Everybody contemplates suicide at least once in this life. When merely continuing to live seems too painful to possibly endure, we all wonder if death could relieve the pain.
When that happens, when despair and depression threaten to lead us to self-inflicted self-destruction, we have three options.
First, we can ride it out and wait for things to get better, while praying about our mental state and finding someone who we trust to speak to about what we’re feeling.
Second, we can make an unsuccessful suicide attempt – a risky move that psychologists call a “cry for help.”
Third, we can go through with that self-destructive impulse, and deprive ourselves, our loved ones, and the world of any future we might have had. That option, of course, closes off all possibilities and leaves a huge physical and psychological burden for those left behind.
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The Spiritual Laws Regarding Suicide
So please, if you’re contemplating harming yourself or committing suicide, choose the first option. After the suicide of someone he knew, Abdu’l-Baha said the Baha’i teachings sincerely ask that:
You must not injure yourselves or commit suicide. … Should anyone at any time encounter hard and perplexing times, he must say to himself, “This will soon pass.” Then he will be calm and quiet. In all my calamity and difficulties I used to say to myself, “This will pass away.” Then I became patient.
Today, the problem of suicide has gotten worse. Currently, the United States and many other countries face a suicide epidemic, especially among young people. Between 2007 and 2020, the US has witnessed a 54 percent increase in suicides in the 10-to-24 age group. That stark statistic comes with an embedded question: is suicide contagious?
Suicide Contagion
Lately it seems that suicide has become a growing contagion. Yes, we do live in a place and time with real, severe, and seemingly insoluble issues. Climate change, racism, injustice, materialism, a global pandemic, grinding poverty, questions of identity, and the impending extinction of half of the world’s species can lead any sensitive person into a hopeless cul-de-sac of grim possibilities. Aggressively blaming, shaming, and cancelling social media interactions don’t help, either. Quick solutions won’t work, and more gradual ones seem too slow, unsuited to the dire and immediate crises at hand.
These serious social pressures have caused suicides to rise geometrically among the young in many countries and cultures, perhaps because young people face all of these critical issues at once. When we’re young, our sensitivities are heightened, which means we tend to pay a great deal of attention to what our peers say and do. That means learning about one suicide can lead others to do the same. Because suicide has become so commonplace, the experts have begun to consider suicide a contagious public health calamity. So “suicide contagion” is real, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and we need to face it as a society and find ways to fix it.
Recognizing the Deep Despair that Leads to Self-Harm
The perceptive psychologist and author Erik Erikson, when he looked into what causes the deep despair among young people that leads to suicide, concluded that human society has a fundamental duty to minimize the conflicts for its young people by providing a sense of security, identity, and integrity. Those bedrock foundations of society, he wrote, allow for spontaneity and flexibility, both necessary to keep the soul and the body intact.
Right now, this primary duty of any human society – providing hope for the future to the coming generations – seems increasingly absent in our culture. Instead, we’ve created a pervasive sense of doom, a skewed way of perceiving the world that focuses on every potential negative outcome rather than any possible positive ones.
The Role of Religion: Hope through Community
From a Baha’i perspective, the provision of hope is the role of religion, a role that no solely human invention or culture can fill. A belief in something greater than the individual self, something profoundly spiritual, can give us that sense of security, identity, and integrity.
In an increasingly irreligious civilization, we’ve largely jettisoned the old, traditional forms of religion without replacing them. In the process, we’ve lost the built-in optimism and forward-looking hope that a sense of the sacred can generate in the minds and hearts of the young. When people believe in a benevolent and loving Creator, they tend to also believe that things will work out for the best in the end. Without a false sense of over-optimistic naiveté, they have the reassurance, provided in the holy books of all the great Faiths, that problems have solutions and that issues can be resolved if enough people join together in peaceable unity to address them. When people of faith gather in what the philosopher Josiah Royce called “the beloved community,” they often have much more agency and impact than any single person can, which creates a unified force that mitigates against anxiety, depression, and suicide.
We humans are by nature social creatures, and we need others we can rely on to help us face the problems life inevitably throws our way. Typically, those who commit suicide feel isolated and alone, without the community, commitment, and commonality religion provides.
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How Belief in the Afterlife Prevents Suicide
Also, and maybe more importantly, a firm belief in an afterlife can confer a sense of detachment from the physical and material aspects of being. Rather than focusing on the immediate, it can help us fix our gaze on the reality of a much more distant, long-term, promising horizon.
The Baha’i teachings carefully and kindly point this fact out. Abdu’l-Baha, in a letter of loving condolence to a woman whose husband committed suicide, wrote:
Thou hast written of the severe calamity that hath befallen thee – the death of thy respected husband. That honourable man hath been so subjected to the stress and strain of this world that his greatest wish was for deliverance from it. Such is this mortal abode: a storehouse of afflictions and suffering. It is ignorance that binds man to it, for no comfort can be secured by any soul in this world, from monarch down to the most humble commoner. If once this life should offer a man a sweet cup, a hundred bitter ones will follow; such is the condition of this world. The wise man, therefore, doth not attach himself to this mortal life and doth not depend upon it; at some moments, even, he eagerly wisheth for death that he may thereby be freed from these sorrows and afflictions. Thus it is seen that some, under extreme pressure of anguish, have committed suicide.
Abdu’l-Baha’s letter reveals another one of the great bounties and benefits of a spiritual orientation – detachment. The truly spiritual soul recognizes two incontrovertible bedrock facts about this physical existence: it is temporary, and it is fleeting. That spiritual soul, then, learns to rely instead on the eternal permanence of the human spirit, and tends to its development, knowing that it will persist long past the vagaries and vicissitudes of the body’s short sojourn here on Earth.
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Solace for the Ones Suicide Leaves Behind
For those who have lost a loved one to suicide, the Baha’i teachings offer solace, compassion, and a vision of a reality far beyond the one we inhabit now. Abdu’l-Baha, in a letter to a mother whose young son had passed away, sent her this achingly beautiful message, consoling her by telling her what her son might say if he could speak to her from beyond the veil of the grave:
That beloved child addresseth thee from the hidden world: ‘O thou kind Mother, thank divine Providence that I have been freed from a small and gloomy cage and, like the birds of the meadows, have soared to the divine world – a world which is spacious, illumined, and ever gay and jubilant. Therefore, lament not, O Mother, and be not grieved; I am not of the lost, nor have I been obliterated and destroyed. I have shaken off the mortal form and have raised my banner in this spiritual world. Following this separation is everlasting companionship. Thou shalt find me in the heaven of the Lord, immersed in an ocean of light.
So if you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please recognize these important truths – first, this life hurts, but the hurt does not last forever; and second, that people in kind, compassionate, and loving communities, like the global Baha’i community, can help you find ways to turn darkness and despair into the dawn of a new day.
If you are having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for more help.
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