Rights of those with chronic mental disorders/illness MUST include the RIGHT to commit suicide without physically hurting anyone else,
What gives the Mental Health Profession or Gov’t , who the heck are they to expect people to live their whole lives dependant upon Psychiatric Drugs, that’s SICK and Unreasonable,
And to make Suicide more Humane, the Mental Health Profession/Gov’t MUST Provide the Suicide Method.
I think in NYC, and I’m Jewish myself, that in NYC, the Vast Majority of the Therapists and Shrinks are Jewish, which leads many to think the Mental Health Profession is “Jewish Dominated” this Generates a RABID anti-semitic Backlash.
Put it this way, if the Gov’t/Mental Health Profession, gave me the Cyanide to take for my OCD, I’d be thrilled
Please Don’t Delete this Post…
Until those with Chronic Mental disorders/illness are given the Right to commit suicide without physically hurting anyone else, we will NEVER be truly free.
I’m generally in favor of having more rights, being an officially designated schizophrenic myself, but I have to say that the rights of the mentally ill do not necessarily include posting in the wrong forum.
As for suicide – one of our movement honchos once expressed it like so: You have the right to commit suicide, but not the right to commit suicide in my living room.
I think society and its designated authorities have the right to interfere or intervene if your suicide-related activities are inherently disruptive. I don’t think society is entitled to declare suicide to constitute that type of disruption in and of itself.
There are also lots of valid concerns that, while they don’t fully outweigh your right to check out if you dont’ want to remain among the living, still need to be taken into account. Perhaps most centrally, if we’re going to authorize as legitimate a mechanism by which live people become dead people through an act of will, we need to keep in mind that we want to keep certain other mechanisms of converting live people to dead people via an act of will fully and totally illegitimate – in other words, we still want the homicide team to show up when a corpse’s corpse-hood seems to have been intentionally caused, barring rather specific evidence of it being a legal and official suicide. And therefore we’d want to formalize some safeguards to ensure that the decision is volitional, uncoerced, made by someone with intact judgmental capacity, and so forth.
A registration process followed by a waiting period seems entirely reasonable to me.
GF: My advice (I am not a Mod or a Mental Health Professional):
Post this in the appropriate forum (i.e., Great Debates)
Seek professional help. Or, if you are already being treated, seek MORE professional help.
I call “Cry for Help” on you.
But as to the OP: Doctors take an oath to first do no harm. Helping your patient die can easily be construed as failing that oath in the biggest way possible. Others–presumably, including you–feel that “doing no harm” could also encompass helping a terminally ill patient, who is suffering tremendous, untreatable pain, to end his or her life (since working to prolong the patient’s life would actually be inflicting more harm upon him or her).
In any case, though, we usually reserve the right to make life-or-death decisions to people of sound mind–by definition, some mentally ill patients are not of sound mind, and hence incapable of making such decisions. Is it right to allow a patient to kill himself when, simply by taking a pill once a day, he could lead a normal, happy, productive life, enriching the world? I don’t think it is. (And I know that’s a simplistic case study there–most mental health issues are not treated so simply.)
This is neither here nor there, and I wager that the “many” you speak of is a small category, perhaps a category of one. (i.e., You.)
Now, I am NOT–REPEAT, NOT–offering you, or any other trouble people advice, or suggesting a good course of action, but it seems to me that plenty of people exercise their right to “commit suicide without physically hurting anyone else” every single day without reliance upon the government or mental health officials. I don’t see anything stopping them.
Speaking as the third generation of my family to be mentally ill, I would like to post an objection. Should the government condone or assist in suicide for the mentally ill, how long would it be before there was termination or segregation of the mentally ill for the good of society. Sometimes the mentally ill are dangerous, it’s a common plot device on Law and Order. My Grandfather was mentally ill, as was my mother. If she had been involuntarilly sterilized, I would not have been born to be mentally ill.
For the record, I get the help I need, I consider myself mentally well. Get help or go off and hang yourself, they won’t put you in prison. Don’t make an ass of yourself.
