Morality, Mental Illness, and the Prevention of Suicide

Since the middle of the 20(th) century, suicidology, as a group of disciplines working to understand and prevent suicide, has reinforced the long-held view that suicide is caused first and foremost by mental illness. Yet, the record of the last two centuries demonstrates the difficulty in identifying the risks and in reducing the incidence of suicide despite persistent reliance on psychosocial means. In order to understand the reasons for this outcome it is crucial, we will argue, to expose the moral values on which the medicalised assumptions about causes of suicide was based. Our aim here will be to demonstrate how moral arguments against suicide, which existed for centuries, have shaped psychiatric theories and discourse on suicide since the turn of the 19(th) century, and how this has persisted in present suicidology. These arguments, which had once justified legal and religious sanctions, were progressively naturalised and appropriated by medicine. Latent, implicit, even denied in contemporary suicidology, these moral arguments remain nonetheless at the heart of the medicalised conception of suicide, as it is through these moral values that medicine was able to 'appropriate' this act.