# Suicide at my building this morning. **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [November 1, 2016, 11:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/suicide-at-my-building-this-morning/770350 "2016-11-01T11:08:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Foggy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foggy/32/1082_2.png) [@Foggy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Foggy)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2016, 7:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/suicide-at-my-building-this-morning/770350/21 "2016-11-03T07:06:43Z")
> [@ekedolphin](#): > > **Foggy,** how are you holding up? I’m doing OK. We have some loud mouth jerks here so I’m staying in my room. I can’t talk about my own issues anymore, (Topic Ban that I agree with), but I’m doing fine, really. Thanks. Also, I get to buy Egg Nog Later today. ---
**Author:** ![Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/les_espaces_du_sommeil/32/308_2.png) [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2016, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/suicide-at-my-building-this-morning/770350/22 "2016-11-03T13:35:25Z")
A woman commited suicide in the same way about 5 years ago in the apartment block next to mine, except it was in the middle of the afternoon. When I came home from work there was an ambulance and a couple of police cars in front of the building, so it was clear that something serious had happened. I later learned that when the police arrived, they didn’t know what to make of what they found at first because there were two bodies. They then thought they had a couple of murders on their hands. It took a while for them to realize that the woman had landed on a man who was visiting someone in the building. They both died instantly ☹ . ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2016, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/suicide-at-my-building-this-morning/770350/23 "2016-11-03T22:24:38Z")
Back when I lived in Chicago we had a guy take a stroll off the roof of a building with intent to self-terminate. He wound up landing on one of those steel fences with the pointy bits on top. After which half of him hit the ground on one side of the fence and the other half came to rest on the other side of the fence. Kind of glad I just heard about that one instead of actually seeing it with my own eyes. ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2016, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/suicide-at-my-building-this-morning/770350/24 "2016-11-04T03:18:02Z")
> [@Spiderman](#): > > & the innocent bystanders who happen to witness it. > & the First Responders who have get dispatched to it. > [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](#): > > It took a while for them to realize that the woman had landed on a man who was visiting someone in the building. They both died instantly ☹ . This is why we need to legalize voluntary euthanasia for people with severe depression, like they offer in more socially advanced countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2016, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/suicide-at-my-building-this-morning/770350/25 "2016-11-04T03:36:09Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > This is why we need to legalize voluntary euthanasia for people with severe depression, like they offer in more socially advanced countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands. Do you know of any instances of legal euthanasia for solely psychological reasons? My understanding was that these laws require “hopeless and unbearable” suffering, as objectively assessed by a doctor. How could a doctor possibly determine that any purely psychological condition has no prospect of remission? ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2016, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/suicide-at-my-building-this-morning/770350/26 "2016-11-04T03:57:47Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > Do you know of any instances of legal euthanasia for solely psychological reasons? Yes, [cite:](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/the-death-treatment) > [@The New Yorker](#): > > In the past five years, the number of euthanasia and assisted-suicide deaths in the Netherlands has doubled, and in Belgium it has increased by more than a hundred and fifty per cent. Although most of the Belgian patients had cancer, people have also been euthanized because they had autism, anorexia, borderline personality disorder, chronic-fatigue syndrome, partial paralysis, blindness coupled with deafness, and manic depression. In 2013, Wim Distelmans euthanized a forty-four-year-old transgender man, Nathan Verhelst, because Verhelst was devastated by the failure of his sex-change surgeries; he said that he felt like a monster when he looked in the mirror. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2016, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/suicide-at-my-building-this-morning/770350/27 "2016-11-04T05:33:08Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > Yes, [cite:](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/the-death-treatment) Thanks, that’s a superb article. I did not realize the breadth of the laws there and the impact they have had. I think it’s incredibly enlightened to dispel this great taboo. > [@](#): > > Last year, thirteen per cent of the Belgians who were euthanized did not have a terminal condition, and roughly three per cent suffered from psychiatric disorders. So, as you’d certainly expect, only a small percentage are psychiatric patients - but evidently majority social attitudes and the law are quite amenable to it in dire cases of intractable depression. It says the rule is that three doctors must sign off that the patient is incurable; reading between the lines, it appears that in practice the standard is something like “beyond reasonable doubt”, rather than _absolute_ certainty. And here’s an aspect that had not occurred to me: > [@](#): > > The suicide rate in Belgium (excluding cases of euthanasia) is the second-highest in Western Europe, a phenomenon often attributed to the Flemish personality type known as “binnenvetter,” a person who holds emotions inside. Joris Vandenberghe, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Leuven and a member of the Belgian Advisory Committee on Bioethics, said that **he finds euthanasia requests therapeutically useful, because they prompt patients who would not otherwise seek medical help to consult with doctors about their feelings of hopelessness. He said that most of his patients, even those who are approved for euthanasia, end up deciding that they want to live.** But he rejects the idea that suicide is always an indication of pathology. “There’s a whole philosophical history of looking at suicide as a rational choice,” he said. “We, as humans, have the possibility to weigh our own life and decide to end it.” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/suicide-at-my-building-this-morning/770350.md?page=1)