In an interview with Esquire, Brad Pitt says:
I’ve never been suicidal except for one little period. And in that one little period, I just thought—I just couldn’t—just didn’t see a way out. The pain was so oppressive that—I wasn’t going to act on this, but I could feel—I could feel the cold steel of the bullet in my head, and it felt like relief.
He “wasn’t going to act on” it, but he said that he came to “understand suicide, in the sense that it’s just relief. It’s just looking for relief from the pain.”
We don’t know anything about the actor’s personal life outside what’s written in gossip columns and tabloids. But what Pitt said in the interview is not all that uncommon. We know it from suicide rates themselves. Many of us know it: a member of the family, a friend, a co-worker, your son’s college roommate. Our own thoughts.
And this is a fact: We are increasingly normalizing, mainstreaming, legalizing doctors assisting suicides. That’s suicidal. For individuals. For a culture.
You may dismiss me as being obsessed with these beginning-of-life and end-of-life issues. I get it. And I’d be happy to acquire some more balance for a country that stops ignoring our grave incoherence: government money is spent on preventing suicide while Catholic nuns are mandated to tell their patients how to get a doctor to help kill them.
Wesley Smith has mentioned this recently, too, for what should be obvious reasons in these parts. We celebrate a 26-week in-utero surgery while also celebrating abortions for any reason at the same point in pregnancy — and any other point.
What exactly do we stand for? After 250 years, a country ought to figure that out.