Putting Suicide Prevention Stickers Over the Dying With Dignity UK Ads Was An Act of Rebellion

Meghan Schrader

By Meghan Schrader

Meghan is an autistic person who is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and an EPC-USA board member.

Before getting to the main topic of this post I want to acknowledge the recent passing of Not Dead Yet director Diane Coleman. I never had the pleasure of meeting Diane in person, but I was honored to have NDY post some of my articles on its social media accounts and republish one of my EPC blog posts on its blog. I am deeply grateful for Diane’s decades of disability justice work and my condolences go out to her family and friends.

The rest of this post will address the use of suicide prevention resources to defy the right to die movement’s ideology. Despite the fact that the UK’s subway system usually forbids advertisements for controversial social policies and the fact that suicidal people are known to take their own lives in subway tunnels, Dignity in Dying UK posted glossy, expensive assisted suicide advertisements on the walls of London England’s subway system, such as one that fit into the assisted suicide movement’s pattern of foregrounding the assisted suicide advocacy of upper middle class white women by featuring a young, attractive white woman jumping for joy over the prospect of being able to die by physician assisted suicide. In response, assisted suicide opponents covered the advertisements with posters with the contact information for the UK’s largest suicide prevention organization, the Samaritans.

In my opinion, the act of putting suicide prevention posters over Dignity in Dying’s posh advertisements is the kind of nonviolent cvil disobedience we need more of. It was a powerful statement that the death with dignity movement does not own the cultural lexicon; that not everyone is willing to buy into the death with dignity movement’s rebranding of assisted suicide as “aid in dying.” It was an example of regular people ignoring the desires of the elite; it was a case of someone putting the interests of marginalized, struggling individuals ahead of young, privileged white women leaping in exultation at the prospect of getting to die with champagne in their hands. I think it was the kind of action that Diane Coleman would have been proud to imitate.

In a culture where the assisted suicide movement enjoys a great amount of power and prestige, assisted suicide opponents need to find creative ways of resisting its influence. Covering Dying with Dignity’s advertisements with suicide prevention posters did just that.