The problem with World Suicide Prevention Day is the idea that suicide is preventable

Suicide is prehaps the biggest thorn in the side of the pro-life bias in our culture. The idea that suicide can be (and most often is IMO) a rational act and not a symptom of madness does alot to expose what this existance is really about. The assumption that life is always a universal good in itself is exposed as baseless by the existance of those for whom the future realisitcally holds no prospect of positive utility that can outweigh their suffering, and who would choose to end their lives rather than suffer on in hope that 'it might get better'. At the moment we as a culture are stuggling to accept the idea that suicide might a valid choice for someone who is already in terminal physical decline and living in a great deal of physical pain, or without the ability to function in a way that physically healthy people take for granted. A great deal of resistance can be expected to the idea that suicide might also be a valid and rational choice for a person who is physically healthy, especially if they are young.

The pro-life bias in a modern secular society, a society that is supposedly built upon the foundations of objective reason rather than superstition, is quite different to the taboos placed on suicide in traditional religious cultures. Before the 'enlightenment' in Western culture, suicide was considered a sin because it was a subversion of the will of god, who created man to live on Earth according to his design. No matter how bad one's suffering is on Earth, there could be no excuse for taking one's life, it would be considered a spiritual failure. The pro-life bias in secular humanism is not based on aquiescence to the will of a diety, but has inherited some of the residual trappings of that judeo-christian world view. Rather than prescribing that we stoicly suffer in this world to earn our reward in the eternal everafter, secular humanism is built on the idea of optimising happiness in this world here and now. What both have in common is the underlying assumption that everyone can be happy, whether it's in heaven or whether it's on Earth. A christian would want to 'save' someone from suicide because they are concerned for the fate of that person's soul, for a secular person there is no soul to be saved only the validity of the pro-life bias itself, which has it's roots in a sort of wilful ignorance:

'Perhaps we do not want to acknowledge that we live in a world where some people are currently so bad off that any of the following would improve their lives: (a) selling an organ; (b) selling themselves for sex; (c) ‘escaping’ their lives by getting high; (d) working at a factory at 8 years old.  Paternalism can serve to protect the paternalist from seeing the world as it is.'

The above quote is from Jason Roy discussing the function of paternalism in the denial of realties that are unpleasant to the majority of people. He goes on to say that by censuring certain behaviors that result from people having to endure intollerable circumstances:

'...we, to a large extent, avoid the sympathy response. People who break the law to use drugs or sell themselves for sex are not viewed as worthy of sympathy, because they are criminals.'

Suicide is generally not considered criminal, but the same kind of paternalism is at play in suicide prevention as it is in drug prohibition or prostitution abolition. The suicidal are generally seen as 'mad' rather than 'bad', mentally ill rather than criminal, but with the same predictable results, ie; the negation of personal autonomy and the increase of suffering while ostentasiously trying to prevent it. On top of the natural berievement anyone will experience when losing a loved one, the friends and relatives of a suicide often face the guilt that they could have done more to prevent it. The idea that suicide can and ought to be prevented, like with drug use and prostitution, can only be practically realised by locking people away or otherwise keeping them under constant scrutiny and by trying to convince them that their own experience and motivations are invalid.

Once we liberate ourselves from blind optimism we can more easily accept that for some people suicide is a very reasonable solution to impossible problems. There is a generalised fear about breaking the taboo on suicide, yet if the breaking of many previous taboos are anything to go by we are rather more likely to develop understanding and compassion than be destroyed by it.