Is Suicide Selfish? | The American Spectator

On Wednesday, America lost one of its great freedom fighters to a man with a gun, and the world went into mourning. The loss of one man has had a ripple effect on an entire community. It illustrates the fact that death doesn’t impact just the deceased; it expands to all who touched their lives.

Wednesday also marked World Suicide Prevention Day. A date set aside to remember the countless lives lost and the countless more left behind in grief. In America, someone commits suicide every eleven minutes. That’s more than 120 deaths each day, nearly the entire population of Charlottesville, Virginia, in a year. Each loss leaves a wound that never fully heals. Which brings me to a difficult question, one often whispered but rarely spoken aloud: Is suicide selfish?

I don’t raise this subject lightly. I grew up surrounded by loss. Young men, most of all. Boys I sat beside in classrooms, teammates I played alongside, never made it past their teenage years. Their names still echo. I’ve seen what their absence did to families, to friends, to whole communities. So when I ask, is suicide selfish? I ask with the weight of lived experience. Not from cruelty, and never from coldness.

Suicide springs from despair. A darkness that convinces the sufferer there’s no way out. Depression, trauma, and shame can strip life of meaning until escape feels like the only logical option. To reduce all of that to selfishness alone would be cruel and simplistic. But the opposite extreme, treating suicide only as an act of personal freedom, is just as false. Suicide is never private. It reverberates outward.

Take the father crushed by debt. He convinces himself his exit will spare his wife and children, that his absence will free them from the price of his poor choices. But when he is gone, the bills still come. The debts remain. His children must grow up without a father. His wife must grieve while carrying new burdens alone. It wasn’t release. It was abdication. Or the mother who believes her children would be better off without her. She cannot see that to a child, even a flawed parent is everything. That child would rather face hardship with their mother beside them than live in material comfort without her. What she thought was sacrifice, her children feel as abandonment.

Suicide, then, can feel like an escape — but it can also be a theft. It takes from loved ones the one thing they cannot replace. A father, a mother, a brother, a friend. Their presence is stolen in an instant, yet the absence echoes for decades. To those left behind, suicide can look selfish because the act shifts unbearable pain from one person to many.

But selfishness here is not the casual kind we use to describe greed or vanity. It’s not about wanting more for oneself. It’s about failing to see what is owed to others: love, loyalty, and the sheer fact of staying alive for those who cannot imagine life without you. This is not said to condemn those who suffered so greatly that they saw no way out. Hopelessness can blind a person to the devastation their choice will cause. Yet the devastation remains.

The Christian tradition has always taken suicide seriously. Life is not something we own outright; it is a gift entrusted to us by God. To end it deliberately is to break that trust, to claim as private property what was never fully ours.

Saint Augustine wrote that suicide breaks the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” for it is the killing of oneself, who is also one’s neighbor in the deepest sense. Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas expanded the case. Suicide is an offense against God, against the community, and against the self. Against God, because life is His gift. Against the community, because we are not isolated beings. Our lives belong to those who love us and lean on us. Against ourselves, because darkness robs us of perspective, stealing the chance of recovery and redemption.

But you don’t have to be a churchgoer to see the weight of that argument. Even if you’re a Dawkins-loving, Bible-bashing skeptic, you can still recognize the truth buried here. Life binds us to others, and ending it breaks bonds they can never mend.

This isn’t theory. I’ve seen it up close. I’ve seen mothers with faces drained of life after finding sons who had hung themselves. I’ve seen fathers break as they lowered their boys into the ground. I’ve sat in classrooms where silence was louder than any bell, where empty chairs screamed what words could not. Suicide does not end suffering. It multiplies it. It seeps into families, into friendships, into generations yet to come.

Some argue that it’s too harsh to call suicide selfish, that such words only heap shame on the suffering and drive them further into anguish. There is truth in that, and we must tread carefully. Compassion matters. But compassion cannot mean denial. Survivors know the sting of desertion. Their sorrow runs deep, and their anger is not without cause. To ignore the selfishness at times is to ignore their lived reality. Anger and sorrow sit side by side. Both are real.

So what can we do? Sometimes it’s as simple as showing up. Making the call. Sitting with someone and reminding them they matter. What appears to be a small gesture can be a lifeline.

And we need to speak plainly. Suicide isn’t noble. It isn’t poetic. It is devastation. It is both refuge and robbery. For the one who dies, it feels like release. For everyone else, it feels like a sentence. It’s important to remember the dead. But more than that, let’s stand with the living. Let’s speak with honesty. Let’s love with urgency. And let’s remind each other that despair does not get the last word. Life does.

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