Is suicide, as a phenomenon, necessarily bad for society?

Great Debates
1

Since I had the misfortune to start those other threads in the PIT, I have learned to abide by the rules of conduct of the SDMB. Hopefully this thread will not descend into the execrable Donnybrook that the other two did.

I have since also had the pleasure of communicating with a former soldier who understands much of where I am coming from. We are exchanging emails and it is absolutely wonderful to be in touch with someone who has an inkling of what I mean.

I have also found a wonderful website for people who want to discuss self-liberation. You can see a list and the photos (believe it or not) of their members, both alive and deceased, at http://ashbusstop.org/members.html

However, they have had to temporarily freeze their membership because they have been invaded by “do-gooders” who started flooding onto their site after a story on CNN that alleged that alt.suicide.holiday was responsible for the death of a young woman.

I believe that people who take a logical view of the right to death as something that exists alongside the right to life are in much the same position as witches were a few hundred years ago, or gays were a few decades ago. Just admitting you subscribe to or sympathize with that way of seeing things can get you condemned.

So let me ask you a few logical questions.

We are constantly asked to panic at the fact that a “teenager” might read about suicide and decide to do it. Why only teenagers? Is the self-administered death of someone of say, 58, like me, somehow better? Or do teenagers have fewer rights than I do? Or is my life worth less than theirs?

If, as many people have alleged on these boards, it takes someone mentally unhinged to want to kill themselves, then from a societal point of view, why would we not want these people to remove themselves from an already overpopulated world? I AM NOT proposing that we kill the mentally ill. But when someone who naturally depressive and unhappy, who may cost our health system hundreds and thousands over their lifetime, wants to exercise their right to death instead of their right to life, should society make it so damned difficult for them to do so?

Imagine 18-year-old Suzie and 18-year-old Beth. Both are fat girls whose boyfriends have just told them they are breaking up with them because they don’t like “fat chicks”.

Suzie wants to off herself. But Beth takes a look in the mirror, thinks (you know, Beth ol’ girl, he is right) cries a little, squares her chubby shoulders, sticks out her chin(s), goes on a diet, and ends up with a better boyfriend than the one who dumped her.

Now then, assuming that neither Suzie nor Beth has yet reproduced, which of the two would you prefer add their genes to our gene pool?

Do you know what kind of parents mentally unstable people make? My mother was mentally unstable. And look what a fuck-up she raised!

Then again, many suicides are older persons who feel their bodies getting weaker and more prone to pain. Many are older people who have money problems and a very low income. As they get sicker and older, they will cost society more and more money. All they want to do is end their life a decade or two sooner. To save themselves suffering and by the way, to save the rest of us a lot of money.

So do we respect their wishes? Nooooo! We send the do-gooders after them with pictures of butterflies and recordings of “What a Wonderful World”. Are the do-gooders willing to pay the $20,000 or so extra income they would need to avoid the worst form of poverty, poverty in old age? Nooooo!

So let the do-gooders shove their butterflies and their CDs where the sun don’t shine and respect the rights of these people to death as well as life.

In closing, I am assuming I will not be violating copyright laws if I quote one of the verses from the theme song to the movie and hit series MAS*H, which many people do not realize is titled “Suicide is Painless”:

The only way to win is cheat
And lay it down before I’m beat
And to another give my seat
For that’s the only painless feat

2

“Suicide is often a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

I see the idea of teenagers committing suicide and elderly and often in pain adults committing suicide in completely different terms. Things that seem simply unbearable to a hormone-filled teenager often seem much more bearable when some time has passed. Many times all a teenager needs is someone to listen to them, non-judgmentally, and not always tell them what to do and how to feel.

There is a huge difference between a teenager committing suicide and an elderly person deciding they don’t want to hurt anymore. I watched my mother suffer for six months, usually not knowing who I or anyone else was, and came to the conclusion we are kinder to our animals than our elderly. Fortunately for my mother, she didn’t survive the surgery when the nursing home allowed gangrene to develop in her foot and the doctors were going to amputate it.

I think assisted suicide for terminal patients who are of sound mind should be legal. Otherwise - I have a big problem with making suicide available to those who might change their minds if they don’t have a quick, easy way to kill themselves.

And there is a huge cost in pain to those left behind.

3

It’s probably neutral as a whole to society in general. It’s bad for the person who does it, of course, and generally negative emotionally for their family and friends.

4

I don’t see that suicide is necessarily bad for society. Take for example, the World Trade Center fires and collapse. A lot of people jumped rather than be burned alive, and no one suggested that they were cowards because they committed suicide rather than endure physical pain.

I don’t think that someone who commits suicide to avoid emotional pain is any more cowardly than someone who does it to avoid physical pain. I do think that a person who commits suicide has a responsibility to ensure that there isn’t a less fatal way of avoiding the pain. If someone jumped out a window during a fire when a fire escape was available, well, you’d say that person was an idiot.

Same thing with emotional pain. If there are treatments for the pain, they really should be tried before suicide, otherwise, I guess that person would be an idiot as well. That being done, I have no way to gauge the pain someone is in, and wouldn’t presume to try.

The means of suicide should be considered, it certainly would be immoral to make someone an unwilling participant, no running into traffic or suicide by cop. The third rail in an electrified rail system could make thousands of people late for work. Fires and explosions unless carefully contained are probably out. You shouldn’t leave your body where it would distress someone unduly, like some kind of grisly Halloween surprise. Unless you have an insurance policy without double indemnity, making it look like an accident would be fraud. As you can see, there are complexities here.

The note should be considered as well. Try to avoid recriminations, you’ll be out of it, and the people you want to get back at already know who they are. It just looks petty to kill yourself to punish someone else. Same with murder-suicide by the way. After you’ve tried the murder, wait a while to see if you feel better afterwards. You could try a leading the note off with a small joke, I’ve always been partial to “By the time you read this I will be dead. If only you were a faster reader”.

5

But, if the suicide causes turmoil in the lives of the deceased’s family and friends, which I think is generally the case, it could result in a net increase in mental instability.

6

Most people who kill themselves are depressed. Depression is treatable.

The idea that we should encourage suicide so that the depression-prone remove themselves from the gene pool is as repugnant as the idea that we should euthenize people born with heart defects or crippling diseases.

Some people are faced with untreatable medical conditions that destroy the possibility of living a life of anything other than suffering. A case can be made that those people should be allowed to end their lives if they desire.

But encouraging suicide in general for whoever wants it? That’s wrong. Because the vast majority of the people who attempt suicide are in a mental state where they are not able to rationally judge the consequences of their actions.

7

Suicide, in and of itself is not necessarily bad for society. Your arguments in favor of it are quite bad though.

8

True. But “encourage” and “allow” are two different thing.

9

Of course suicide is bad for society:

  1. Suicide results in the death of human beings. The people whose lives you’re so easily dismissing are, after all, members of society, and their misfortune has to be factored in to the “Benefit” that “society” feels as a whole.

  2. The effect of suicide on remaining family members is uniformly negative; it’s a devastating emotional loss with potentially tremendous economic consequences.

  3. The most valuable resource is people. More people, in general, is good, no matter what Paul Ehrlich says. Fewer people is bad.

I mean, if you take the very popular Internet pseudo-nihilistic position that “all people suck and are stupid and nothing matters blah blah blah let’s go watch my Daria DVDs,” I guess people dying might be of no consequence to you, at least in the abstract. But people staying alive and not dying is in fact one of the key measures of how well a society is doing.

Let’s face it; most suicides are people who would rather have stayed alive the rest of the time and just were unfortunate enough to hit a deep depression at one point. Depression is a treatable medical condition; death by suicide is no less unfortunate and negative than death by traffic accident or meningitis or a skiing mishap. It’s true that some suicides are essentially a point-of-death choice between a lingering death and a quick one, like the WTC jumpers or an old person offing themselves before the cancer eats them, but those aren’t generally the suicides people are trying to prevent; they’re trying to prevent a person choosing dying over living, the teenager from killing him/herself who otherwise would have had a long and productive life.

Or to sum up; if you don’t think suicide’s a bad thing, for society, do you think murder’s a bad thing for society?

10

Of course they have fewer rights than you do!

No one stops you from drinking or smoking because it might be bad for your health. No one stops you from voting or signing a contract because you might not have thought it through. No one stops you from having sex because you might only understand the consequences intellectually instead of understanding them with your gut. No one arrests you if you don’t show up at work for too many days in a row. No one informs your parents or waits for them to give permission when you go in for medical procedures. The list goes on.

The concern over teenage suicide might just be more of the same. “We know better than you, son. We’ve been through the same shit you’re going through, but amazingly enough we don’t remember it being all that bad 30 years later, and if we had to go through it then so will you; we believe you’re making a big deal over nothing, so stop being such a pussy and just deal with it. And maybe by the time you’re our age, you’ll have forgotten all about the hard time you’re having now and you can pass this lesson on to a new generation.”

11

I realize that my anecdote is not proof, but I will say this: as a 32 year old, productively employed, generally law abiding, socially well-adjusted member of society, I am glad that I was not allowed to kill myself half a lifetime ago. And I’d like to think that the world would be just slightly worse off without me.

12

Fair enough. Change what I said to “do nothing to prevent”?

13

Grr … and ignore that last question mark in my last post.

14

So: “The idea that we should do nothing to prevent suicide so that the depression-prone remove themselves from the gene pool is as repugnant as the idea that we should euthenize people born with heart defects or crippling diseases.”

They aren’t really equivalent now; you’re comparing one group of people who choose to die with another group who you’re actively killing. Let’s change it once more: “The idea that we should do nothing to prevent suicide so that the depression-prone remove themselves from the gene pool is as repugnant as the idea that we should allow people born with heart defects or crippling diseases to refuse treatment.”

Better?

15

No, because a person with a congenital heart defect is in a position to rationally assess his situation. A person suffering from severe depression is not.

Society has a duty to protect those who (through incapacity or ignorance) are not capable of protecting themselves. We don’t let minors sign contracts. We don’t let people without medical training buy whatever prescription drugs they want. We put up barbed wire fences to prevent foolish people from wandering into electrical substations where they might be electrocuted.

Similarly, society has a duty to prevent people suffering from depression from acting upon impulses that they would regret if they were thinking clearly about their situation.

16

Good luck getting a consensus on this board as to whether those restrictions are good.

Well, I sure wouldn’t want someone ignoring my opinion on such a vital issue, so I have a hard time disregarding someone else’s choice as “not thinking clearly” without being able to get inside his head. It really isn’t my place to tell someone “oh, your priorities are wrong, you should be thinking less about the pain you feel at this moment and more about the future”.

Suppose there were a pill we could give to people who refused treatment for serious diseases, which would make them “see the light” and want to be treated. How long would it take before someone declared that anyone who refused treatment was not thinking clearly, and demand that they be given this pill to change their thinking? Is that really any different from forcing someone who wants to kill himself to wait, in misery, until the desire to die passes?

17

The phrase “self-liberation” that you keep using is really giving me the creeps. I can’t quite articulate why, but it has something to do with the fact that dead people can’t really enjoy the fact that they’ve departed this vale of tears.

I’m depressed, and I can think of nothing more freeing than to be able to live my life rather than just exist from moment to moment.

18

Evolution has prepared humans (and all species, really) to survive the sudden deaths of individual members through predation, injury or disease so, no, suicide isn’t “bad” for society.
That doesn’t make it good, though. I’m for euthanasia and assisted suicide in cases of untreatable suffering. Depression doesn’t qualify, and suicide isn’t something to be encouraged under any circumstances.

And I, too, am suspicious of the euphemism “self-liberation”. "Suicide is accurate enough.

19

I mentioned in my OP that there is a wonderful site for people who want to discuss their pain and their desire for self-liberation by discussing with others who are not going to judge them or shove their values down their throat. And I also mentioned that I cannot join this site at present because membership is frozen.

You can see a list and the photos (believe it or not) of their members, both alive and deceased, at http://ashbusstop.org/members.html There are only a couple dozen of them and it is obvious the site plays an important role by offering them an emotional and spiritual “safe house”.

They have had to temporarily freeze their membership because they have been invaded by “do-gooders” who started flooding onto their site after a story on CNN that alleged that alt.suicide.holiday was responsible for the death of a young woman.

I can just see it now. These 20 or 30 gentle souls want nothing more than a chance to discuss the possibility of freeing themselves from a planet of six billion psychotic apes who suicide bomb, bomb civilians and call it self defense, run concentration/extermination camps where they gas millions, kill in the name of their loving God, and let their fellow humans live in cardboard boxes in some of the richest countries on Earth.

We live in a world in which the number of cases of torture have increased, not decreased, since the middle ages.

These gentle human creatures live in a world where you can be put in jail or tortured for having consensual sex with another adult on the grounds that it is unnatural, but where it is natural for 80-year-old dudes to walk around with a hard-on thanks to Viagra.

All this handful of people wants to do is consider an option. The site says clearly that it neither encourages nor condemns suicide.

But as soon as they see a story about it on CNN, the Polyannas of this world have to flood the site to shove their “pie-in-the-sky” shiny-happy opinions on the poor, harmless refugees huddling together on this site.

You keep saying that depressed people cannot make a rational decision about ending their lives? Have you ever thought that maybe it is the shiny-happies that are not in their right minds? That given the state of the world, maybe it is the Polyannas who are disconnected from reality?

All I know is that thanks to the do-gooders, I cannot get onto this site as a member.

20

Don’t you mean self-liberation bomb?