In 2010, shortly after two of her friends had killed themselves, Jennifer Michael Hecht, a poet and an intellectual historian, urged her readers not to do the same, in a blog post on The Best American Poetry’s website. “So I want to say this,” she wrote, “and forgive me the strangeness of it. Don’t kill yourself.” She continued: “When a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community….Don’t kill yourself. Suffer here with us instead. We need you with us, we have not forgotten you, you are our hero. Stay.”

Three years later, we have Stay, a book that draws out her argument against suicide and surveys the history of ideas behind it, from philosophy to art to modern social science. Hecht wants to debunk the prevailing secular dogma that killing yourself is morally permissible, a matter of personal choice. “Outside the idea that God forbids it, our society today has no coherent argument against suicide,” she writes. And so she sets out to provide one.

But this is a bigger undertaking than she understands. Hecht’s philosophical goals are monumental: to survey all the historical arguments for and against suicide, to reconcile the tension between social obligation and personal experience, to help establish the “logical, coherent antisuicide consensus” that Hecht believes we need. But the book has no interest in challenging or complicating the ideas it begins with. It’s a 251-page version of Hecht’s blog post, dressed up with lazy summaries of art and ideas. (“Religion’s claim that God rejected suicide clearly had influence on people.” “A profoundly mistaken pair of suicides in Shakespeare is that of Romeo and Juliet.”) In her unwillingness to interrogate the concepts she introduces, Hecht gives us an unphilosophical history of philosophy, a non-intellectual history of ideas. Nothing disturbs the premise of her own pain: that when it comes to the immorality of suicide, the suffering of survivors is proof enough. This makes for an unconvincing argument—and one that ultimuately embodies the very ethical confusion it sets out to diagnose.

Nearly a million people kill themselves in a given year: 40,000 or so in America. The numbers are rising, but certain policies have slowed them, as Hecht shows: targeted counseling, journalism standards, barriers that make it hard to throw yourself off high objects, like the Golden Gate Bridge. As an analogy, Hecht wants to offer “conceptual barriers” to thwart possible suicide attempts, as if her readers were students at New York University in the library whose high walkway was once the site of a number of suicides a year. The idea of the “barrier” is laudable and elegant—but problematic when the barriers are weak, structurally or conceptually.

A short essay can help only so much, yet we learn that the piece that inspired Stay “drew a large response on the Internet, prompting an editor of the Ideas section at the Boston Globe to contact me and ask to publish it in the Sunday paper.” “The Globe” then “printed it on a lovely blue background over a half-page,” prompting “a lot of email from people who had read the essay,” thanking her “for saying what they hadn’t been able to say: ‘Stay.’ They had not known how to ask.” One can be happy for her “significant positive response,” and even happier for the people who told her that her “word and ideas got them through a bad time,” and still wonder what kind of author introduces a book about suicide by congratulating herself on a viral blog post.