terms on which we depart, but to deny those individuals who do wish to die on their own terms to opportunity is either barbaric, paternalistic or misguided (and perhaps all of those things).
In talking about suicide we tread a razor thin wire between something we know very little of, and death. We would do well to remember the intense suffering of those who choose the ultimate unknown over any possible life they might lead, and to try to understand the gravity of that decision.
Photo by Wayne Sutton
