"...society has come to focus on the rights of individuals, to the detriment of people’s obligations to each other. 'I think that comes at a social cost'..."

When Will People Get Better at Talking About Suicide?

As suicide rates rise, and stigma recedes, many discussions and portrayals are still clumsy or hurtful.

Pescosolido has a theory, based on some of the sociologist Émile Durkheim’s late-19th-century writings on suicide. People are quick to blame loneliness and a lack of social integration for suicide, she says. “The other dimension that we tend to forget about is how much people guide you, and oversee what you do, and tell you when you screw up and help you right your path—the regulation that social networks accomplish in your life,” she says, wondering whether “the ability of your family, friends, or society to guide you is what’s been going away, not so much the lack of connectedness.”

Sometimes a restricting sort of politeness, the desire not to bother each other, can build walls between people, especially in a time when we’re hyperaware of how many other texts and emails and Facebook notifications our friends are probably getting. Pescosolido posits that society has come to focus on the rights of individuals, to the detriment of people’s obligations to each other. “I think that comes at a social cost,” she says. Formerly taboo subjects like suicide have become less off-limits as stigmas have eased, but these shifts take time.