Many, many professional organizations use clinical language around suicide because it’s always been a sensitive topic.
You also see this everywhere in when people use euphemism instead of saying it directly.
I do think that both the suffix "-cide" and the transitive verb "committed" insinuate wrongdoing and I in fact appreciate avoiding that phrasing out of respect for the deceased and their families.
On the other hand my younger sister took her own life in 2014 and my uncle took his own life in 2017, and that's the phrasing I've used, whenever I've felt the need to share these biographical details. Doesn't discard their agency, but also doesn't stigmatize. I can't help but think that the style guide would be better served by this established vernacular. It's both clear and respectful, and I wouldn't even really call it a euphemism.
compare and contrast: - he committed suicide - he was a victim of suicide - he died by suicide
each implies different levels of legality and passivity, and therefore control, and responsibility.
in this particular case the passive voice is extra important because to any reasonable person the post office management / fujitsu / uk gov are the responsible parties.
Too much focus is put on retroactively heaping blame on involved persons whenever things go wrong, but that is a really bad approach in my view; enforcement/punishment for things like this should be as light (and consistent) as possible.
But instead we get insane inconsistency (depending on exact outcome) thanks to media amplification and selective outrage.
All that achieves in the end is that people become better at shirking responsibility and playing the blame game, and it hinders not only investigations of past incidents but even increases future risk by incentivizing everyone to cover their ass first and actually fix things second.
But suicide is an act (even if often either an irrational one committed by people in a disordered state of mind, or perhaps a desperate one by people with no path to happiness), and understanding any particular suicide is going to require understanding the thoughts and motivations of the person who killed themselves.
framing suicide more like a disease that acted upon them
Could you or I be 100% certain we wouldn't react the same way?
Negro, black, African American, person of color... it's not the term, it's the implication. Solve the fact that the treatment is that of second-class citizens and there won't be a need to create new terms.
("But that's hard and as an individual I feel powerless so instead I will use a different term I guess." Probably the same phenomenon causing people to direct energy against vaccines more than pollutants and chemicals)
"Disabled", "handicapped", "differently-abled" -- we've never needed to rename "tall", have we?
I agree with your final paragraph, disagree in part with your second, and disagree with your first.
To the second: I don't doubt there's an implication of wrongdoing baked into the etymology of "committed suicide" - after all, suicide is a sin in Christianity and was historically a crime in England, and I imagine when the term first arose there was an intent for it to be condemnatory. But I think modern usage of the term is generally not understood to inherently carry that implication. IMO sometimes, as here, terms become established as first-class citizens in the language, speakers and listeners consequently don't even think about their etymology any more, and consequently the connotations logically implied by their etymology just cease to be salient to the vast majority of people.
(I also don't think the -cide suffix implies wrongdoing. Homicide is not necessarily illegal or wrong, and then of course there are words like "fungicide".)
But in any case if the term is to be eschewed, there are alternatives that avoid the implication of wrongdoing in the word "commit", are already well-established in the language (thus avoiding confusion about meaning) and avoid the new set of distasteful/offensive connotations that "died by suicide has". "Took his/her own life" is one; simply "killed himself/herself" is another. That is - we agree on your third paragraph, even if we disagree on details along the way.
To your first paragraph - I am perplexed. Did you (or anyone else) really just read this term for the first time (whenever you first came across it) and intuitively understand it was simply a new term for "killed themselves"? I struggle to imagine anyone grasping what the term was meant to mean without going to Google to figure out how it was meant to differ from the usual "committed suicide" (or either of the other less common but still well-established terms above); certainly I did not.
Bloody woke libtards in Victorian era!
Probably not - but when I say that we should not deemphasise their agency, I don't think I imply otherwise. The opposite, in fact: to even ask or try to answer the question you ask here - to consider how I would act if put in the circumstances of another person - is to view their suicide as agentic.
(Observe that you could not meaningfully ask, of someone who got lung cancer and died due to asbestos exposure, whether I could be certain I would not "react the same way" to asbestos exposure! That is the difference between the "disease" framing and the "act by an agent" framing.)