Suicide - This is a feature aritcle on suicide and the psychiatry view of it

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Psychiatry and Suicide

Those individuals attempting suicide who are not able to "finish the job" can look forward to a life of medication, sedation, and therapy. While this is not a happy outlook, it is the truth. Because states have decided attempted suicide is beyond the parameters of legal prosecution, they have found a new way to control the individuals life. The irony is a person has no life to look forward to if he attempts to end his life and is unsuccessful. At the turn of the century psychiatrists professed themselves as experts on suicide. They explained the attempts as a cause of mental illness, leaving other psychiatrists as the only physicians capable of "treating" the "illness." Some suicidal patients were diagnosed as schizophrenic, while others just with extreme cases of depression. Ilza Veith wrote, "The act of suicide clearly represents an illness and is, in fact, the least curable of all diseases" and the AMA wrote, "the contemporary physician sees suicide as a manifestation of emotional illness.

Rarely, does he view it in a context other than that of psychiatry" . Psychiatrists found another way to keep themselves in business.

Moreover, psychiatrists have taken the place of clergy and religion. Psychiatrists are set in place to explain that suicide is evil, wrong, and the want or need to commit suicide must be driven out of a person. "Instead of being stigmatized by religion [suicide] is now stigmatized by medicine (psychiatry)" . Psychiatrists explain that those who attempt suicide are mentally ill and with counseling and medication they can be reformed and perhaps allowed back into society. Two hundred years ago, a priest would have told someone with suicidal tendencies he was possessed by the devil (instead of having a mental illness) that was evil, wrong, and needed...