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The suicide guide that Koestler promoted, like other how-to suicide manuals published in the U.S., Scotland and The Netherlands, was designed only for the use of hopelessly sick people, with the express purpose of reducing, as the British guide puts it, "the incidence of unsuccessful attempts." A Guide to Self-Deliverance is heart-wrenching reading. The manual stresses that suicide should be a last resort for those in intractable pain. It then offers the exact doses of drugs that will ensure death. The manual recommends that the drugs be used in combination with other methods, such as plastic garbage bags and auto exhaust. If the prescriptions are carefully followed, the end will presumably be painless and "the body when found should simply look dead and not disgusting." Because of the more than 20 known or suspected cases of suicide attributable to the Self-Deliverance manual, including that of a physically healthy 22-year-old music student, Britain's Attorney General is currently seeking to have the high court declare the booklet illegal on the ground that it violates a law that forbids helping a would-be suicide.
In the U.S., assisting a suicide is a crime, but under the First Amendment, how-to manuals may be published. Thus, Let Me Die Before I Wake, put out by Hemlock, a Los Angeles-based organization named for the potion taken by Socrates, has been sold freely in bookstores. A more compassionate work than its British counterpart, Let Me Die gives case histories of desperately sick patients who have sought to end their lives. In recounting successful attempts, the book gives the precise doses of the drugs used.
The proliferation of manuals romanticizing death troubles social workers and doctors who are intent on preventing suicide among healthy people, as well as those clergymen who oppose suicide for any reason at all. The worst offender is France's Suicide: Operating Instructions, by Claude Guillon and Yves Le Bonniec, a pair of anarchists who, with ineffable Gallic logic, have equated the act of suicide with revolt against the established order. Their book, which explains how to forge doctors' prescriptions for lethal drugs, has attracted more than 100,000 French readers and has provoked denunciations by scores of physicians and public health professionals, including France's Minister of Health. Most distressed have been the volunteers who operate France's suicide-rescue organizations, like Search and Encounter, which provide counseling. "We are absolutely terrified by the book," said an official of Search. "It's criminal. It goes against all our efforts. We're about rebirth. Their message is to flee from life."