This might be more of a GQ, I suppose, but it also calls for opinion. Does suicide fit into the range of “normal” human behavior, or is it aberrant?
I don’t see why, there’s all sorts of situations where trying to stay alive is less rational than deciding to die. What’s rational about choosing a slow agonizing death over a swift painless one? And what is a better example of “normal human behavior” than avoiding extreme pain?
It depends on the situation. On 9/11 some people had the choice of dying by smoke inhalation or burning to death, or jumping out a window to their death. Which was the more rational choice?
I know a few people who are currently “committing suicide” (their doctors’ description) by refusing further medical care. I find their action to be completely rational.
I should have been more specific. Let’s narrow it down to exclude individuals who are in crippling pain or who are in imminent danger of death from something else anyway.
Frederick the Great often prepared plans to commit suicide for diplomatic reasons if a military action didn’t work out. I wouldn’t say that was mentally ill.
No, I don’t think so. I definitely don’t think it’s proof of mental illness when it’s a response to terminal or crippling or painful disease, and in other cases I’m not convinced it’s proof on its own. If you take someone who kills himself when his finances are ruined, for example, I think that’s very sad and an irrational response to enormous stress, but I don’t think it means he’s mentally ill.
Good question. To what extent do we own our bodies, and who should have ultimate control over our lives? In Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love he envisioned a future where the right of the mentally competent to end their own life was inviolate.
I have no issue with someone desiring to end their life in the absence of any life-threatening disease just because their life sucks. As long as it is thought out and reasonable alternatives have been persued. Certainly many people that commit suicide have major depressive disorders that could be better managed. However, the act of taking your life because you simply have nothing else to live for to does not necessarily mean that you are mentally ill.
(bolding mine)At no other time in our lives are we forced to look for and/or take the best course of action. The right to die should not be limited thus.
My thoughts on this subject have changed in the last year or so. I’d previously been adamant that suicide was the ultimate right of an individual. Even wrote a paper on the topic as an undergrad in the mid-80s. Think I may have been challenging Thomas Aquinas (or maybe someone else, I do not remember), whose position was that suicide was wrong because it was a sin, made baby Jesus cry, yada yada.
A close friend of mine committed suicide last year. I’ve seen what his act did to his family. His grandmother found the body. She’s in an institution now. His mother had been clean for over 20 years, now she’s not. His uncle, who is and has been my best friend for over a quarter of a century–utterly devastated. His other friends, myself included, wondering why he did it. Could we have stopped it? Did we miss some signal he was sending? We’ll never know.
I don’t want to be mad at my friend for what he did, but at some level I am. It was a selfish, thoughtless act, that caused harm to a lot more than just himself. He was physically healthy as a horse. Guy was in shape–worked out, ran several times a week, but apparently, from what we’ve been able to piece together, somewhere along the path of life–his mind got broken. I can’t believe a sane man would do what he did, knowing what the likely fallout would be to those around him.
R.I.P. David–but goddammit, I want to kick your ass for doing it.
I can see why you feel this way, but consider that humans have disappointed and broken the hearts of their friends and families through all of history, and yet it hasn’t been seriously proposed that we somehow make illegal this action.
For that matter, it’s just as possible for someone to inflict suffering on their family by not choosing suicide. Living people are quite good at making other people miserable, often without trying. So one could use the same exact logic to declare that them not committing suicide is a “selfish, thoughtless act”. Or rather, non-act.
It should also be noted that usually the intent of an action is very important in judging its morality.
If Oakminster’s friend meant to hurt anyone, he was a jerk, but I doubt this was the case.
To many suicidal people the fact that their action will hurt others is yet another regrettable thing about life.
btw we had a thread with the exact same topic just a month or two ago, but SD’s search engine is mocking me.
My answer to the OP remains the same: mental illness is indeed tied to suicide, but there are rational reasons / situations in which someone who is not depressed may choose to end their life.
Playing Devil’s Advocate: people make decisions all the time with a plethora of negative consequences. I’ve been told that my moving eleven years ago really messed with a lot of people’s lives, but nobody begrudged me doing it. I did feel bad about it, but the problems that my former co-workers, friends, and collaborators suffered because of my absence simply were not my responsibility. Likewise, if I stopped donating to my usual philanthropies, people would suffer, but that wouldn’t make me a sociopath. Selfish decisions sometimes hurt others, but to say that there’s no place for selfishness in human action is naive.
That said, if you’re going to kill yourself, do so responsibly. Eating your gun near a police station (where the folks around are used to finding scenes of violent death) suggests itself.
I’m not really concerned with whether or people should be allowed to commit suicide, just with whether those who do should be considered mentally ill.
Suicide is an action, not a disease. You would have to look into the reason a particular person has decided to commit suicide, then decide whether the reasoning itself is caused by mental illness.
I’m not saying it is a disease. I’m asking if it’s a symptom.
But without examining the reasoning behind the action, there is absolutely no way to tell.
Suicide is a clear sign of mental stability. Those of us still alive are delusional.