Resolved: People have the right to kill themselves

Resolved as follows:

People have the right to end their own lives, for any reason they wish. Laws that interfere with that right are morally repugnant.

People have the right to do to their own bodies anything they wish, even ingesting potentially fatal substances on a daily basis, and laws that interfere with that are wrong.

If a person chooses to end his own life slowly or haphazardly, by taking dangerous drugs, even if he’s not consciously trying to die, the reality is that he’s trying to die, and should be permitted to die if that’s what happens.

Medical resources should be reserved for people that want to live, not people who try to die and change their mainds at the last minutes, including drug OD victims and attempted suicides.

It is an evolutionary benefit to the human gene pool in our current environment when such people die without reproducing.

One (IMO) necessary proviso:

a. Provided that said individual is deemed to be of sound mind and judgment
else, we just give up on anyone who has, say, depression that could be easily remedied with drugs/counseling, which I think is wrong.

I think it’s spot-on, though your eugenics rationale is highly disturbing. I think personal liberty and free will are reason enough to allow self-destruction.

Here’s a 12 year old boy. He upset that the girl of his dreams won’t go out with him. He swallows a whole bottle of Tylenol. We shouldn’t make any attempt to save him?

** As long as being “of sound mind and judgment” is not contingent on wanting to live.

Since we currently have no objective method for determining when someone has a mental illness called depression instead of merely being depressed, this criteria is invalid.

Our current criteria are based solely on behavior and symptom checklists.

I might agree on the conditions that all the ‘dangerous drugs’ mentioned are simultaneously legalized and producers held accountable like every other aspirin selling company (quality, information and production control). And Adults only…

You can’t let people die if they did a half-assed job getting a darwin.

Do you have proof that all suicidal tendecies are genetic and thereby inheritable? It’s new to me.

Some forms of depression might be genetic, but I’m not so sure that letting everybody with a mild depression kill himself would be benefitial to the gene pool. While a person might have 1 or 2 negative traits, like depression or a tendency to abuse intoxicating substances, it doesn’t follow that the person as a whole doesn’t compliment our gene pool. Just look at what it’s been doing for art and music since the beginning of time.

I have mixed feelings about this. In many cases it would clearly be a bad idea to allow suicide without any state intervention.

What if you’re a parent? Can you just off yourself and leave your minor kids to fend for themselves? Would all your children have to be older than 18 before you can get a “suicide license”?

What about people with debts? Shouldn’t they be forced to pay off all their debts before they get a free suicide pass?

Should there be a “waiting period” on suicide? I say if the government allows it, give the person at LEAST a year to think it over, and literature to read on both sides of the argument so they could make a fully informed decision.

With 1 in 4 people suffering from a Psychiatric illness, that’s a hell of a lot of people to potentially eliminate from the gene pool. This argument doesn’t really work on many levels. Lots of suicidees do not suffer from mental illness (although admittedly, the majority do). A lot of elderly people commit suicide, and would therfor not be passing on their genes anyway. It’s a bit of a Nazi way of looking at things. By the same argument, you could say that nobody with any illness with a hereditary element should be treated. Cancer, for example. 1 in 3 of will get it. It runs in families. Should we not treat cancer patients in order to eliminate the disease from our precious gene pool?

Mental illness is highly prevalent, and much more treatable than most people realise. A lot of people who commit or attempt suicide do so in part because their symptoms are not picked up by health professionals or are inadequately treated. Do we punish them for this?

In the UK, Suicide accounts for 1% of all deaths, and 20% of all deaths of young people. Between 1984 and 2004, the number of suicides among men ages 15 to 24 increased by 64%. It is possible that the true rate of suicide among children and young people is as much as three times the official recorded level. This may be due to uncertainty about the circumstances of death, unwillingness to use the label of suicide, or the constraints of registration policy and practice, as well as protection of the family.
The suicide rate for older people has fallen over the last few decades, although older people are more likely to be successful in their attempts than younger people, perhaps partly due to the increased likelihood of having prescribed medication and overlooked symptoms of depression. In 1998, 16% of all suicides in the UK were people aged 65 or over.

Around 90% of suicides and suicide attempts are carried out by people with a recognisable psychiatric illness, and research into this has revealed the following statistics:

  • Depression carries a 15% lifetime risk
  • Schizophrenia carries a 10% lifetime risk
  • Manic depression carries a 20-25% lifetime risk
  • Alcohol dependency carries a 15% lifetime risk
  • Substance misuse carries a 20-25% risk for younger people
  • Borderline Personality Disorder carries a 15% lifetime risk

These people deserve treatment as much as anyone with any other illness. It is not for anyone in the medical profession to decide on someone’s right to live or die. If we see a patient who has attempted suicide and is either unconscious or judged incompetent (ie, of “unsound” mind), we have to treat them. That is our job.

Other common factors leading to suicide, or attempted factors seem to be:

  • Severe stress or life crisis (e.g., a relationship breakdown or job loss)
  • Disturbed or unhappy family background (especially if there is a history of abuse)
  • Socially and/or educationally disadvantaged background
  • Social isolation
  • A history of deliberate self-harm

These people are sad. They deserve help. They need help. Who are we to judge them? There are a few cases, true, where the individual will have made up his/her mind, is thinking clearly, and whose mind will not be changed, and in such cases, yes, they have the right to end their own lives. Everyone has the right. But they deserve a chance to be helped first. Scenarios such as this are sadly few and far between - the vast majority of suicdees are mentally ill.

"People think that in medicine you can cure people and that in psychiatry you just foozle around. Fact is, it’s the reverse. You don’t cure heart disease or kidney disease, you palliate it. With a basically healthy young woman like this who wants to kill herself, if you can connect with her right now, at this shit-moment in her life, she’ll probably never try to kill herself again! If that ain’t cure, what is?”

  • Samuel Shem
    Mount Misery
    And incidentally, I haven’t just dragged up a few random statistics from a half-arsed internet search. This is subject on which I have done a considerable amout of research and writing.

You seriously misunderstand the concept of evolution.

If you can manage to squeeze out a kid before you off yourself, the “suicide genes” (or whatever it is you want to cleanse) get passed to the next generation.

oops. I must have missed the last part about “not reproducing”.

But like I was saying, I don’t think there’s any reason to believe you could get a significant percentage of people to suicide before they reproduce to even put a dent in the genes responsible for depression.

There is (as always) a moral and a practical side to this. Morally, you should be able to decide that life holds no meaning, fill out a form or two, and check into a local organ donation clinic, and not check out. This presents huge practical problems, however. Whether or not people should have the right to legally off themselves is contingent on both the morality and the practicality of the situation.

On the other hand, being able to kill yourself without government assistance would be a screen against at least some unsound suicide attempts, and it’s not like they can charge you for suicide anyway. So, not a pressing societal issue, to me at least.

To Daysleeper

Didn’t want to recopy your post, but think it is excellent.

The increase in suicides, depression, and other mental maladies is well documented. It is also known that spiritual teaching reduces these problems better than secular methods.

Why can’t we develope a spiritual approach to help these people, and I am not talking about traditional religion.

Near death experiences has been shown to lessen the desire to commit suicide in those that read them.

I think it is strange that we have the means and methods of helping people, but not the courage.

I am not wanting to start a debate on whether there is a spirit world or not, but I do wonder why the problems increase as the world becomes more secular.

http://ndeweb.com/info01.htm

Love heals all things

In the OP you suggest that the act of taking life-threatening drugs, even if the person isn’t consciously trying to die, the fact is that you’re trying to kill yourself and want to die subconsciously. Do you really believe that every 17 year old at a party that tries ecstasy/crystal meth/acid etc. secretly wants to die? I think you seriously overestimate the analytical skills of people who are already drunk, possibly high on the non-life-threatening marijuana, and under the severe influence of peer pressure.

My question: Are you saying that this should be religiously allowed, ethically allowed, or legally allowed? Because you talk about morals here, but obviously ethics are subjective, and I’m sure different religions have different stands on the issue. So what status quo are you trying to modify with your resolution?

Resolved?

Agreed, so long is there is no legal obligation for anyone to provide assistance to people - including medical and financial assistance - that wasn’t arranged for privately in advance.

Obviously, anyone doing anything that might potentially lead to death has a subconscious desire to kill themselves. The people who do these things are sick, and need to be helped – if they refuse it, or deny that they’re trying to kill themselves, then we have an obligation to help them whether they want that help or not.

Unless the person is a smoker. Or a skydiver, or someone who drinks alcohol, or drives a car. Those people are obviously sane, and it would take a sick mind to think otherwise.

S TVAA, you know exactly where to draw the line? Cigarette smokers don’t count? How about marijuana smokers? Coke snorters? Crack heads? Heroine addicts? Tell us.

Nowhere in the article you link to is this even claimed.

It has often been said that suicide is a selfish act. This is true.
Killing a human being is wrong, whether it is yourself or someone else. People forget all the people they interact with on a daily basis, not to mention family members.

I have seen a lot of misery cause by those who kill themselves, and they don’t prove nothing by doing so. Your consciousness (you) will continue to live after the death of your physical body. This has been shown in a scientific study. You can’t run away from yourself no matter what you do.

If you are being abused in any way, get help, tell someone, call a hot line, they are in the phone book.

If you are unhappy, sad, don’t feel like there’s any hope, get some counseling or talk to a close friend about it. Don’t believe for a moment that it can’t be fixed.

Sometimes people attempt suicide and stay alive as a vegetable or badly crippled. It is not worth the gamble.

Spiritual practices will help greatly, not necessary to be religious.

http://ndeweb.com/Suic01.htm

Love will heal all things.

Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence. It seems conciousness continues for a brief period of time after the heart and breathing stops, and the person gets revived. But that doesn’t prove you’re conciousness continues when you’re embalmed and 6 feet under.

No I didn’t. Years ago there were experiments with having potential suicides read about near death experiences. I gave you the correct statistics from those experiments.

They were not continued because of the spiritual clash with the scientific. Spiritual methods have always worked better than science in these areas.

People who have NDEs come back with no fear of death or life. This is very helpful to those who do fear death. It is a shame our children are taught misinformation in school about religious ideas. It sometimes cripples them mentally for life.

If there were no higher intelligence and if life didn’t continue after death. Then it would be true that life is not worth living. It would have no purpose, no meaning, no anything. Science is doing the world a great disservice teaching its propaganda that we are only pieces of meat.

Love heals all.
We are spiritual beings having a physical experience.