Escape Hatches: Toward a Mature Discussion of Suicide

Photo by Ayyub Jauro: https://www.pexels.com/photo/hand-reaching-out-of-a-person-drowning-in-water-4128516/

“Brian asked if I’d rather live in a world governed more by probability or by cause and effect. I think he asks me this stuff just to see if I understand him,” Erin said.

“What did you say?” I said.

“Cause and effect, of course! In a world governed by probability, you couldn’t even be sure you could kill yourself.”

 I had that conversation in what I think was tenth grade. It seems weird to me now as an adult, but I feel like when I was a kid, we often talked about suicide as a way to escape a life made unlivable: suicide as an escape hatch.

Conversations like the following were common:

“I’ll kidnap you and take you to a mad scientist’s lair and give you drugs. Then you’ll be addicted and have to do everything I tell you to do because you’ll need drugs.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I’ll kill myself.”

“I’ll strap you down so you can’t do that.”

“Then I’ll just hold my breath.”

“I’ll hook you up to a machine that will make you breathe.”

“When you take me off the machine, I’ll stop breathing right away.”

Talk like that stopped after adolescence. Greater maturity probably had something to do with that. Not knowing the realities of life leads kids to say creepy stuff. We also might have been more casually morbid and insensitive back then (‘80s kids represent).

The talk might have stopped, but that thinking is arguably with us now as much as ever.

Of course, none of us can be sure that suicide is like pulling the plug on your Xbox to get out of a jam (or shutting off the iPad or whatever it is the kids use these days). Who knows what happens to you on the other side of the curtain. As hauntingly dramatized in Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure, it’s always possible that the cruel twist of suicide might be that it somehow further ties you to the world you’re trying to escape.

It at least seems to have the same effect as unplugging the game when your character’s life bar is low, and the bad guys are closing in. And I, for one, can’t blame anyone for having had the thought of a permanent pause cross their mind.

Do you mean to tell me you haven’t?

In some ways, you could make the case that suicide as escape hatch is often the only form of suicide we acknowledge.

On the one hand, we have the truth of Erin’s thought experiment. It’s trivially easy to imagine a life too painful or hopeless to be worth living: the cancer too advanced, the multiple life sentences too much, the debt too staggering. Even if we don’t think the challenge is worth taking a (seemingly) permanent escape route, we certainly understand that reasoning.

Indeed, we might be too quick to understand such reasoning. Up to a point, we take choice away from such people. Obviously, on one level, the person’s choice is the whole point. Yet, in another sense, we kind of imagine that choice as having been made for them. A life expectancy of six months of unending physical pain in a hospital bed doesn’t leave one with much to bring to the bargaining table.

Things are trickier when we can’t locate a clear external cause for the choice. Regarding cases such as these, commentator Ian Marsh argues that we’ve adopted a “compulsive ontology of pathology” when it comes to understanding suicide. What he means is that we have a knee-jerk response to think of suicide as a psychological disorder—something individualized and abnormal.

This is a version of the same reasoning as in Erin’s escape hatch but moved to the inner from the outer world. Underlying psychological problems that make life unbearable or leave you so confused that you don’t know what you’re doing can force your hand just as much as an external cause. Again, it’s an open question how much room we’ve left for choice in such scenarios.

The explanations are never that stark or monochromatic in practice, and the details vary meaningfully across them. Still, there’s truth to this way of diagnosing where our thought is willing to go and where it won’t.

I noticed these patterns in my own thinking when a lifelong friend killed himself a few Augusts back. After finding out about it, I quickly settled on an ordinary explanation.

As I saw it, after years of trying to beat heroin addiction, he’d pinned his hopes on a new, experimental treatment. Everything else had failed. He’d been through NA. He’d sponsored other people through NA. He’d sponsored the people who he had sponsored had sponsored. He’d sponsored his own hopes through seemingly every conceivable solution and configuration of treatment (his sprawling NA lineage was just one chapter in his treatment).

A simple story: after the new treatment failed, he chose Erin’s escape hatch over a future of interminable arrest, danger, and humiliation.

My explanation made sense then, and it still makes sense now. There’s obvious truth to it. Nevertheless, as my emotions have calmed and the details of his final days have become clearer, it’s obvious that my understanding was as right as wrong.

It isn’t my business why he made such a personal choice. But it’s worth acknowledging the depth of his inner universe as well as the complexity of the act he committed. It honors him.

Some of those reasons are social. My best friend was far from the first to struggle with those challenges, and it’s no coincidence that so much in his life (all of our lives) tracks clear social class patterns. It’s a truism that demography equals destiny, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

But we’d be fools to let the social crowd out the existential here. We’d be wise to heed Erin’s point: facing the question of a life worth living and wondering when to look for the exit is going to be true regardless of our society or social order. In a sense it’s individualized, but it’s also quasi-universal or universal when taken in aggregate.

Of course, this isn’t to undersell the place of mental health, which both overlaps with and stands apart from the social and existential. The trouble comes in when it becomes a crutch helping us avoid other issues at hand.

In this sense, philosopher Simon Critchley is right in calling for a more “grown-up, forgiving, and reflective” discussion of suicide. Something in our discussion needs to change: both direct and indirect suicide methods continue to rise. We’re missing something (“I’ll just hold my breath”).

I don’t know exactly what that discussion would look like or what its effects would be. There are, however, many types of escape hatches in the world. Whatever it is we’re facing here doesn’t provide the time or place to look for one.