Can suicide be rational?

Carolyn G. Heilbrun's suicide this past October could not have come as a great surprise to her family and friends. After all, the 77-year-old former Columbia University literature professor and mystery author [pen name Amanda Cross] had written for years about her plans to kill herself.

Heilbrun was suffering from none of the conditions commonly associated with suicide when she evidently took an overdose of pills and put a plastic bag over her head. She was neither terminally ill, in severe pain nor, apparently, depressed. Instead, she committed what some have called "rational suicide" -- ending one's life out of a conviction that one has lived long enough, that the likely future holds more pain than joy.

Rational suicide, a coinage dating back nearly a century, has also been called balance-sheet suicide, suggesting that sane individuals can objectively weigh the pros and cons of continued life, and then decide in favor of death.

Read the whole story. (You will note that The Washington Post has new registration procedures, it takes no more than a minute, and we link to them frequently, you are encouraged to register.) Or sometimes you may attempt suicide to get more attention and resources from other people.

I am a skeptic, and unlike many economists I am willing to point The Finger of Irrationality. Consider the following:

Heilbrun's decision [is] such a disturbing one, says suicide expert John L. McIntosh, chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University South Bend. Even someone making what appears to be a thoroughly rational case for suicide, McIntosh says, can be suffering from depression or cognitive rigidity, an unwillingness to consider other options. Health professionals, he stresses, should be diagnosing and then treating such individuals.

So what happened?

Heilbrun...had been especially open about her plans. In her 1997 book, "The Last Gift of Time," she described life after age 70 as "dangerous, lest we live past both the right point and our chance to die."

Two concerns that Heilbrun mentioned were her "inevitable decline" and becoming a burden on others. Her motto, she said, was, "Quit while you're ahead." But though she was then 71 years old, Heilbrun chose not to act -- not yet. Her sixties, to her surprise, had been a source of astonishing pleasure. She wanted to keep writing, enjoy her family and friends, spend time in a new home and keep certain "promises."

In the July 2003 issue of the Women's Review of Books, however, Heilbrun wrote that she feared "living with certainty that there was no further work demanding to be done." She had consented to life, she stated, "only on the terms of borrowed time."

On Oct. 9, 2003, Heilbrun was found dead in her New York apartment, having committed suicide. A nearby note read "The journey is over. Love to all."

My take: I plan on hanging on until the bitter end. Perhaps that is why I cannot so easily imagine a rational suicide, apart from cases of extreme pain and terminal illness.