And yeah, the idea that suicide is somehow never justified is nonsensical. The reality is that sometimes life just isn’t worth living. Certainly, people considering suicide need counselling and professional help, but I feel like the argument put forward in the OP is yet another extension of the profoundly damaging “psychiatric diseases aren’t real diseases” meme. Someone suffering through long-term mental disorders may very well feel that life is no longer worth living, and it can be hard to disagree with them in some cases. The suffering of those going through depression is all too real, even if it is “all in their head”. Obviously, try to help them first, but euthanasia, after all other treatments have been considered, is reasonable. Unfortunate, but think of it this way - would you rather live the rest of your life miserable and in pain, or die? I know what my answer is.
I would rather be alive than dead. And if I told a medical professional that I wanted to die, I would expect them to help me overcome that desire instead of handing me a bottle of pills.
I naturally read that as “I acknowledge that such a point exists…” and assumed you were going to make some kind of reasoned argument about how your view of that point is different than that of other posters. I had to read it twice to make sure that you had really written it with the word “not”. Absolutist indeed.
The contingencies surrounding the quality of human life are not always that simple, and fortunately the medical profession is coming more and more to an explicit recognition and appreciation of that fact. I highly recommend the book Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, a brilliant young surgeon who is also a deeply thoughtful examplar of his profession. It might help to temper some of that barbaric absolutism with a touch of understanding, humanity and compassion.
That doesn’t mean that it’s not in the public interest to encourage people not to commit suicide, nor that the you’re entitled to medical assistance to kill yourself.
I wouldn’t. I was speaking hypothetically; if someone tells a medical professional they want to die, the medical professional’s job is to change their mind.
Many diseases don’t kill but destroy life ending life being livable. Even mental illness can be untreatable.
I do think anyone with a disease that is not terminal should have the option to ask for help dying. I also think every possible means to treat and help that person find a way to make life worth living again should be done first. After that is done, and fails, then let that person die. The jumped though the hoops to try all we know to make it better. It fails and anything more is forcing them to suffer.
If you let someone kill himself because “everything possible has been done”, and a miracle breakthrough comes around the pike a year later, you can’t undo the suicide.
And if they go through their savings, their relative’s savings and their friend’s savings, and this “miracle” doesn’t come through, you can’t undo the bankruptcy proceedings and destitution that will now be added to an already painful and now extended death.
I don’t think the ultimate question of who has control of your body is too far off-topic. Now, where did “mental illness” enter into my scenario? I only asked if, suicide were supposedly legal, the police would interfere if they got wind that someone planned to end their own life. Your response that they would be responding to a “public danger”, when I never said that it would be a public spectacle was strange, as was your followup when I asked what danger?
" The danger posed by a mentally disturbed person threatening to kill"
When you said that suicide was “legal”, what exactly did you mean, if attempting to carry out this “legal” action will get you labeled “mentally ill” and a danger to others?
Thoughts of suicide or attempts to commit suicide are often signs of mental illness, and people who are ready to kill themselves are often unconcerned about whether or not other people get taken along with them.
The parts that I bolded seem to be in contradiction. Whether someone should be able to ask for euthanasia if their condition isn’t terminal is a difficult and certainly a debatable point, but as you point out yourself, mental illness can be untreatable (and horrible) without being terminal.
I would point out, though, that one of the important themes running through Being Mortal that I mentioned in #23 is the idea that medical science is strongly – almost absolutely – conditioned to preserving life by “every possible means”, to use your words. And Gawande believes we go much too far with this, especially with respect to subjecting the elderly to complex, painful, risky procedures that have limited benefits or perhaps none at all, and that may kill them, as opposed to focusing on their comfort and quality of remaining life. As a surgeon he cites many instances of such folly, sometimes at the instigation of doctors, and sometimes misguided patients themselves. Patients have every right, of course, but often they get very bad advice, and there is a real lack of adequate end-of-life counseling.
This is not the same as euthanasia but it’s a closely related observation that embodies the same idea, that medical science is excessively focused on “saving life” at any cost without adequately assessing quality of life and the true best interests of the patient.
So, if police find out that I intend to hang myself in the privacy of my own apartment, and I have no history of mental illness, they will not respond?