I generally try to be sensitive to using politically correct language, though sometimes that can be exasperating because of various hypersensitivities where people are too easily offended. Simply put, someone can take offense at almost any word. However, despite our occasional exasperation with those who are too easily offended, we must admit that in the past we were too careless and callous in our naming of things. Our vocabulary was often hurtful precisely to those who were most hurting. We had too many pejorative and belittling terms about those who were different from us and about those who suffered from various disabilities.

With that in mind, I would like to make a suggestion regarding how we speak about suicide. The common expression is that someone “committed” suicide. That verb needs to be struck from our vocabulary when we talk about suicide.

Very few people who die by suicide, “commit” suicide. More accurately they “succumb” to it in the same way as someone succumbs to cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack. Fifteen years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I didn’t “commit” cancer, it overpowered my immune system against my will. It’s the same with a stroke or heart attack. You don’t “commit” a stroke or a heart attack. They overpower your natural resistance.

Physically we have an immune system which, akin to police on patrol, keeps vigilance over our health, seeking out bacteria, viruses, and malignant cells and destroying them before they can take root, multiply, destroy our health, and cause death. But as we know, sometimes for all kinds of reasons, a malignancy can overpower our immune system and our health breaks down and we die because our natural protection against sickness is overpowered by bacteria, viruses, the breakdown of a vital organ, or some cancerous cells. We die, not by choice, but by conscription. We don’t “commit” a sickness.

The same holds true for our mental health. Mentally, we also have an immune system that, akin to patrolling police, keeps vigil on our psychological and emotional health. But, as with our physical health, sometimes a factor or a combination of factors (genetics, trauma, clinical depression, a tragic life circumstance) can overpower our psychological and emotional immune system and we can succumb to a sickness (unbidden and unwelcome) called suicide.

This is true, I submit, for most people who die by suicide. There are exceptions of course, though these are exceptions, not the norm. Someone can indeed “commit” suicide where, in effect, they are not succumbing in weakness to an illness but are in strength making a proactive choice. Thus, we can make a distinction between what might be called “killing oneself” as opposed to “succumbing to suicide.”  

Someone can kill himself out of strength, pride, and arrogance: I’m too proud and special to share life with the rest of you! Life has not honored my specialness. I’d rather die than continue to live in this world! That’s the difference between a Hitler-type suicide and that of an oversensitive soul too bruised and wounded to continue to fight for life. The former chooses suicide out of strength; the latter dies out of weakness. (Albeit, in fairness, we may not even judge Hitler. Who knows what malignancies overpowered his mental immune system?)

With that being said, allow me to reiterate some key truths vis-à-vis suicide which need to be said, said, and said again, until they need not to be said anymore.

In most cases of suicide:

• We are dealing with a very sensitive or deeply wounded person who is too bruised to touch or too wounded to respond any longer to our outreach.
• The one dying of suicide dies against his or her will.
• Their manner of death is akin to jumping out of a high-rise window because your clothing is on fire.
• Their manner of death is the equivalent of an emotional cancer, stroke, or heart attack.
•  In many cases suicidal depression has some biochemical roots.
• Suicide is not an act of despair. One doesn’t choose to lose hope, rather wound and illness overpower hope.
• Suicide is not an act of selfishness, though it may seem so.
• We need not be anxious about the eternal salvation of those who die by suicide. God’s empathy and understanding are infinitely deeper than our own.

When persons we know and love die by suicide, one of our tasks is to redeem their memory so that the gift their life brought to the world is not denigrated and erased because we now view their life through the prism of how they died.

To die of a heart attack, cancer, or stroke can be sad and tragic, but it’s not shameful. The same for dying by suicide. It’s sad and tragic, but it’s not shameful. Indeed, it may be the most unglamorous and humble of all deaths and thus deserves a special empathy and understanding.

When speaking about suicide, our vocabulary needs to reflect that special empathy, and to do that we need to eliminate the phrase: “someone committed suicide.”