Q: I am an attorney. While a potential client and I were preparing her will, she asked how it would be affected if she committed suicide. A little flustered, I asked if she was seriously considering suicide. She said no, but did she mean it? I don’t want to ignore a cry for help, but is it appropriate to try to be her social worker – she does see a psychiatrist – especially considering the rules governing attorney-client confidentiality? What should I do?
– J.S., Oak Park, Ill.
A: If your potential client has made a reasoned choice for suicide, your task is not to dissuade her but to provide legal advice, to help her get her affairs in order. You can speak to her with compassion. You can urge her to discuss this with her psychiatrist or her family. You can decline to take her on as a client. But you may not violate her autonomy and her confidentiality by reporting this to anyone.
If, however, she is clearly deranged and a danger to herself, then you must seek help for her.
In such a case, you are forbidden to prepare her will; as you know, she must be of sound mind for that.
The American Bar Association grants lawyers the discretion, but not the obligation, to break confidentiality to report a suicidal client, lucid or not. Some state bar associations – Connecticut, for example – go further and forbid a lawyer to prepare a will if doing so will assist a client’s suicide. But the ambiguity of this proscription undercuts its helpfulness. Presumably such a client will find another estate lawyer and keep mum about her dark thoughts. And to whom would you report a suicidal but apparently rational client, anyway? The police?
It should be noted that many psychiatrists discount the idea of rational suicide, except when a person is terminally ill and suffering intolerably. It is, however, beyond your purview to make such sophisticated judgments. If your client seems rational, and she does, you should help draft her will, but I don’t envy you the moral burden of doing so.
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