That’s one perspective. However, it sounds disjoint from fact and reason to me - suicide does not kill all men, wipe out the world, destroy all buildings, etc.
Are you floating the notion that the shrink is spouting insanities from ideologies? In that case he would would be polluting his practice with his personal perspective.
He’s an enthusiastic Christian, I expect he’s pushing the old idea that suicide is Evil. They don’t like losing followers who become suicidally depressed from the misery Christianity inflicts, so they tell the same people they inflict guilt and self hatred and misery on that they have a duty to stay alive and suffer. It’s one of the many things that makes Christianity such a vile institution.
There are many different kinds of suicide, for many different reasons, some of which are morally superior to any alternative. The shrink in the OP is an ass. It’s his job to dissuade his patients from suicidal thoughts, but his attitude is indefensible when referring to sane people who are not experiencing a crisis.
I think the psych just expressed it in a poor manner. I’m guessing what he meant was that there is anything you do while living is less harmful to yourself than suicide. Which I think is true.
But you have the capacity to hurt other people and the amount of harm you do to them can easily outweigh the harm you do to yourself by committing suicide.
I think the therapist might have been rejecting a false dilemma. It isn’t often going to be the case that somebody’s only choices are suicide or prostituting children.
Regards,
Shodan
Someone should kill himself only in what I call a “Rommel” situation where as in Field Marshal Rommel’s case your whole family was threatened if you didn’t kill yourself-in other words it isn’t really suicide but rather sacrifice.
Why would it be wrong to kill yourself instead of suffering a terminal illness?
Yeah, the one way in which suicide is worse than those things is that it’s the end of hope, things can’t get better once you’re dead. It’s the reason why the RCC used to consider it the only unforgivable sin, that it was the denial of hope and the one sin from which you didn’t have time to repent (there has always been a school of thought which asked “what if you have time to repent while you’re hanging from the noose?”).
That doesn’t mean the other things are good, or that they hurt less people or cause less total pain. Several of the things the OP asked may cause more pain than a suicide, and by that measuring stick, that would make them worse.
“Selfishness” is the worst objection that I’ve heard in regards to suicide. “Think what it will do to your family?” “Your poor parents!” “Think of the suffering you will cause!”
Yes, all those things will certainly happen and that’s why I don’t think I would go over the brink (although I have played on the edge). However, except for dependent children you bring into the world, I believe you have no obligation to keep living for the happiness of someone else, to the exclusion of your own pain and suffering. For instance, I look at my parents. I do not see them as “living for me”–never have, actually. They’re obese, don’t take care of themselves, don’t exercise, don’t watch their sugar or cholesterol, and spend much of their time thinking about bills, frivalivous consumer shopping, gauche forms of entertainment, and church. Both are destined to premature deaths or achingly slow, hellishly miserable ones. Now, if I were feeling particularly suicidal and someone told me to think about how much harm my death would cause my parents, I would rejoin with, “Why should I care, when it’s obvious they don’t care about how their deaths will affect me? Is a preventable, unintentional suicide any more moral than one done deliberately?”
Actually, this isn’t hypothetical. My therapist asked me this question and I gave her this response. She had absolutely nothing to say to it, other than, “Well, what about everyone else?”
Yes, what about everyone else?
I would like to think that although a family member’s suicide would hurt me tremenduously, I wouldn’t begrudge them their right to “escape” whatever hell they were going through, especially if I could empathize with their hell. It’s selfish to demand someone to keep living “just for you”. What if you (not speaking to anyone in particular here) are part of the problem? People don’t ponder this question at all, because most people cannot fathom the serious contemplation of suicide and the reasons behind it.
I think that you’re making up everything in this post. Please provide a cite to back it up.
But of course that depends on whether you’re looking at it from the point of view of the suicider or of the rest of the world.
Judged morally or ethically or from the point of view of its effect on the rest of the world, of course there are actions worse than suicide.
Judged from the point of view of its effect on the person’s own psyche, which is probably the view the shrink was taking since that’s his area of professional concern, suicide is the one act it’s impossible to recover from ( at least unless you posit some sort of purgatorial afterlife). “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
Suicide can certainly have horrible consequences for the survivors, but I think the blame for that falls as much on society’s taboo against suicide, and those who propagate it, as it does on the person who committed the act. By taboo, I mean the very common idea that a person who chooses to end their life is necessarily mentally ill, irrational, impulsive and not responsible for their actions.
When people talk about about how a loved one’s suicide has affected them, they generally express, in addition to grief, emotions such as surprise, wonder about the person’s motives, and guilt that they may have failed the person somehow.
The way I see it, these emotions (aside from the actual grief) are a direct result of the taboo against suicide. Someone contemplating suicide, who is serious about it, cannot breathe a single word about it to anyone, for fear of being locked up and forcibly preventing from carrying out their plans. They can’t prepare their loved ones, explain their reasons, reassure them and say goodbye. Because of the taboo, suicide is necessarily a sudden, unexpected death, rather than an anticipated, planned-for one, and the effects on survivors are accordingly worse.
Annie-Xmas please don’t do anything to hurt yourself!!! Life sucks but it always get’s better, it always does trust me. That said this shrink sounds like a total idiot. Assuming this shrink is married and has kids if I sold drugs to his kids, raped tortured and murdered his wife and all his children I wonder what his answer would be then??? Hey doc are you still happy I didn’t off myself??? What a dipshit. I do not condone suicide but there are definately things that are worth than death. If anyone is in need of psychiatric care please get a qualified shrink because this gentleman sounds like a complete idiot.
The Judeo-Christian ethic does make it makes sense, though. Assuming suicide is sinful, a successful suicide is a one-way trip to hell. Everything else can be forgiven with a quick prayer, but not that.
Also, it seems like you guys can’t process the idea that truth is not some universal ethic that must be upheld. Why couldn’t the therapist be lying? Why couldn’t the therapist know that acquiescing to the statement would lead down the path of the patient thinking they know better than the therapist, which, in depression where a lot of thoughts are messed up, that could be very dangerous?f
And, anyways, if you are actually discussing suicide, chances are you’re pretty bad off. Getting a new doctor and having to reestablish that therapist-patient relationship (which can take upwards fo 6 months) might be too dangerous.
Whoa up people. I was talking to this idiot in a non-professional setting. He also told me that I would probably be helped by anti-psychotic medication, despite my pastpill addiction and my absolute horror of the slightest chance of future addictionto anything. Thank you for your concern, but I am not planning to off myself. For all I know, tomorrow could be the best day of my entire life!
Waitaminutewaitaminutewaitaminute.
Are you among Annie-Xmas’s inner circle? How do you know anything of the religious predilections of her mental health care team members?
ETA: or of the mental health professionals within her social circle?
I think Der Trihs was talking about Chesterton, not Annie-Xmas’ shrink.
On the topic of suicide (from the 9/10 Harper’s [Treatise], Critique of Pure Semen) by an actual moral philosopher, Immanuel Kant:
Don’t kill yourself before you try medical marijuana.
Many years ago, a guy committed suicide by jumping out of the window of an office building in down town Detroit. He landed on a woman on her way to wok in the morning and killed her. That is worse than regular suicide, because it took an innocent person along.
I can think of a number of people whose suicides would be to the benefit of us all – with the possible exception of bad televised eulogies.