The idea of “suicide stations” squicks me out. I don’t think it’s such a good idea to offer that for otherwise healthy people. For those who are old and/or terminally ill, I don’t have a problem with them freely choosing to end it, but offering handy places for healthy people to go have themselves killed is another matter.
Also, who would pay for these suicide stations and who would want to work in them? Providing a quiet, painless way out for people who are already dying and in pain could be seen as a worthy service to provide, not so much for people who are physically healthy and might be able to attain good quality of life with counseling, social services, and medication.
People will be made to feel a burden by their families and perhaps encouraged not to be selfish and carry on living - they should take up the offer of painless suicide as being the best for their families.
Yeh nothing wrong with that :dubious:
I’ll tell you why this is going to happen. In the next century or two, human labor is going to be largely unnecessary to the functioning of society’s infrastructure because of automation. Unemployment is going to soar. 50%? 80%? I dunno, but a huge swath of the population is going to be permanently on some form of welfare – even if we could retrain everyone, there just won’t be enough jobs.
Which means either turning ourselves into some Star Trek like Utopia, or a massive class war, or some way to encourage people to remove themselves from the equation.
I think it’s reasonable to count assisted suicide and its preliminary/associated services as medical care. And these should indeed be seen as worthy, honorable, compassionate services.
Formalizing such services could save the lives you seem to be concerned about.
As it stands now, the ‘healthy’ but solitary, depressed person does not necessarily have any interaction with professional medical services. They endure their private misery for however long they can, and one day when they can no longer, onto the tracks they go.
If a cleaner, more dignified, less stigmatized death was understood as a fundamental ultimate right, with institutional support, they’d go there. There would be a chance to offer them the help they would need to live.
I like George Carlin’s suggestion. A beheading at the top of a hill. The head rolls down the hill, and there’s a series of holes in the ground at the bottom. The audience places bets on which hole the head drops into.
I have no problems with suicide. I assume I would if I knew someone who had done it, but that would be selfish of me. I cannot know their pain, and assuming that I could force them to live how I choose to is arrogant to the extreme, and dangerous. What if I wanted someone to be atheist? Should I get to force that too?
I have no problems admitting that like many troubled youths, suicide did cross my mind when I was younger. Now I’m glad I hadn’t taken it, but if I had, I wouldn’t be around to regret it. So in effect, you can say one can never regret suicide, that it represents the one thing people do that they have and will always support no matter what.
Life is not precious. Its interesting, its painful, its joy, its suffering, and everything in between and none of the above. I don’t consider it a gift. Compared to the vast eternity of unlife, this experience we have now is no more than a blip on the infinite cosmic history of which the great majority will never remember or care about. There’s no need to make this short time we have any worse by forcing people to do things they don’t want to do to themselves.
Why does it have to be a place that offers suicide to the physically healthy? Why can’t they offer free, unstigmatized medical care, counseling, and social services? Of course there’s still the question of how this would be paid for.
I think Peremensoe has a good point here, which I bolded.
And I still don’t think medical professionals and counselors are going to want to work in a place where physically healthy people are helped to commit suicide. You can’t force them to work there, and can’t hire people with no medical training off the street to do it for $10 an hour.
I actually don’t see anything wrong with this. Really. I mean, I know there are elderly folk who do feel a burden on their families. They want to go, before they spend all their money that they saved for the kids on their medical care. What’s wrong with giving them an option? When it comes to death we give our pets more love than ourselves…we put them down when the pain gets too much, but Grandma must just keep on suffering no matter what.
What becomes of people like me? I have no children and never will. I have every intention of taking care of myself but what happens if I can’t? Do I just live on and on, breaking my SO’s heart even further as well as bankrupting him? I’d rather there be assisted suicide.
I don’t know about young people but I would say we should not stop them, though I would like to see a waiting period instituted. I don’t want people killing themselves on a whim, I’d like it to be a well thought out decision. But no one who is the support of a minor child. I’m sorry, but I do believe you abrogated some of your rights when you had a child, and for a while, anyway, the child takes precedence.
I admit that I’m planning on going out like Maude from Harold & Maude. If at all possible I plan to decide when I’m done. Hopefully there will be a mechanism in place that I can do it safely, cleanly and with all possible organ donation. I don’t plan to let life run its course. I will take the responsibility.