Suicide and Social Justice

Abstract

While individual cases of suicide can frequently generate widespread feelings of loss and grief, a collective sense of political responsibility for the enduring and differential conditions of suicidality remains missing today. The aim of this article is to develop the broad outlines of a political approach to suicide as a matter of social justice. In contrast to the dominant psychological and psychiatric approaches to the study and prevention of suicide, this article advances the thesis that suicide is a solitary “answer” to a set of collective and institutional questions about the conditions of a dignified human existence that we (i.e., most political societies) have not confronted in a meaningful or sustained way. I argue that a political account of suicide should ultimately point in the direction of a new right to life movement, the aim of which is to secure the conditions of human dignity for all persons.