Is suicide bad?

A number of months ago I wrote about gun buybacks, arguing that this policy cannot possibly do any good whatsoever. It turns out that I was dead wrong: it certainly can, and it probably does. According to a study done by Australian economists Andrew Leigh and Christine Neill, a nationwide gun buyback program implemented in Australia in 1997, which reduced the stock of firearms by about 20%, has lead to a decrease in the number of firearm suicides of as much as 74%, which translates into about 200 lives per year.

When thinking about the effects of gun buybacks on various outcomes, it never occurred to me to consider suicide--a huge omission on my part. It's clear that there should be an effect, and now we have evidence suggesting that it's there.

OK, so gun buybacks reduce the number of suicides. Is that a good thing? Why should we assume that suicide is always a bad thing?

Actually, we don't have to assume this to believe that this particular consequence of gun buybacks is beneficial. I for one don't think that every act of suicide does more harm than good. Death isn't always the worst thing that can happen. No one knows your life as well as you do, so if you think it's not worth living, you are probably right. (Note: some ethicists argue that suicide need not be a bad thing using the volenti non fit iniuria principle. I don't think this is a good argument. It works as an argument for suicide being legal, not beneficial. It's legal to drink two pints of Jameson a day; few people would argue, however, that it's a good idea to do so.)

I do think that most suicides do more harm than good though (in a social welfare meaning of the phrase), for two reasons. First, suicide victims are often dead wrong when doing their mental cost-benefit analysis trying to figure out if carrying on is worthwhile. Most of the time those mistakes are due to (very much treatable) mental conditions and/or influence of drugs. I cannot find the statistics at the moment, but I do know that in some societies very large number of suicides are directly caused by episodes of alcohol-induced psychosis, for example. Second, a suicide victim does not affect only themselves, but those around them as well, often causing them considerable pain and suffering.

Aside from all this, here's why we can be fairly sure that saving those 200 lives a year is actually a good thing: the decrease in suicides by firearms did not lead to an increase in suicides by other methods. In other words, most potential suicide victims who were all of a sudden cut off from access to guns did not use a substitute. This I think is pretty powerful evidence that many suicide decisions were incorrect (from victims' point of view), and that many acts of self-destruction were carried out only because they were too easy to execute.