Yes people need to be responsible for their own destiny, even if that means bringing it to an abrupt halt.
Oftentimes people who commit suicide are socially isolated. In our society we spend our times apathetic to the lives of others, up and until some kind of crisis in which case our guilt overrides our apathy and we are spurred to action. Perhaps if they were touched by someone in a way that felt good more often they wouldn’t be suicidal. The side effect of our culture being so taboo laden is that everyone fears one another, therefore we keep ourselves isolated in order to not worry about being hurt by one another. A lot of people don’t want to talk about problems with a loved one until they are holding a gun to their own head. So I feel it is hypocritical to act like life is some sacrosanct virtue when really what you are doing is avoiding death, and not really preserving life at all. We live in an unnatural state where we each have these cubic little boxes that are the little part of space we have convinced ourselves into believing that we ‘own’, because we are able to dominate them for a period of time, but we have so many little barriers up between us and other human beings that people fall into the little alleyways between the fences quite literally. Maybe these people wouldn’t want to kill themselves if the doors leading to their own species weren’t closed to them everywhere they looked. So if you don’t care about them while they live, then why care about them when they want to die because they can’t feel that anyone cares about them enough to give them the desire to live.
In a society where people spend more time with plastic boxes communicating with people they’ve never met than they do with the people they know in the flesh, it’s very easy to miss those that disappear. Do you think a native American tribe often lost a member and wasn’t aware of it? Do you think tribes in the Serrenghetti lose track of members often? What about Greek Islands where everyone’s related and there’s no electricity?
So I generally think it’s a good thing if people that do not want to live choose to stop living. Of course if they do have a reason to go on living then that should be pointed out as well, so if you care enough to help expose that for them, and give them a reason to live, then they stop being a person who wants to die, even if only for a short while, and that’s a good thing too, but I don’t think that we should be keeping brain dead people alive on machines, nor do I think that you should have to be brain dead to choose to die, and we shouldn’t lock people up into sanitariums and keep them drugged for twenty years if they want to die either. I think that it’s a good thing that there are people on the internet talking about this sort of thing and offering advice on how to kill yourself.
Besides the other aspect we haven’t addressed. How do we know people don’t go to that newsgroup and feel a sort of catharsis that keeps them from killing themselves? Maybe that newsgroup has kept people going by its existance. Clearly people who post on a message board like that have given some consideration to the issue and how they feel about it personally, so maybe it’s merely a cathartic outlet for people posting tips.
And one last question: And by convincing them to live are you preserving their life or prolonguing their death? If you are prolonguing their death, I don’t think that’s humane at all to get them to keep going.
And yet people sometimes emerge from decade-long depressions to lead normal, happy lives. Encouraging a suicidal person to kill himself cuts off the possibility of a change of heart later.
Would you argue that severe burn patients should be **encouraged ** to choose euthenasia over the months or years of pain that many of them face over the course of their recovery? (Note the emphasis on “encouraged”. Not just “allowed”. “Encouraged”.)
A person suffering from severe depression is not in a position to rationally judge the worth of his own life.
I’m perfectly fine with assisted suicide laws that allow people with terminal conditions or long-term incurable pain to end their lives in a manner they see fit. But encouraging **anyone ** who feels suicidal (even the young and healthy) to go through with it to free up resources for the rest of us is wrong even in utilitarian terms.
No, I never said “encouraging” someone is right (for me, anyway). But advising on the correct way to do it is a different matter. I think suicidal people have the right to information on how to do it.
Yes, depressed people frequently get well. But frequently they don’t. Regardless, it shouldn’t be anyone else’s business. Life and death are personal liberties that shouldn’t be meddled with.
No, but **mswas ** did. And that’s my main bone of contention. He’s arguing that the suicidal should be **encouraged ** to complete the act.
I’m fine with **allowing ** people to commit suicide, so long as there are appropriate safeguards to prevent people who are temporarily not thinking clearly from committing an act they would later regret.
For some people suicide is realistic. They do it and they are no longer miserable. I don’t know how much instruction anyone needs, though, unless they are bedridden and being watched constantly. There’s a rather long list that any suicide-prone person can write down in 5 minutes.
Probably more true than you imagine. I have a friend who insists that the newsgroup in question was very influential in convincing her not to commit suicide. Apparently, when you’re in deep emotional pain, it helps to talk to others who are experiencing the same pain, without fear of being monitered or “punished” for broaching taboo subjects.
I visited the newsgroup myself, and indeed, there seems to be a lot of thereputic venting going on, and I didn’t see anyone actively encouraging suicide, other than answering questions about methods.
But I can also imagine that some people would prefer just to end it rather than wait for a recovery which might happen.
The family member I mentioned before who killed herself was my aunt. After it happened, I was angry at her, and very resentful of what I saw as a very selfish action.
But looking at it after all this time, I now understand why she did it. She really didn’t have anything to live for. She had just gone through an extremely nasty divorce, and her business was bankrupt. She was forty years old and had just had another baby. Her other two children are adults, and are fucked-up losers. She was terrified she would fail at raising this baby, too. Her rebound marriage was terrible. Her health was not good, and she was miserable. She felt like a failure, she told my grandmother a week or so before she died. She felt she had impoverished my grandmother, and had ruined the lives of her children.
I imagine she looked at life and saw very plainly the future before her: broke, homeless with an infant and out-of-work-and-not-looking husband, unable to pay the substantial loan given to her by my grandmother . . . She would have to re-start a life she didn’t want to live.
My anger was at the grief I saw my family enduring. But looking at it now, after my emotions have subsided, I understand and I forgive her. I’ll always miss her, but it would be selfish of me to expect her to live just to spare us the grief of her loss.