Comment by johnorourke
6 days ago
"died by suicide" is just a modern replacement for "committed suicide", because that phrase dates back to when it was a crime, so it's regarded as making the victim look bad.
6 days ago
"died by suicide" is just a modern replacement for "committed suicide", because that phrase dates back to when it was a crime, so it's regarded as making the victim look bad.
I say this as someone whose father killed himself when I was in 5th grade:
The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand.
The person is dead either way. There's literally no way to sugarcoat this fact. We'd rather you just speak in plain, honest language than trying to make it sound less bad somehow.
What makes “committed suicide” any more plain or honest than “died by suicide”?
I don't have a big issue with that particular phrase itself. Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here. Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly. Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.
But really it's the transparent and ham-handed attempts by some others to smooth over the sharp edges of reality merely by re-phrasing how things are written.
People generally don't want pity, but these re-phrasings accomplish nothing other than to make clear that one person feels sorry for another.
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The latter implies that suicide just happened to the person, like they got hit by a bus.
The former correctly attributes the action to the person who killed themselves. Certainly the motivations and causes that drive people to suicide are complex, but ultimately it is a choice the person makes.
"Committed" is perhaps not the best word, since it's associated with crimes (and suicide is not a crime in many places anymore), but it's at least more active.
It assigns agency to the person who died.
Think about it this way: I have relative who is vegan, so she has been trying to convince me to kill myself for many years now.
I can still choose whether I do it though, and obviously I chose not to so far, although during COVID I didn’t have much other social interaction, so I nearly went through with it.
I had agency throughout though. I’m not dead because I chose not to go through with it.
That’s the difference.
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Because the latter implies some external attribute to it?
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That's a really hard thing to go through. I'm sorry you had to bear that as a fifth grader.
It's possible that both you and your dad are victims in different ways.
For context: Suicide was a crime in the United Kingdom until 1961.
* https://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Eliz2/9-10/60/contents
* https://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14374296
Except colloquially no one today thinks the word has any bearing on whether the victim looks bad. It just means they're responsible for the act.
I guess some people take comfort in the idea that suicide is thrust on people and they take no responsibility for their actions.
This seems to be a common topic in the current pendulum swing.
Healthy, sane people in good situations don't kill themselves.
It follows from that fact that if someone kills themselves, at least one of those things was not true. And those things can and often are thrust on people, or at least occur against the will of the person.
In this case, a bad situation was thrust on a whole bunch of people, and it ended up killing some of them.
> Healthy, sane people in good situations don't kill themselves.
Correct. This has no bearing.
> it ended up killing some of them.
No, and it's irresponsible and unhelpful to act like agency and choice is not part of the equation. As if to say that basically everyone chooses the same way (euthanasia) in the face of terminal illness, or depression.
Tautologically, if you want to convey that help is out there and that a better life is possible, then you're saying people have a choice to make.
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