Suicide (Latin suicidium, from sui caedere, "to kill oneself") is the term used for the deliberate self-destruction by a living being, resulting in their own death. Such actions are typically characterised as being made out of despair, or attributed to some underlying mental disorder which includes depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism and drug abuse. Financial difficulties, interpersonal relationships and other undesirable situations play a significant role.

Over one million people commit suicide every year. The World Health Organization estimates that it is the thirteenth-leading cause of death worldwide. It is a leading cause of death among teenagers and adults under 35. There are an estimated 10 to 20 million non-fatal attempted suicides every year worldwide.

Views on suicide have been influenced by broader cultural views on existential themes such as religion, honor, and the meaning of life. The Abrahamic religions consider suicide an offense towards God due to religious belief in the sanctity of life. In the West it was often regarded as a serious crime. Conversely, during the samurai era in Japan, seppuku was respected as a means of atonement for failure or as a form of protest. In the 20th century, suicide in the form of self-immolation has been used as a form of protest, and in the form of kamikaze and suicide bombing as a military or terrorist tactic. Sati is a Hindu funeral practice in which the widow would immolate herself on her husband's funeral pyre, either willingly, or under pressure from the family and in-laws.

Medically assisted suicide (euthanasia, or the right to die) is currently a controversial ethical issue involving people who are terminally ill, in extreme pain, or have (perceived or construed) minimal quality of life through injury or illness. Self-sacrifice for others is not always considered suicide, as the goal is not to kill oneself but to save another; however, Émile Durkheim's theory termed such acts "altruistic suicide."

Suicide is the act of killing oneself.

Sourced

• Many advocates for a "right to die" would also like to see such opportunities expanded to include fully-competent patients with locked-in syndromes, quadriplegias, and other forms of extreme disability, specifically in cases where these victims express an ongoing and rational desire to die, but are physically incapable of ending their own lives. To deny such patients assistance is, to my own thinking, a form of torture by inaction.
  • Jacob M. Appel, bioethicist, Next: Assisted Suicide for Healthy People, July 16, 2009.

• If the healthy are granted the right to die, gray areas will inevitably arise. That does not mean that all areas are gray.
  • Jacob M. Appel, bioethicist, Next: Assisted Suicide for Healthy People, July 16, 2009.

• A free society, to be truly worthy of that name, owes healthy, competent individuals the right to end their lives on their own terms.
  • Jacob M. Appel, bioethicist, Next: Assisted Suicide for Healthy People, July 16, 2009.

• Don't commit suicide, because you might change your mind two weeks later.
  • Art Buchwald, in a humorous personal mantra he used to combat his states of depression, published in Too Soon to Say Goodbye (2006)

• The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)

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Fri Jul 30 02:54:33 2010