It’s that time of year …

The air is painfully cold and the sun is a friend that we certainly haven’t seen much of in a while. 

Life can seem gloomy.

Its likely that you know someone who has struggled with or is still struggling with seasonal depression. Maybe you do yourself. But what happens when this temporary pain morphs into a desire to die? 

In the United States, more people die of suicide than murder every year. Suicide kills more people than AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or liver disease and more men and women between the ages of 15 and 44 than war.

Historically, arguments against suicide have originated from religious ideals that define suicide as a sin–a wrongful act against God.

In opposition to this argument, secular thinkers have treated suicide as a personal right, an act of cultural defiance. This inevitability led many to romanticize and glorify suicide.

Great artists, poets, and writers who died by their own hand are often seen as courageous figures of defiance. The famed Sylvia Plath was one such writer. Plath gassed herself when her son was only a year old. Her son later grew up to kill himself. 

This occurrence is no anomaly. When a parent commits suicide the child is 3 times more likely to commit suicide themselves.  

Which leads to an interesting thought: Does suicide cause suicide? 

Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, certainly thinks so. She goes as far as to claim that “suicidal influence is strong enough that a suicide might also be considered a homicide.”

Hecht claims that if committing suicide can cause others to kill themselves, then the opposite must be true: not committing suicide will keep others alive. 

Hecht believes that remaining alive is one of the most basic acts of moral good that a human can preform. She believes that it is our duty to society to stay alive. She states in her book that:

“We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith — a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.”

What do you think? Is this argument against suicide a moving one?