Choosing suicide

The videotape combines a portrait of an extraordinary woman during the last few months of her life, an account of her carefully researched and rehearsed act of suicide, and an exploration of certain aspects of rational suicide on a philosophical plane and as a public policy issue. Jo Roma, an artist and psychotherapist, had been a long-time advocate of rational suicide and was writing a book about it when she learned that she had inoperable cancer. The distant and somewhat theoretical question of planning her own self-termination suddenly became a metter for practical decision-making. Some months later, when her illness seemed to threaten to prevent her from concluding her book, Jo and her husband, Mel Roman, who is a professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, asked a friend to arrange for the videotaping of a weekend of discussions between them and close relatives and intimate friends. These, plus excerpts from interviews with Jo Roman one month before the date of her suicide, and with Mel Roman a few days after her death, constitute the spine of the work. The attached press clippings contain more information about the circumstances of her act and its immediate consequences.