Do suicide manuals help create a bias toward death ?
There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: the nightmare of a botched attempt to end it." So Arthur Koestler wrote in his 1981 preface to A Guide to Self-Deliverance, a suicide manual distributed to the 8,000 members of the British Voluntary Euthanasia Society. When the famed 77-year-old writer (Darkness at Noon), who suffered from Parkinson's disease, decided two weeks ago that his life was intolerable, he reportedly swallowed the finely calibrated dose of drugs prescribed by the society. Sharing the fatal potion was his wife Cynthia, 55, who apparently believed she could not endure life without him. When police found the Koestlers in their London town house, husband and wife were seated in an upstairs room, in a macabre tableau of family death.
For the growing number of proponents of "self-deliverance," the Koestlers' suicides seemed to epitomize the "gentle, easy" death celebrated by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and 18 similar groups that have sprung up in Europe, Asia, Australia and the U.S. Still, the sensational case raised some disturbing ethical questions about suicide pacts in particular and, more generally, about the fast-growing movement that aims to facilitate the suicide of the terminally ill.
Did Koestler have a moral obligation to dissuade his apparently healthy wife from ending her life? Are organizations like the Voluntary Euthanasia Society encouraging suicide by presenting the act as dignified, respectable, even attractive? Koestler's effusion in the how-to book for which he wrote the preface was characteristic of the movement's publications: "The prospect of falling peacefully, blissfully asleep is not only soothing but can make it positively desirable to quit this pain-racked mortal frame."
Though the notes the couple left behind to explain their action have not yet been made public, close friends in Britain believe Koestler was the dominant partner. Said one physician who knew the couple well: "My guess is that she did not take a leading role but that Koestler said, 'The time has come.' " U.S. Psychiatrist Herbert Hendin, author of a 1982 study, Suicide in America, points out that in suicide-pact cases he has studied, a common factor is coercion, usually by the man. Says Hendin: "There is a tendency for suicidal people to say that what is a solution for them is a solution for others."