Suicide prevention expert Robert Goldney of the University of Adelaide’s Discipline of Psychiatry is urging the public to adopt the term “homicide bomber” in lieu of the misleading and harmful term, “suicide bomber.” He argues that so-called “homicide bombers” rarely have the set of psychological conditions and motivations of a suicidal person, and that the only fact the two share is the perpetrator’s death. “The usual feelings of hopelessness and unbearable psychic pain, along with self-absorption and restriction of options in those who are suicidal, are the antithesis of terrorist acts,” Goldney said in a Newswise report. “Mental disorders also do not appear to be a prominent feature in so-called ‘suicide bombers.’”
 
It’s an important distinction that respects persons suffering from mental illness or mental stress.
 
Today would have been my cousin’s 30th birthday. He committed suicide three years ago, and despite his mental trauma (he had undergone a severe head injury during a pole vaulting accident in high school, and was never the same afterward), no one could ever say that he was a threat to others. He was a smart, kind and funny person who treated me like a little sister. It would be a disgrace and dishonor to him to categorize him alongside killers.*
 
In the end, as I have implicitly argued many times in the old blog, words matter. Words matter for meaning, of course– if you think about it, “suicide bomber” is actually a misleading term that belies the specific political intentions of terrorists, no matter how much we might abhor those aims. But words also matter practically. They influence the lives of people: the family members left behind, the people reading the news, the teen who might be influenced by the normalization of the word “suicide.” When a term is related to illness or death, it is extremely important to tread with caution. And that goes for all the times we use mental health terms cavalierly– the girl who acts “bipolar,” the teenager being “retarded.” Words that may be leaves in the wind to one person, are deeply rooted in others’ psyches, and we need to proceed with care and intention when we speak.
 
 
 

*I am not unsympathetic to certain persons’ political motivations for violence. I am not naive to what is causing people around the world to retaliate to inhumane conditions (or the perception of those conditions) physically. With that said, I still in no way agree with or condone that behavior, and am still offended by anyone who would say that suicide and abnegation-of-self as a by-product of political violence are the same thing.