About four years ago, the British Press were full of reports about a woman, brain damaged after taking an overdose while suffering from post-natal depression, who had won £2.8m from Lancashire Ambulance NHS Trust, in the North of England. The story raises many issues, some of them ethical. Setting aside questions about whether compensation of this level was, or could be justified, where does responsibility for Mrs Burchell’s tragic condition lie? With the ambulance crew who took twenty six rather than ten minutes to reach her? Or does it lie with Mrs Burchell herself, who was the agent of her own harm, as well as the victim of the circumstances that led to her ending up alive, but disabled? It is important to engage with such deeply unsettling questions.
We will probably never know what Mrs Burchell intended when she acted – whether, for example, she wanted to die or merely ‘to be dead’ for a while. Some people who act in apparently similar ways intend, by ‘gesturing’ at suicide, to influence the behaviour, thoughts and feelings of others. Some, whose acts I would refer to as ‘cosmic roulette’, intend to gamble with their lives, leaving the outcome – life or death – up to chance, or to God.
In this paper I will discuss questions of responsibility in suicide. En route, I will map out a little of the conceptual and ethical territory that surrounds suicide and a range of other related human acts.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)