I manage an e-mail-based discussion group for therapists and trainers of therapists.

One year someone joined the list; it happens that people come and go all the time, and so his coming started with not much fanfare. However, after awhile he became substantially provocative when he announced that he intended to kill himself and would do so on December 31 — that caused a stir.

Why join a group of therapists and make such an announcement? Perhaps he did not understand how a therapist might react to such news, but perhaps he knew all too well.

Perhaps he had no real intention of killing himself, but just was a lonely person who had not real-time friends and wanted to entertain himself by causing other people to get excited and concerned.

One of the problems with online activities is that unless there is a real-time corresponding relationship, one often has no idea who the other person actually is, where they live, or what they are up to. That is the danger when paedophiles stalk children in chat rooms, pretending to be someone benign.

So, the people on my list began to bat around the situation, and they looked it over from their various positions in the world.

Someone from the European Union wrote: “People have a legal right to kill themselves. The only reason to call emergency services is if there is a medical or psychiatric emergency.”

He continued to say that if he had been this person’s therapist he would have had the duty of confidentiality under European Human Rights legislation and could not inform anyone of what apparently was going on unless he had had some prima facie evidence that the person was being “unchoiceful” in his wish to die.

Another, from the United States, summarised the situation there by saying, “I think the law is different in the US”. One, we do not stand in a confidential relationship to one another on this list, except as a courtesy.

Second, if a person is in danger to herself or others, one has a duty to protect or warn the endangered person. Third, confidentiality does apply to therapy relationships, but a failure to take measures when there is a credible risk of suicide is negligence. Assisted suicide is a crime.

Fourth, people do not have a legal right to commit suicide in the US. I chimed in, because it dawned on me that there were wider issues involved: A positive approach to ethics calls us to refuse the compartmentalism that allows us to limit our ethics to only that which saves our professional butts, to only that which is associated with our professional roles, and it promotes a more holistic ethic in harmony with who we are as persons. That would eliminate the arbitrary line drawn between who is our client and who is another human being.

Do we behave significantly different with clients as opposed to others? Do we promote or participate in another’s suicide? What are the criteria that inform us in such situations?

I think that people often get stuck in their roles. It’s as if, on the way to work in the morning, they put on costumes that accord with their jobs, and those costumes influence the way they think. One is a retail clerk. Another is a doctor. Another is a teacher. One is a banker. Another is florist.

When they were in high school, they learned to identify with a certain social group. They wore the appropriate costumes to announce to the world that they belonged. When they grew up, similar identifications, and corresponding costumes began to provide limits to their compassion, caring, investment of energy, or interest in doing good work.

Here in Bermuda some wear the costume and have the “look” of an entitled group; they do not need to work quite as hard, and they don’t care what kind of burden that places on those around them.

Others belong to the group who is merely passing through, and they are too preoccupied with making money to care very much about what kind of burden their presence places on those who will remain after they have gone.

Then there are others still who wear the costume of those caught in the middle between these two extremes, and they feel the stress of wanting both compassion and good work.

Are we defined by how little we have to put out in order to cover our butts? Or is there another compass that guides, some kind of transcendent value that demands we do a good job, care for those around us, and participate in humanity? I’d like to think that such were true.