Society's attitudes toward and treatment of the suicider are examined. The emotional and clinical impact suicide has on everyone, and its consequences to the hospital are detailed. Our unfortunate emphasis on "prevention" as against treating the disease process which causes the death is stressed. Also stressed is the psychiatrist's misplaced role in contrast to that of other physicians involved in a patient's death. Only in psychiatry does it seem that the role assigned the physician is that the he prevent a specific patient's death as much as that he treat the patient's underlying fatal disease.