Witnessing to Hope Amid Deaths of Despair: A Christian Account of Suicide Prevention
Warren Kinghorn, MD, ThD, Duke University, Durham, NC
The population-adjusted rate of death by suicide increased by approximately 35% in the United States between 1998 and 2021 and has remained at a high plateau since then—all too often involving those who are on the margins of their communities and who struggle to hope. Academic scholarship and discourse around suicide, however, is fragmented and sometimes points in different directions. Medical scholarship around suicide (e.g., Shawn Christopher Shea, The Practical Art of Suicide Assessment) tends to focus on suicide as a pathological behavior that is closely linked to a long list of individual risk factors associated with age, race, gender, mental and physical health diagnoses, history of similar behaviors, marital status, and more. While medical models of suicide acknowledge the importance of social factors such as employment and family relationships, these are generally considered only as circumstances of individuals who are at varying degrees of individual risk. A particular strain of recent sociological research (e.g., Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism), in contrast, narrates suicide as one of several examples of “deaths of despair” (along with drug overdose and alcohol-related illness), and focuses not on individuals but on the economic and social conditions of communities that have been affected by job loss and dislocation associated with global neoliberal capitalism. When suicide is considered in the bioethical literature, attention is usually focused not on suicide broadly considered but rather on the narrower topic of assisted suicide or medical aid in dying. In this discourse, (assisted) suicide is often framed as a triumph of individual self-determination in the face of suffering and life-threatening illness, with debate focused on the degree to which physicians and other clinicians should actively aid this self-determination.
In this presentation, drawing on the world of Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and others, I argue that these disparate discourses about suicide are linked by their shared reliance on the image of the self-expressive, self-reliant individual who derives value from production and consumption and who is alone in the world except for relationships that at least by the time of adulthood are voluntarily chosen and curated. In contrast to this is a Christian image of the human person as irrevocably and essentially beloved of God, made in God’s image, intrinsically vulnerable and dependent, formed in and through dynamic relationship with God, with other humans, and with other creatures. A Christian response to suicide that is informed by this image will not settle for a legalistic “no” that has all too often perpetuated shame and stigma around suicide. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’ teaching on suicide in Summa theologiae IIaIIae q. 64, I will argue that the Christian “no” to suicide must always be placed in the context of an emphatic “yes” to the goodness of dependent, finite, vulnerable human life and to communities that will commit to the relational and material support of those who find themselves at the margins. In contrast to the three approaches above, a proper Christian response to suicide will push against medicalized individualism, economic materialism, and neo-Stoic self-determination in pursuit of a world in which those who suffer can find belonging, vocation, and hope.
In this presentation, drawing on the world of Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and others, I argue that these disparate discourses about suicide are linked by their shared reliance on the image of the self-expressive, self-reliant individual who derives value from production and consumption and who is alone in the world except for relationships that at least by the time of adulthood are voluntarily chosen and curated. In contrast to this is a Christian image of the human person as irrevocably and essentially beloved of God, made in God’s image, intrinsically vulnerable and dependent, formed in and through dynamic relationship with God, with other humans, and with other creatures. A Christian response to suicide that is informed by this image will not settle for a legalistic “no” that has all too often perpetuated shame and stigma around suicide. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’ teaching on suicide in Summa theologiae IIaIIae q. 64, I will argue that the Christian “no” to suicide must always be placed in the context of an emphatic “yes” to the goodness of dependent, finite, vulnerable human life and to communities that will commit to the relational and material support of those who find themselves at the margins. In contrast to the three approaches above, a proper Christian response to suicide will push against medicalized individualism, economic materialism, and neo-Stoic self-determination in pursuit of a world in which those who suffer can find belonging, vocation, and hope.