Why is it comforting to think of suicide as a failure of human reason? One of the laudable features of the mental health care bill introduced in the Rajya Sabha this week is that it decriminalizes suicide. But the thinking behind this change reveals a logic that goes to the heart of a modern democracy’s lingering discomfort with suicide. Reversing the Indian Penal Code, which made suicide a criminal offence, the new bill states that “any person who attempts suicide shall be presumed, unless proved otherwise, to be suffering from mental illness at the time of the bid and shall not be liable to punishment under the said section”. So, wanting to kill oneself, according to the bill, cannot be an act of sanity — and this is why the law should not punish a failed suicide attempt. If suicide is at all seen as an act of volition, it is assumed to be driven by a mind that is diseased.
To draw such a limit around the legal and moral understanding of suicide is to deny persistent traditions of thought and action that make suicide nothing less than an assertion of rational choice — an act of sanity. It becomes, in these traditions, the culmination of a rigorous process of thinking and feeling, of relentless self-examination, which makes the act an expression of an understanding of life — the dignity and value of life — rather than a negation of it. For Seneca, the Roman philosopher, statesman and dramatist who took his own life, not “mere living” but “living well” was the good to be striven after. So, a wise person “lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can”. From classical Athens and stoical Rome to existentialist Paris, some of the world’s most radical thinkers have seen in suicide the ultimate affirmation of human agency. To achieve control over one’s death is the logical consequence of being in control of one’s life, the only possession that living beings truly have for themselves. This is not just a Western notion of autonomy, but can be found in some of the most robust traditions of Japanese, Jain and Hindu thought and action. Bhishma in the Mahabharat, or Yukio Mishima in 20th-century Japan, would have found it very strange — and an affront to his human dignity — to be deemed mentally ill and therefore absolved from moral responsibility for his action. So would a person suffering from a painful terminal illness, or a poor farmer impossibly in debt.
The consensus that it is sinful, criminal or mad to want to end one’s own life is perhaps founded on a fear that unites most, if not all, human beings — the fear of death. But added to this great leveller is another, less humanely shared, fear that compels modern states, and their legal or ethical systems, to continue pathologizing suicide even after having decriminalized it. This is the fear of human agency itself, and the taboos it might break once it has taken the risky business of reason and sanity into its own hands.