Suicide is irrational. It is sickness that is madness and madness that is bad.

The neo-Platonist, Plotinus, establishes that suicides succumb to “disgust, grief, and anger.” It is not a rational act. Porphyry, student of Plotinus, reports his own contemplations of suicide and then the enlightenment by his master: “He came to me unexpectedly … and told me that this lust for death did not come from a settled rational decision but from some melancholic disease, urging me to go for a holiday … So I was brought to abandon my longing for death.”[1]

Augustine establishes: “Suicide is sin in that destroys what makes us human: namely reason.” And: “Suicide is deplorable madness.” Suicide must be overcome through “sound judgment” and the “voice of reason.”[2]

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[1] Prophyry, Life of Plotinus.
[2] Augustine, City of God 1.20-2; Letter 158.

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Finally, the O on our Suicide BINGO card is suicide that goes cap in hand to society to beg, please, sir, may we suicide? May I have my dignity? Please, also, may I be assisted. May we not be outcasted characters in your story of more and better human life? And society in its roles and values and authorities, political and legal and medical and religious and psychiatrical, sometimes approves the role of suicide but only when you would not survive or thrive or, god forbid, procreate anymore anyway, which is simply to say only when you are used up and no longer any good to the story of a better tomorrow, individual and society. There is no real honor or glory bestowed here. You are merely allowed to and the clock keeps ticking and the dogs keep barking and phones ring-a-linging and people scuttle just the same and always the chicken dancing. QED