So I was talking to a shrink who informed me that “Any way of living your life is better than suicide.”
When I recovered from his statement, I asked:
You mean like selling drugs to elementary students?
Yes.
Prostituting elementary school students?
Yes.
Serial killing and mass murdering?
Yes.
What’s your take on this?
Shrinks aren’t moral philosophers - their job is to make darned sure their patients don’t off themselves. Suggesting that there are any circumstances in which suicide is acceptable is just not something a responsible shrink is going to do in earshot of a patient, IMHO.
My thoughts on suicide are…evolving. I still maintain that suicide is the ultimate right of the individual, but a friend of mine exercised that right earlier this year. The collateral damage from his act is enormous. His grandmother, who found the body, is now in a mental institution. His mother had been clean for years…now she’s relapsed in a major way. His uncle, who is and has been my best friend for 25 years, and helped raise the child after his worthless father disappeared, is devastated. I don’t want to be mad at my friend…or at the memory of my friend, since that’s all I have left, but I am mad at him. He caused all this pain for so many people…all because he couldn’t man up and handle his own problems, and he wouldn’t take his meds or otherwise follow the instructions of the professionals that tried to save him. Yes, he had the right to end his life…but I wish he hadn’t. Also wish he’d given more thought to how his choice was going to affect other people.
I would say any of the, uhm, lifestyles you mentioned would hold out the hope that those activities could be contained (perhaps with jail) and then mitigated (though lots of therapy). At least it’s good for his business.
Just like my grandpa used to say, just because someone dabbles in serial killing as a youngster doesn’t mean they ALWAYS have to be a serial killer. If you are a suicider, you will forever remain suicided.
I would think that if a person is a serial killer or serial pedophile and opts to kill himself because he cannot stop his crimes, then that is better than continuing to live and commit those atrocities. A better choice, of course would be to turn yourself in.
One thing that is worse than suicide is the scenario where the person–usually a guy, sometimes a woman–kills entire family, then shoots self. (In cases I’ve read of where it’s a woman, she usually muffs the “shoots self” part, or fails to set herself on fire with the rest of the family, or somesuch.)
In this scenario it’s perfectly acceptable to kill yourself FIRST rather than last.
I think that if your life is horrible and has no hope of improving that suicide can be logical. People tend to have an instinctual gut-reaction to suicide but frankly there are much worse things that can happen.
I’m trying to evaluate the statement, but I keep thinking it’s not really a coherent remark. In what way exactly is suicide worse than those things?
The way you live your life can cause you pain or pleasure in various combinations and you have whatever state of mind you have. If you’re dead, you don’t experience anything and you have no state of mind. That’s true whether you kill yourself or die by any other cause. I don’t think there is any particular way to evaluate that as better or worse than living. It’s true that if you are alive, you may be able to get a handle on your problems and things could improve. Dying eliminates that possibility. Of course in theory it also eliminates any possibility that things will get worse. There’s no question that suicide creates a lot of pain for the friends and family of the dead person but that seems like a separate issue.
Part of the problem with those questions is that you’re not LIVING your life, you’re living the lives of other people.
I would’ve asked, "Is suicide better than prostituting yourself? Using Drugs? Killing others?
Sorry, I have arthritis or another of various joint deterioration conditions in every joint below my waist, including my spine, and I may have parkinsons disease starting up [waitinf on a consult with a neurologist group at Yale], and alzheimers is also in my family. I am going to kill myself because I do not want to be a drooling wheelchair bound twitching blob, costing way too much money to keep alive with essentially no brain functioning. I prefer to go out when I plan to, with some dignity, not spend my life strapped in bed shaking uncontrollably and in a diaper with no mind. You don’t like it, sod off. Nothing is going to improve that.
I reject the notion that all suicides are any one thing. I think some suicides are very justified (the ‘assisted suicide’ rules, for example). Some are morally reprehensible (extreme example, but I’ll use it nonetheless: Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and other Nazis who took the completely cowardly escape hatch after years spent destroying lives all around them). Most probably fit somewhere in between. To suggest it would be worse if Ted Bundy had killed himself before killing his victims is ridiculous and I’d almost have to ask the shrink “Is you is or is you ain’t serious?” before believing anybody would think so.
I don’t have an objection to that. Is there something in my post that made you think I did?
Annie, I think the shrink you were talking to maybe has some personal stuff about suicide coming out in those answers. I would disagree with him.
I dunno, Mr. Excellent probably nailed it. I don’t think we can make any assumptions about the shrink’s personal attititude about suicide (beyond, I guess, assuming that he got into the field in the first place with the view that mental illnesses, including depression, were treatable and thus suicide can be prevented) but I find it entirely plausible that if a patient brought up the subject (I’m assuming the psychiatrist didn’t), a responsible shrink would discourage it however possible.
My take on this is that it’s completely and utterly incorrect. If the choice is between seriously harming numerous other people and killing yourself, then one should kill onesself, unless it can be reasonably anticipated that the fallout of your death (greiving family members?) would be worse than the harm caused by the other option.
This is not to say that suicide is always a great idea, of course. But there are certainly some things that are worse.
What worse, killing millions of people like Stalin*, or killing yourself? If he claims that suicide is worse even than that, that’s a position that makes no sense. If killing one willing person is wrong, surely killing millions of unwilling people is much worse. If he admits it would have been better for Stalin to kill only himself then we have an admission that some things are worse than suicide and can narrow matters down from there.
As for why he said what he said; probably it’s a clumsy attempt at professionalism, as others have said. Or maybe he’s the sheltered, unimaginative sort who really can’t grasp the idea that some things are much worse than death.
And the other question here is “worse for who?” If you’re Stalin and you enjoy killing people, you’d probably rather be alive and killing people than be dead. On the other hand a lot of other people would be better off if you’re dead. I’m told that’s the perspective suicidally depressed people tend to take on that issue. So from that side of things, the shrink’s take is probably too simplistic to help even if a shrink would never tell someone that suicide is a valid option.
Get a different fucking shrink, and give your current one a good swift kick in the balls from me on your way out the door.
There is no way in any form of hell ever imagined by man that hurting others is more acceptable than hurting yourself.
The people you hurt probably want no part of your fucked up insanity; what you do to yourself is your own goddamned business.
" Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one’s self. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say “poor fellow,” of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer’s suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man’s crime is different from other crimes—for it makes even crimes impossible." - G. K. Chesterton, in The Flag of the World
Ah, the good old argument that people shouldn’t be allowed any escape, no matter how horribly agonizing their condition or how horribly they are abused. Popular among people who make life so hellish that death is preferable, but who don’t want to lose their work force and armies to the escape of death.