Ah, so that’s what “they’ll greet us as liberators” meant!
Is alt.suicide.holiday really the only suicide support board on the net? Colour me surprised.
In one of the other threads I responded to you with this sort of scenario. The context was of the grief-stricken parents of a teen blaming this board for encouraging their child to suicide and threatening legal action over it. I used that scenario to illustrate the sort of legal situation I imagine the Reader wishes to avoid. Substitute “wife” for “parents” and “husband” for “teen” and the illustration holds. Pardon me for not listing every possible variation of angry litigent/self-liberated soul but I didn’t feel it necessary. A teen suited me for the purpose of that scenario for two main reasons: 1) Parents of teens often seem to blame “peer group pressure” in situations where an adult’s actions are assumed to be of their own free will. 2) I have known of more teens than adults who have committed suicide, which means that suicide is something I associate more strongly with teens than adults (hence my bias).
Where I feel suicide is damaging is through the impact it has on those left behind. My cousin (now aged 21) lost five friends to suicide about two years ago. I wonder how many of those later suicides were influenced by the earlier ones? Would all five have taken their own lives if they hadn’t known each other? I believe each suicide contributed to the grief and stress that made it more likely that another of them would choose “self-liberation”. In one case, a couple in their late teens split up and both were dead within a fortnight - she took her own life in her grief at their split, and he killed himself out of guilt over her death. How very Romeo and Juliet of them. Still - would she have felt so utterly unable to go on after her relationship broke up if she was not already struggling to deal with the death of several of her close friends? I don’t know if anyone can answer that question, but I can tell you that it has had a permanent impact on my cousin’s life, state-of-mind and well-being. The so-called “mentally-unstable” members of the group didn’t remove themselves completely and painlessly from the lives of those around them, they hurt those around them enough to damage their mental wellbeing.
You say self-liberation as though your death affects only you. This is not true, unless you live in a vacuum. Each person’s death affects others in ways you can’t imagine - this is not an original or unique concept (quite the opposite). It is hard when you are grieving the loss of a person who dies in an accident or from natural causes, but that natural grief is exacerbated by guilt when someone takes their own life and their family, friends, loved ones, neighbours, co-workers and even casual acquaintances question their own role in it and how they failed you. Even as a supporter of voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill, I can perceive a great negative impact that can come from suicide.
Between depressed teens and terminally-ill geriatrics, there’s a lot of middle ground, so I find myself sorta neutral on the overall value of suicide. I fully support the idea of euthenasia and suicide-for-terminal-illness, and also understand (but am not in favour of) suicide-as-protest and suicide-as-attack-strategy. There’s a part of me that says suicide-while-depressed is really hard to prevent ahead of time, but it certainly can be discouraged, not cheered on. Suicide support groups like the OP mentions are like those bulimia and anorexia support groups - creepy as hell.
It’s worth keeping in mind, as Cazzle notes, that suicides don’t happen in isolation. In fact, suicide can be quite catching. There’s been a well-publicized epidemic in Micronesia (cite here), where young kids, even as young as nine, have been killing themselves on what seem to be somewhat flimsy pretexts. To me this is the real danger from an acceptance of suicide as a valid response to stress.
And like Mr. Dibble, I see a world of difference between teen suicide and other forms of suicide. Teenage angst is fleeting, usually. The angst of somebody much older is completely different. If someone has a long-term feeling of being maladapted to society, they may just be right. So you, Valteron, at 58, I would suppose your knowledge of yourself and the world is much profounder than that of Valteron, aged 15. So the decision of an older person to off themselves is much different, qualitatively, than the same decision by a teenager, and should not be regarded in the same light. Morever, I doubt that suicide is quite so catching among older people.
You know Valetron if you think sucide is such a good thing for some people, you should stop trying to lessen the impact of it by calling it “self-liberation”. Call a spade a spade or stop calling it anything 
I don’t understand the purpose of suicide support groups. Anorexia and bulimia groups give support and advice to people who wish to live in a way that other people in their lives disapprove of and want to stop. Suicide is more of a one time thing. If done successfully, the approval of others in your life is not something you have to worry about.
Is it not about suicide and just about belonging to a group? Do some members find fulfillment in convincing others to kill themselves? Do new members lean slightly towards suicide but need convincing? Is the whole thing a cry for help or attention?
In some ways, yes, I’d say it was better. At 58 you’ve at least had ample opportunity to live life while someone who is a teenager has not and therefore it seems a bit more tragic. On the other hand I really hate to get into pissing contest over what’s more tragic. Either way there are going to be people in a lot of pain whether the loved one is 58 or 15.
There’s a lot of different answers to this. We care because it is incredibly painful for a loved one, even a sick loved one, to die. When someone commits suicide their loved ones often times feel guilt “why didn’t I see it coming”, they don’t understand “why did he do it”, and they can get angry “why did he do this to us”. There’s a big difference between someone who has terminal cancer and decides to end their life and some teenager who’s having serious social problems because he’s a homosexual, just as an example. We can reach out to the homosexual teen and say “Hey, it’s ok to be gay, you’re not alone, we care, and we want to help” which might go a long way towards keeping him around.
Quite frankly, I’m not a big proponent of eugenics.
Sometimes people who commit suicide are just going through rough patch in their life. I don’t really have enough knowledge about the effectiveness of parents with any kind of history of mental illness vs. those who have none.
I don’t really think that’s very comparable. I don’t know if anyone said “Well, I’d rather leap to my death than die from smoke inhalation or burning so here i go.” People who are panicking do all sorts of crazy stuff.
Marc
So many things flying around this thread that I hardly know where to start.
The OP makes some horrible arguments, though I agree with the basic premise that suicide can be both rational and even, under the right circumstances, a “good idea.”
To address a couple of other things:
Depression isn’t always treatable.
Teens are at greater risk because their lives aren’t in perspective yet. Most of the upsets of the teen years are temporary. Some aren’t. None of us are psychics, so we have to rely on experience and distance.
Appart from your discription of the world trade center jumps as suicide I agree with everything you said. If suicide is only available to those who are sain enough to know what they are doing and to way up the pros and cons of the situation then it should be allowed. Provision for organ donership from such cases should also be encouraged.
“self-liberation” is a false term though, liberation implies something becomes free. But suicide just results in the sessation of life, nothing is left to become free.
And what if that teen will NEVER receive that kind of support? What if the choice is either killing himself or being forced to live a lie by his community? Is his choice not to live a lie (and face it there are some people who will never accept him) dwarfed by the family’s desire to keep him around as a smiling, outwardly happy heterosexual so they can convince themselves they are not as terrible as they really are?
Put another way, suicide is often not due to temporary problems. Sometimes it is a choice between death and another miserable sixty years.
Suicide is one solution, but somewhat cowardly. It is letting the bastards win. Running away to San Francisco, or Amsterdam or some other more enlightened place is a better solution. Homosexuality isn’t condemned everywhere so they have a chance.
Now if someone was a paedophyle, and couldn’t get help, and knew they could not resist their urges for ever (or had allready succumbed) then suicide would be a good option for them (though they might try emasculation first as a less severe method of self correction).
Not everyone is willing to sever their ties with their family in order to find happiness. And wouldn’t running away and never returning have the same net result for the family as suicide–their son’s gone away, he’s never returning, and they won’t be willing to go away and see him. It’s a really no-win situation.
The OP asked if suicide is bad or not for society, not for the individual or his immediate family & friends.
I don’t hold much hope in exploring “rights” and “logic” here, because there’s a lot of situations and events where these artificial constructions dont’ apply, and suicide is one of them.
So what about societies with little or no restrictions on suicide? From what I’ve read, the avant-garde arts community sees it as an understandable occupational hazzard, just like pipefitters view falling off windows. The officer corps of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces resorted to suicide if they lost too many card games or otherwise disgraced themselves. I’ve read that Swedes kill themselves more frequently than, say, Turks. And of course, feudal Japan had suicide as standard operational procedure.
Since we’ve got these and probably more examples I didn’t mention, can you tell me how they were improved by suicide?
Suicide also severs their ties with their family. Running away allows the possibility of returning. Maybe the families next generation wont be so biggoted, or maybe there is really only one person in the family who causes the homophobia to spread to the other members, once that person dies the others in the family may be wiling to accept the ‘lost son’ now that the bad influence is no longer there.
I prefer to think of it as having their lives in different perspective. In any case, though, what matters IMO is their subjective experience. If a teenager feels as much pain from a problem that might only take 4 years to resolve as an adult would feel from a problem that might last 20 years, we should allow him to deal with his pain just as we’d allow the adult to deal with his, even though from an outside perspective, they aren’t the same. It’s what’s going on inside his head that counts.
As for society as a whole. Of course suicide isn’t necessarily bad for society. If the uncurable rapists, murderers, and paedophiles commited suicide rather than breaking the law then society would be better off for it. Similarly for those people who sanely wish to die and who are and always will be a net drain on society the option for them to self-destruct would not harm society.
That’s a pretty freaking big if. You don’t know it will take 4 years to resolve. You don’t know it will take 4 minutes.
What we can know is that teens are in a state of huge upheaval and conflict. Just as I would discourage someone from committing suicide in a temporary state of grief or upset, I would discourage a teen.
When an adult has spent a life depressed, there’s no reason to suspect things will improve any day. There is reason to suspect it of a teen.
I know you think that teens are abused and oppressed and put upon. But it is an absolute fact that being a teen is temporary.
Sure. But I don’t think that’s a good reason to force the teen to live with his pain when we wouldn’t force an adult to live with the same subjective amount of pain.
Just about everything is temporary. Hell, torture is temporary, but I don’t think you can justify torturing people just by telling them it’ll be over eventually, so I find it hard to justify forcing people to live in pain just by telling them it’ll also be over eventually.
I have to admit that I’m ok with the concept of forcing teens to do things they might not necessarily appreciate at the time. Then again I’m not an advocate of treating minors the same as I would an adult. Is this thread really about suicide or is it about teen rights?
Marc