Why Offer a University Course on Suicide?
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In 2026, I will have the opportunity to teach “Lectures on Suicide” at the Federal University of Pelotas, through the university’s Banco Universal programme, which offers courses open to students from different degree programmes. As far as I know, this is the first time the university has offered a course devoted entirely to philosophical, historical, and cultural reflection on suicide. Creating an academic space in which to think about this subject answers a genuine educational need that goes well beyond intellectual curiosity. Suicide is one of the great human problems, and yet it is still often surrounded by silence, simplifications, and prejudice. Thinking about it requires reflection, public debate, and intellectual training.
LYSIS has played an important role in this process. The project seeks to contribute, however modestly, to building a culture that recognizes a moral obligation to bring suicide into the work of thinking and into public debate. The subject demands intellectual rigour, human sensitivity, and ethical responsibility. Thinking about suicide also requires knowing its history. Here the focus is on the history of the ideas, moral judgments, and cultural interpretations that different societies have developed to make sense of this kind of death. The flesh-and-blood people who died by their own hands deserve, above all, our respect and silence.
“Lectures on Suicide” is an important step along this path in its own right. The weekly work of the classroom makes space for dialogue, debate, and systematic study. The course is designed to help students understand two central theses. The first is that the idea of suicide is a historical construction that emerges in particular cultural and moral contexts. It is not a given of nature. This calls for a careful distinction between the phenomenon of voluntary death, which has accompanied human history since antiquity, and the idea of suicide, which emerges when this kind of death comes to be interpreted through particular moral judgments. The second thesis examined in the course concerns our contemporary understanding of suicide. What we now often interpret as a symptom of mental illness or psychological disorder has a specific intellectual history. That interpretation emerged to a considerable extent within nineteenth-century psychiatry, which was deeply shaped by a hygienist morality that sought to normalize conduct and define social pathologies.
Suicide tends to appear in our public discourse in the form of numbers, diagnoses, and protocols. We talk about it as a public health problem, a clinical phenomenon, or a statistic to be managed. These approaches are necessary and still insufficient. Suicide is a philosophical, historical, and moral problem as well as a medical and epidemiological fact. It runs through the great cultural traditions of the West and reappears in different forms in literature, religion, law, and medicine. More profoundly still, it touches a sensitive point in human experience itself: the relation between suffering, freedom, meaning, and the limits of existence.
The course now coming to UFPel grew out of an earlier experience. Between 2018 and 2021, I had the opportunity to teach it at the Federal University of the São Francisco Valley, where, together with a group of students, I founded Thanátous – Liga Acadêmica para o Estudo da Morte e do Suicídio, an academic society for the study of death and suicide that operated during those same years. It was a period of intense dialogue with students from different fields, in which we sought to examine carefully and rigorously the many interpretations of voluntary death throughout history. The work we did there continued beyond the classroom. I subsequently organized the lecture material and submitted it to the Press of the Federal University of ABC. After a long process of evaluation and discussion with the university’s reviewers, a critical dialogue lasting several years, the work now takes the form of a book of essays entitled A invenção do suicídio — genealogia dos nossos preconceitos morais e crítica da psiquiatria. It is due to be ready by the beginning of April, with publication planned for shortly thereafter. The book brings together reflections that emerged directly from teaching those classes. In a sense, it is the written continuation of a university course, an attempt to turn classroom discussions into essays that can reach a broader audience.
The course I am offering seeks precisely to open up this field of reflection. Throughout the semester, we examine central figures of the Western intellectual tradition, from Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek physicians to Saint Augustine, Michel de Montaigne, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Viktor Frankl. We ask how each age has understood the relations between life, suffering, freedom, and death. This perspective is particularly important for students in the health sciences. Physicians, psychologists, nurses, and other practitioners will inevitably encounter people experiencing profound suffering and thoughts of death. Responding to these situations requires more than a command of clinical protocols or psychiatric diagnoses. It requires a broader understanding of the phenomenon, one that recognizes its cultural, moral, and existential dimensions.
The course is also of essential educational value for students training to teach and those studying the humanities. Teachers increasingly encounter young people in their schools who are facing profound crises of meaning. Yet they rarely receive training that enables them to address these issues with confidence, sensitivity, and responsibility. Reflecting philosophically on suicide is quite different from promoting, justifying, or trivializing it. It creates the conditions for listening more carefully to human suffering, recognizing the limits of our interpretations, and examining critically the prejudices we have inherited from our culture. If there is one thing I have learned over the years of studying this subject, it is that suicide belongs to no single discipline. It demands a collective effort. Psychiatrists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, historians, educators, and health professionals need to work together. No field of knowledge can fully understand the phenomenon on its own. That is why I think it is so important for a course like this to have a place at the university.
The course makes no claim to offer definitive answers or to teach therapeutic and listening techniques, which lie beyond my training. It does make it possible to learn from diverse perspectives, including some that the tradition may have forgotten, and to open up new questions. These may be questions our age is failing to ask, ones that can change and overturn our current perspectives. The aim is to educate students who can think critically, listen attentively, and recognize the complexity of human suffering, beyond any ambition to train specialists. Above all, students can learn that diverse views exist and that those views can be understood, discussed, and accepted or refuted through critical judgment. Ultimately, studying suicide is also a way of studying something broader: how societies understand life, freedom, and the meaning of existence. If this course can contribute, however modestly, to enlarging our capacity for reflection and care and deepening our knowledge of this difficult subject, it will have served its purpose.
Alexandre H. Reis