Why is suicide a bad thing for society?

We view taking one's life, especially by the young, as horrendous, a blasphemy of sorts, a wasteful exit from precious life that devastates those left behind. Suicide was once treated as sinful and criminal; nowadays we deem it as mental, born of depressive illness. Hence the cry for more money for mental health and prevention strategies.

Once the preserve of the priests, trying to understand suicide gradually became the domain of the medical and allied professions. Historically, what seemed to make sense was that if you wanted to end your life you were either bad or mad. "Madness", however, was, at first, a legal not a medical matter: 19th century lawyers invented the term "unsound mind" to stop a suicide's estate being forfeited to the Crown and to avoid the criminal stigma attaching to self-death. Such a "mind" duly passed to the province of the physician.

Should it be? The past three decades have seen the rampant "biomedicalisation" of most, if not all human frailties. This medical ideology contends that illness and disease are located solely within the individual and that treatment is predominantly, if not exclusively, medico-surgical or pharmacological.

So, tidily and neatly, disease and dis-ease emanate from within the individual and never, or almost never, as a consequence of life in society or as a part of a social problem.

This "vision" of physical and mental disorder distorts understanding of the human condition. Somehow "happiness" has become the norm. Any form of gloom, dejection, sadness, feeling miserable, weighed down or apathetic becomes a synonym for (clinical) "depression".

This outlook stifles understanding of human relationships, of history, geography, politics, economics, sociology. It brooks little or no consideration of lives lived in ignominy, desperate pain (physical or mental), or utter helplessness. It can hardly bring itself to comprehend, let alone approve, of a different vision — of a voluntary entrance to death, a dignified exit, one that prefers annihilation to the continuation of an unbearable existence.

This biomedical ideology seeks more and more explanations from within rather than from without. The present grail is a search for familial genetic markers for suicide and for "chemical imbalances" in the brain.

A country spends a ton of money helping to equip people with skills and knowledge to be successful in life. For example, public education is funded by tax dollars. So all this investment in people is done with the hope that it'll eventually pay off -- that people will grow up and be productive members of society and earn incomes and pay taxes to help further future generations. When you commit suicide, you break that chain and waste all the money, knowledge, and time that society invested in you.

All human life is precious if someone has that issue they should see a psychiatrist

wasting a life

it isn't bad if the right people are doing it