Review

Review

“This book is not a suicide note.” A fair opening line, as Critchley (SC) goes on to list several novels and essays published under titles containing the word “suicide” which are closely followed by the completed suicide of their authors. It is a cloud that follows this book, which is pure white with NOTES ON SUICIDE in large, blue text on the front cover. I felt self-conscious reading it on the metro this morning, and at work I put the book upside down on my desk, and at the park I held it in such a way as to obscure the title. Lest people think I’m planning to off myself (I am not, FYI).

I do find the topic interesting, though. Personally, professionally, and morally. Personally, because in 2014 I came very close to ending my life. Professionally, because I am a social worker and have worked with people who were actively suicidal. Morally, because I struggle with the concept of “goodness” and it is interesting to me where the concept of self-destruction fits into the image of an “otherwise” good person.

On December 31st, 2014, I put in a Target curbside pickup order for a helium tank. I had a plan, knew how to at least attempt it, I had written good-bye letters and placed them in a safety deposit box. That is the closest I ever got to carrying out a plan. I cancelled the order just before 8am the next day. Ain’t e-mail a great memory preserver? At some point in the months following, I would dissolve the letters in chemicals and eradicate them, not able to re-read them. In 2015 I got a job in a hospital, eventually became a caseworker. In the 11 years since, I’ve moved three times, completed a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, multiple fellowships, and live across the country. In the intervening years, I have made friends, fallen for people, experienced joy and heartbreak. Such is life.

I do not know if I have contributed anything good or lasting in those 11 years. I do not know if I have mattered to anyone. I hope so, but that is something we can never know unless we are told, and asking demands an affirmative answer. What I know is that I would not trade the people I have met and know for that helium tank today, at 7:53pm on April 4th, 2025.

That disclaimer and context-setting aside… I did find this little book interesting. I have been professionally fascinated by suicide and have followed suicide research for years. This is certainly a text of philosophy or commentary, rather than an argument, like, for example, Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Stay. It seeks to carve out a space for suicide as something in need of more language, more nuance. Not the condemnation of Christian et al theology or the stigma of culture at large. Rather, SC wants there to be a discussion about suicide unburdened by panic or revenge, where it may be a reasonable course of action for a certain person, and that there should be no judgement against them for that.

SC cites Andrew Solomon’s framework in The Noonday Demon (see note below), which cites people with terminal or some other catastrophic circumstance where suicide may be a chosen act following reasonable logic. I am not quite sure how I feel about this. I think assisted-suicide should be available for terminally ill people in pain, which I think is a relatively easy conclusion. When we get into severe and persistent mental illness, it gets hazy so fast. I can understand, quite deeply, what it is like to live with an unfriendly brain. I know what it is to imagine people reacting to your death and a dark voice within saying everyone would be happy if you were gone, and I know what it is like for those thoughts to smash into you constantly in the dead of night and intermittently in the midst of an otherwise normal day. So, my uncertainty is not out of lack of understanding, but because I wonder where agency meets our ability to heal.

Whether I agree with SC’s categorizations or some of his conclusions, I do agree that we fear talking about suicide and we lack language for it. think the first thing contributes to the latter. Suicide is a taboo, something that I know a lot of us think about, but we do not speak about it. Because to speak about it can be perceived as manipulative or attention seeking, or because we simply are fearful of saying anything. I am a social worker, and I know many social workers. I also know that many social workers are deeply afraid of working with folks experiencing even minimal suicidal ideation, for fear of risk and liability. They, and other helping professions do this too, jump too quickly to the highest level of care (acute inpatient psychiatric care, in which I used to work), when all the person has is some idle thoughts about guns and car crashes and a lot of self-hatred, things perfectly addressable in therapy.

That contributes to the stigma, even folks supposedly trained in this don’t want to talk about it (here I will shatter an illusion: remarkably few mental health practitioners receive any actual training in practice with suicidal clients in school).

Back to the book. Page 52: “Suicide can and does cause immense grief to those we love and are close to and may also have significant effects on those further away.” This is basically the only mention of suicidal contagion. I think a few others are technically written, but this gets to it. That is a real disappointment, because it is a significant protective factor (in my mind), and a real moral quandary to be dealt with. There are other discussions in the book about “sovereignty” (right before this, on page 51, in fact), but the lines drawn are not as solid as I feel they could be.

SC writes at length in these closing paragraphs in a way that I resent and find disingenuous at best. In the preface, he identifies that he feels the closing pages could be read as “too upbeat” or “insouciant,” and (after asking google to define “insouciant”) I certainly agree.

He writes: “Why not calm down and enjoy the world’s melancholy spectacle that spreads out so capaciously and delightfully before us? … Why not try and turn our selves inside out, away from the finally hateful inward suffering, and outwards and upwards towards others, not in the name of some right or duty, but out of love? Each of us has the power to kill ourselves, but why not choose instead to give oneself to another or others in an act of love, that is, to give what one does not have and to receive that over which one has no power?”

Let me paraphrase, “why not just stop feeling suicidal, why not feel happy?” My experience is that this is not a helpful thing for folks to hear. It is interesting to me that SC reports experiencing suicidal ideation while writing this, and yet produced these sentiments. To be clear, I do not doubt that he experienced such ideation. I am suspicious that these lines were written to allay fears and distance himself from the impression that he may be writing the book as a suicide letter. It is, after all, the opening line of the book. I can understand this, but I remain annoyed. Right after this he describes remaining alive as more courageous, which I also find disingenuous at best, a trite thing people say when they hear about someone experiencing suicidal ideation. Being called courageous is insufferable.

The book is short and well worth a read if you have a moral or philosophic interest in suicide. If you are looking for arguments against committing suicide, especially from a secular point of view, I would highly recommend Hecht’s “Stay” (there are some reviews on this platform that say that book blames suicidal folks and says the book claims people would be selfish for committing suicide. I think the book is more nuanced than that, and would credit it with saving my life. There was a time when I read it every year.). For a clinical text, I would highly recommend David Jobes’ Managing Suicidal Risk; I can’t vouch for the third edition, but the 2nd was splendid.

Notes

• p11 - In suicide notes, the most intense self-hatred gives rise to the most radical exclamations of love.
• p12 - The question of the meaning of life is the wrong question and I humbly suggest that we stop asking it. Our minds will never stop rummaging through the drawers of self-doubt, self-disgust and self-pity in order to find some piece of forgotten dirty moral laundry. What is important is the ability to get life to stand still in order to look at it tenderly and with care, to cultivate slower forms of attention without renouncing life in some sovereign violent act.
• p21 - In The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon has very helpfully begun this work by introducing four categories of suicide: (i) a manic, dire, impulsive and sudden act; (ii) revenge, or self-obliteration as payback for a felt wound; (iii) suicides which are planned, with complex and often lengthy notes, seemingly pragmatic but with a deeply faulty logic; … (iv) those planned through a reasonable logic, because of physical illness, mental instability or some catastrophic change in life’s circumstances.
• p21 (TB: SC goes on to suggest additional categories, such as suicide-homicide, or inadvertent deaths through overdose or drug interaction and where intention is unclear.)
• p29 - We lack a language for speaking honestly about suicide because we find the topic so hard to think about, at once both deeply unpleasant and gruesomely compelling.
• p33 - In writing, one steps back and steps outside life in order to view it more dispassionately, both more distantly and more proximately. With a steadier eye. One can lay things to rest in writing: ghosts, hauntings, regrets, and the memories that flay us alive.
• p37 - …Spinoza argues that a free human being is one who lives according to reason alone and is not governed by fear. To be free is to desire the good directly and to act and live in such a way as to persist in this desire without flinching or failing.
• p41 - Hume writes that someone ‘who retires from life, does no harm to society. He only ceases to do good: which, if it be an injury, is of the lowest kind.’ On the contrary, Hume adds, we do no harm to ourselves or to others when existence has become a weight that is too heavy to carry. Suicide, he concludes, is ’the only way, that we can then be useful to society, by setting an example, which,, if imitated, would preserve to every one his chance for happiness in life, and would effectively free him from all danger of misery.’
• p46 - To love is to commit oneself to another not without the guarantee that love will be returned, but with the hope that it might be. Love takes place in the subjunctive mood: it may be, it might be, would that it were the case.
• p51 - Sovereignty is something shared and divided in the complex networks of dependency that constitute a human life. In relation to the question of suicide, claims of sovereignty very quickly become murky.
• p52 - Suicide can and does cause immense grief to those we love and are close to and may also have significant effects on those further away.
• p54 - It is not at all inconceivable, to my mind, to picture a slippery slope from a legal and moral position where suicide is permitted, whether assisted, accompanied, or not, to one where society exerts a gentle or not so gentle force on those people it considers useless, surplus to requirements or free-riders to kill themselves.
• p56 - Isn’t the perhaps conquerable fear of death always outweighed by the terror of dying?
• p61 - One always speaks to someone in a suicide note.
• p64 - (after a Freud blockquote)… given our intense self-love, in order to kill ourselves we have to turn ourselves into objects. More precisely, we have to turn ourselves into objects that we hate.
• p65 - Suicide is the determination to rid ourselves of what enslaves us: the mind, the head, the brain… This also partially explains the phenomenon of the suicide note and its mixture of depression and exhibitionism, where self-love becomes hatred and one dies apologizing for one’s actions.
• p74-75 - TB: Here, SC quotes George Eastman’s and Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide letters, noting the lack of revenge, retribution, entitlement, self-justification, or self-pity. SC has just spent several pages discussing the manifesto of a homicide-suicide person that, in rage, killed several other people in a mass shooting. SC, looking at the Eastman/Thompson letters, says, “There is rather a sober lucidity and honesty that gives one pause and invites quiet admiration.” I do not find that their letters provoke this in me.
• p81 - TB: extensive discussion of Levé’s suicide and his book “Suicide.” SC quotes him: “Are there good reasons for committing suicide? Those who survived you asked themselves these questions; they will not find answers.”
• p82 - TB: Further discussion of Levé and the nature of suicide as redefining all live events prior to it, changing meaning of everything. “Suicide might grant life coherence, but only by robbing it of complexity by viewing it through the instant of one’s death.” SC writing. “Suicide saddens the past and abolishes the future.”
• p82, again quoting Levé, who is in “Suicide” writing in the second-person about the protagonist, who has killed himself: “You directed toward yourself a violence that you did not feel towards others. For them you reserved all your patience and tolerance.”
• p88 - Cioran writes, ‘When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.”’ (TB: It seems counterintuitive, but this is a real coping mechanism. It gives a sense of agency, helps quell panic, and buys time. Buying time is the name of the game in managing suicidal risk.)
• p88 - TB: SC writes at length in these closing paragraphs in a way that I resent and find disingenuous at best. In the preface, he identifies that he feels the closing pages could be read as …, and I certainly agree. “Why not calm down and enjoy the world’s melancholy spectacle that spreads out so capaciously and delightfully before us? … Why not try and turn our selves inside out, away from the finally hateful inward suffering, and outwards and upwards towards others, not in the name of some right or duty, but out of love? Each of us has the power to kill ourselves, but why not choose instead to give oneself to another or others in an act of love, that is, to give what one does not have and to receive that over which one has no power?” Let me paraphrase, “why not just stop feeling suicidal, why not feel happy?” My experience is that this is not a helpful thing for folks to hear. It is interesting to me that SC reports experiencing suicidal ideation while writing this, and yet produced these sentiments. To be clear, I do not doubt that he experienced such ideation. I am suspicious that these lines were written to allay fears and distance himself from the impression that he may be writing the book as a suicide letter. It is, after all, the opening line of the book. I can understand this, but I remain annoyed. Right after this he describes remaining alive as more courageous, which I also find disingenuous at best, a trite thing people say when they hear about someone experiencing suicidal ideation. Being called courageous is insufferable.
• p91 - “The question of life’s meaning is an error and should simply be given up.”