ABSTRACT Since the middle of the 20th century, suicidology, as a group of disciplines working to understand and prevent suicide, has reinforced the long-held view that suicide is caused first and foremost by mental illness. Yet, the record of the last two centuries demonstrates the difficulty in identifying the risks and in reducing the incidence of suicide despite persistent reliance on psychosocial means. In order to understand the reasons for this outcome it is crucial, we will argue, to expose the moral values on which the medicalised assumptions about causes of suicide was based. Our aim here will be to demonstrate how moral arguments against suicide, which existed for centuries, have shaped psychiatric theories and discourse on suicide since the turn of the 19th century, and how this has persisted in present suicidology. These arguments, which had once justified legal and religious sanctions, were progressively naturalised and appropriated by medicine. Latent, implicit, even denied in contemporary suicidology, these moral arguments remain nonetheless at the heart of the medicalised conception of suicide, as it is through these moral values that medicine was able to ‘appropriate’ this act.

中文翻译：

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道德、精神疾病和预防自杀

摘要自 20 世纪中叶以来，自杀学作为一组致力于理解和预防自杀的学科，强化了长期以来的观点，即自杀首先是由精神疾病引起的。然而，过去两个世纪的记录表明，尽管持续依赖心理社会手段，但在识别风险和降低自杀发生率方面仍存在困难。为了理解这一结果的原因，我们将争论说，揭露关于自杀原因的医学化假设所依据的道德价值观是至关重要的。我们在这里的目的是展示自 19 世纪之交以来，存在了几个世纪的反对自杀的道德论据如何塑造了关于自杀的精神病学理论和话语，以及这种情况如何在当前的自杀学中持续存在。这些论点，曾经证明法律和宗教制裁是合理的，逐渐被医学归化和挪用。在当代自杀学中，这些潜在的、含蓄的、甚至被否认的道德论点仍然是医学化自杀概念的核心，因为正是通过这些道德价值观，医学才能够“适当”这一行为。