The turnaround in contemporary society’s attitude to suicide has been extraordinary.
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Meanwhile, the Samaritans and others issue guidelines to the media about how to cover suicide, imploring hacks to report it in a super-sensitive, non-judgemental fashion. Frequent foot-in-mouth victim Jeremy Clarkson also found himself in the eye of a Twitterstorm when he described people who commit suicide on the London Underground as ‘very selfish’. Following the suicide of Welsh football manager Gary Speed in 2011, the footballer Joey Barton described suicide as ‘one of the most tragic, most selfish, most terrible acts out there’ – and he was branded ‘sick’ by the tabloids and self-styled experts for doing so. The reprimanding of Robin Williams’ critics echoes earlier controversies around the criticism of suicide.
Suicides are ‘NOT cowardly or selfish’, decreed a headline in the Daily Mirror (its capitals). Media outlets openly chastised criticism of suicide in the wake of Williams’ death, with the Guardian informing us at length that suicide is not a selfish act, and anyone who says it is could apparently be doing ‘more harm in the long run’. A Fox News anchor was likewise internationally harangued for describing suicide as ‘cowardly’. So when an American actor tweeted his belief that suicide is ‘a very selfish act’, in which an individual in turmoil is clearly ‘not thinking about your family, your friends’, he was subjected to worldwide Twitterfury and eventually had to recant and apologise for his anti-suicide sentiments. Williams’ sad, untimely death exposed the extent to which we are now actively discouraged from criticising suicide.
The inability of modern society to adopt a clear moral stance on suicide was thrown into sharp relief by the suicide of Robin Williams last week.