This week, in MacDermid v. Discover Fin. Servs., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the dismissal of four out of five causes of action against Discover by a man alleging that his wife’s suicide was induced by the credit card company’s threats of criminal prosecution and jail time. Though it reversed the lower court’s dismissal of the fifth cause of action, an intentional infliction of emotional distress claim, the Sixth Circuit's opinion reveals two major problems with the limited legal liability for credit card companies that prey upon the mentally ill.

The plaintiff in MacDermid is the husband of a bipolar woman who committed suicide after being threatened with criminal prosecution and jail time for going into debt on a credit card she obtained by using her husband’s social security number without his knowledge. The Sixth Circuit upheld the dismissal of the plaintiff’s claims based on the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, Truth in Lending Act, Tennessee Consumer Protection Act and wrongful death.

In its reversal of summary judgment on the I.I.E.D. claim, the court explained that its ruling was based on “ a simple alleged fact: that Discover threatened criminal prosecution, without a proper basis, to collect a purely civil debt.” The court clarified that the decision “should…not be read as an indictment of credit card companies’ practices in general…. as potentially troublesome as we might find some of these practices, they do not, in this case, constitute grounds for legal liability against Discover.”

While the connection between debt and suicide in the United States remains largely unexamined, Mark West’s 2003 study, “Dying to Get Out of Debt,” examines the complex relationship between bankruptcy law and suicide in Japan, where the rate of both bankruptcies and suicides increased rapidly during the late 1990s. Though insolvency was rarely the only factor involved in a suicide, West’s paper argues that the law is at least indirectly relevant to decisions to take one’s own life because the law can bring about debt control and “stigma mitigation,” which can lead to lower levels of stress and depression, and therefore, lower suicide rates.

This research supports the morally intuitive notion that legal liability should at least exist for credit card companies who prey upon vulnerable, already mentally ill consumers and drive them to suicide with aggressive debt collection practices. In MacDermid, the plaintiff claims that he “repeatedly warned the Defendant’s agents of the very severely debilitated mental and physical condition of the decedent and that the condition was caused by those collection efforts… that their continued collection efforts… would lead to the decedent’s death or would otherwise “kill” her because of the decedent’s debilitated mental and physical condition.”

The fact that the Sixth Circuit’s reversal was based on the specific words used by Discover and not the reprehensible premise of companies’ profiting from exploiting  the mentally ill reveals two major problems with existing limits on legal liability for credit card companies. First, they are not necessarily responsible for verifying the information provided in online transactions creating new credit cards. Second, once put on notice of a customer’s mentally ill status, they bear no additional legal liability for the consequences of their aggressive collection tactics. The result—that credit card companies can profit from preying upon the mentally ill—is fundamentally immoral.