Dr. Raymond Moody On Suicide (An Excerpt)

This audio, and the text that follows, are all excerpts from Dr. Moody’s presentation, On Suicide. 

By Life After Life 

So I can talk first of all from the perspective of a person who’s lost a loved one to suicide. Secondly, I studied philosophy and got my Ph.D. in philosophy and became a philosophy professor. And suicide is one of the philosophical problems that has been discussed by great thinkers throughout the ages…

Let’s talk a while about the effect of suicide on the loved ones who are left behind because that’s really where the agony is. The first thought that usually occurs to people when they hear about the death of a loved one to suicide is a feeling of guilt. Is there something I could have done?…I’ll start with the reality of the situation and in practically every case, the reality of the situation is there’s nothing the people left behind could have done. That’s the reality.

 When I was in psychiatry, we used to say that if you had a roomful of 100 people and you ask how many of you have at some point in your life thought about suicide, that 90 percent of the hands will go up. And that what you can infer from that is that 10 percent of the people in the room are lying. Because it’s just a human reality.

Now, as a subgroup of people who had near death experiences, I’ve had quite a bit of experience over the years talking with people who had their near- death experience as a result of a suicide attempt.

Photo by Kalea Morgan

 The near-death experiences of people who attempted suicide are no different at all in their content from the experiences that people who come close to death from some other cause.

The patients who attempted suicide, almost died, but were revived and did have a near-death experience, when those are followed over a period of time, there’s an essentially zero rate of any further attempts at killing themselves.

They say that they never would attempt suicide again because they learned from their experience that even when times are tough, life does have a purpose.

Photo by Nick Scheerbart

Dr. Raymond Moody is the world’s leading authority on the near-death experience. For nearly 50 years he has researched, interviewed, written and lectured on the subject of what lies beyond this life and what happens to those left behind. In this special presentation package Dr. Moody discusses suicide from his perspective as a psychiatrist and near-death experience researcher.

Click below to learn more about Dr. Raymond Moody’s insights into suicide and the afterlife, as well as its effects on those left behind.

DR. RAYMOND MOODY ON SUICIDE