Can billboards cause suicide?
Famous psychiatrist Keith Ablow blogged about an advertising campaign from Final Exit Network, a pro-assisted-suicide organization, which is posting billboards along highways that read “My life. My death. My choice.” Dr. Ablow argues that these billboards could trigger people with depression to commit suicide, and that the organization should be held liable if that happened.
I disagree. All that the billboard says is that people have the right to choose whether to live or die. It doesn’t encourage anyone to kill themselves or say that dying is a better decision than living; it just says that both are valid choices. If someone decides to commit suicide, it means that at that point in time, they believed suicide to be the best option. In my opinion, people have a right to make that decision, even though it is drastic and in some cases might be rash.
People commit suicide because their lives are so miserable that they would prefer death, whether because of a terminal illness, low self-esteem, being tormented or bullied by others, or some other reason. These things are the causes of suicide that need to be solved, not some billboard proclaiming that you have the right to decide for yourself how and when to die (which is true). Billboards do not force anyone to commit suicide, nor can they truly cause suicide, and the creators of such billboards should not be held responsible for anyone’s deaths.