Jennifer Michael Hecht — Suicide, and Hope for Our Future Selves

On Being : Jennifer Michael Hecht — Suicide, and Hope for Our Future Selves Image
On Being : Jennifer Michael Hecht — Suicide, and Hope for Our Future Selves Image

Jennifer Michael Hecht — Suicide, and Hope for Our Future Selves

WBEZ brings you fact-based news and information. Sign up for our newsletters to stay up to date on the stories that matter.

Stay. That’s the message that philosopher, poet, and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht puts at the center of her unusual writing about suicide. She’s traced how the history of Western civilization has, at times, demonized those who commit suicide, and, at times, celebrated it as a moral freedom. She has struggled with suicidal places in her life and lost friends to it. As a scholar, she’s now proposing a new cultural reckoning with suicide, based not on morality or on rights but on our essential need for each other.