It’s interesting that people seem far more willing to grant others their ‘right to die’ provided they are suffering in some bodily fashion—debilitating illness, crippling injuries, etc. So if in this case, it’s the suffering that legitimizes this way out, then there’s some unspoken assumption that mental suffering is somehow ‘less’ than physical suffering; and I just don’t think that anybody who’s never experienced the level of mental anguish a truly depressed person suffers is in any position to judge this. The drive, the instinct to live is one of the strongest present in all forms of life; whatever is strong enough to overcome this has to be pretty bad, I think. If one thinks of the lengths people will go to to ensure their survival—cutting off trapped limbs, resorting to cannibalism, etc.—, then I think voluntarily surrendering one’s life appears in a completely different light.
Oh, yeah. A lot of people who are like us wish we were never born. Although lately I’ve been looking at life with the perspective that I was “lucky” enough to have ever existed. I’m lucky I was born to amazing parents. I was born a free, and physically healthy, person. What are the chances of that? I hope this feeling of being lucky strengthens enough so I can get my head together, and go back to work. Right now I’m on Social Security Disability for depression and anxiety. That was a step that was difficult, but necessary for my own mental health. It’s just temporary. In the mean time I’m trying out new medication, and with seemingly good results. I just have to work on my crippling anxiety.
But mental illness is something someone can work on, and there’s often treatment available for it…
True, but by that token, physical pain is something that can be treated (not always effectively, but the same is true of many kinds of mental illness), and physical disability is something you can receive counseling for.
But…I would agree that there are some important differences e.g. if a physical illness is terminal. But I wouldn’t say that only euthanasia for physical illness should be permissible.
I don’t have to personally experience third degree burns or an amputated limb or cancer to understand that it’s incredibly, horribly painful stuff. I get that mental suffering can be just as horrific as physical suffering. But I don’t think every third degree burn, amputation, or cancer diagnosis would justify self-mercy-killing even if I could sympathize with someone in an extreme situation seeking to end their suffering.
I do sometimes get the vibe that some of the threads of along the lines of justifiable suicide and the like come down to “don’t be angry at me if I kill myself” or a pissing contest over who suffers/will suffer more.
I think there are some extremely unfortunate people who really are in such unrelenting mental agony that suicide might be justified as the only way to end that suffering… but I think they’re rare and they certainly are not every depressed person nor even every person who attempts suicide. There are numerous instances of people who attempt suicide once and not again. There are numerous instances of people who attempt suicide and are later glad they failed. Sometimes a suicide attempt really is a call for help rather than a true desire to die.
Because we are unable to read minds we are therefore obligated as a society to try to prevent suicides and try to save those who make the attempt, because that’s the only way to save those who weren’t completely serious about ending their lives and those who can be treated and their suffering relieved by less drastic means.
Yes, the person suffering mentally really is suffering. The people who would be hurt by their death ALSO will really be suffering. Being ill or injured does not automatically give you the right to inflict injury on others, and mental injury counts in that equation, too.
My grandmother tried to kill herself… she was old, and she was initialy pissed that she didn’t just die by her own hand. She left a car running, and put a hose in the tail pipe running into one of the car windows. same way I would want to go… no mess. It didn’t rock our family too much, as we were prepared to hear that nature did what she couldn’t. The fact is, even at her age, she was able to turn around. We didn’t know how desprate she was until she tried to kill herself. She had a few years of being happy left, once we knew.
My thinking is that unless I’m willing to crawl into that person’s mind and body and experience their pain first-hand, not just for a short spell but for the long haul, I can’t know how bad it is to be them. Maybe it’s not just pain they are dealing with, but also crappy living situations and crappy family support and crappy something else. Regardless, I can’t know if someone has truly reached their “limit” or not. Since I can’t know this, I shouldn’t judge.
And maybe they ARE a weak person. But if a person can be physically weak through no fault of their own, I don’t see why mental weaknesses necessarily has to be a character flaw.
I wouldn’t begrudge anyone their feelings, which I don’t think can be helped. But I think the kinds of judgments we form CAN be.
I’m guessing that in the suicide victim’s mental calculus, net suffering is supposed to decrease. They assume that loved ones either are suffering because of their suffering or that loved ones are secretly wishing they’d die. Most people who commit suicide aren’t thinking they will be missed all that much. Or they think the grieving will pale in comparison to the misery of their continued existence.
I knew a guy who was the consummate loser; his wife and two sons were spiraling down along with him. Then he hung himself in a spot where his sons would find him when they came home from school.
Fifteen years later and his widow is happily remarried. Without their dad dragging them down, the kids have turned things around and are happy/successful. Suicide was the only unselfish thing the asshole ever did.
You can’t do that. You can’t do that for any form of suffering. Even if you were comparing identical injuries - say, a broken leg - that occurs in two different people it still wouldn’t be an exact comparison due to different pain tolerances and response to treatment.
So does that mean none of us can understand nothing of what anyone else experiences and it’s useless to try? I don’t accept that.
You know what? “Crappy living situation” and “crappy support” can be fixed without resorting to self-murder. It’s not adequate justification for suicide. It’s a moral stain on our society that we don’t do better at taking care of the downtrodden but that’s does not make suicide as a “solution” to those problems acceptable.
Bullshit. This is like excusing people who rob banks or beat up little old ladies for their money in their purses or otherwise commit crimes by saying “they had a rough childhood”. I’m sorry, your pain and suffering doesn’t automatically justify causing pain and suffering in others, which suicide does. Why is the pain of the survivors minimized?
Who said it was a character flaw? Being depressed isn’t a character flaw, it’s a dysfunction, a disease. That doesn’t make it OK to hurt other people. Being an alcoholic is a disease, too, but that doesn’t make it OK to be an abusive spouse or parent when under the influence of booze. Being depressed sucks and it’s genuine suffering, but that doesn’t make it OK to hurt other people.
As I said, in rare circumstances killing oneself MIGHT be justified… just as someone who is in the end stages of, say, bone cancer might be justified in doing that. But we don’t go straight from “your diagnosis is bone cancer” to euthanasia even where that sort of thing is legal, you try to treat the bone cancer with other means first. You exhaust all other possibilities first. And second and third. MOST people with depression can be helped and to say otherwise is to shrug your shoulders, give up on people who can be saved, and condoning the infliction of pain and suffering, in some instances life-long, on the survivors. I don’t find that in any way acceptable.
Those who are unwilling to make any judgements at all have no standards and little in the way of morals or ethics. Acting morally or ethical means judging what is right or wrong, what is acceptable or not acceptable.
Just because they feel that way deeply and sincerely doesn’t make their perception of the world true.
OK, bravo for him.
My sister killed herself and not one damn thing good ever came of that. She had spent her professional life helping other people (no doubt her own suffering made her quite empathic to the suffering of others), both those suffering from mental disorders and those who were struggling artists and musicians find work and build careers. That is one of the things that did give her some measure of happiness, and all the people she might have helped over the past 25 years have lost out by her absence. It caused unrelenting pain to our parents. It subjected the woman whose car she used to kill herself to an intrusive police investigation. It caused her partner to be subjected to a police investigation to rule the possibility of murder - granted, it didn’t take long but it’s a level of suck most people never get to experience to lose the person you’ve essentially taken as a spouse for most of a decade AND be hauled down to the police station for a multi-hour interrogation where you have to convince the nice officers you didn’t kill the person you love.
What precipitated this? She lost her job - you know what, she had been through job loss before. It’s a transient problem. It’s not eternal and unrelenting.
Mom had a second heart surgery. Note I said second - the family had been through this before and mom was getting better (well, until she heard her eldest had killed herself, which landed her back in the hospital with another heart attack. Mom never was quite the same after that). Most lived another 25 years past that, and most of those were good years, mom wasn’t dying, and actually it was all going better than her first surgery.
All the problems were like that - it was a hellish year for all of us (I lost my job, too, but I got another one) but none of these problems were going to be permanent. She killed herself for transient reasons, not some sort of “unrelenting” suffering. Yeah, I get that she didn’t have the coping capability of a person without her mental illness, just as someone with spinal damage doesn’t have the same capability to walk as someone completely able-bodied. I still don’t think what she did was justified. She was wrong. That doesn’t mean I don’t love her, that doesn’t mean I don’t try to focus on the good memories, it does mean I think my sister did a terrible thing at one point that hurt everyone who was her friends or family and her reasons for doing so were wrong and mistaken.
So - whose anecdote wins?
Nowhere have I said I would never allow that suicide might be justified. I just believe very firmly that almost always it is not. I could say the same about killing another human being - there are a few, rare situations where it can be justified (like self-defense) but almost always it is not justifiable.
From the suicidal person’s point of view, staying alive can be the ultimate act of selflessness - because it causes them so much pain to stay alive. They stay alive because they don’t want to hurt those around them. This is not always the reason, but it’s a possible one.
From the people left behind, suicide was very selfish of them. “How could they not see the pain they are causing me???”
It’s all about perception. Recognizing that this is a perception issue, inflamed by mental illness (wanting to end your life is almost always caused by mental illness - 99 year old terminal cancer patients notwithstanding), may help in avoiding the resentful emotions associated with the death of a loved one who committed suicide. The pain will always be there, but resentment on top of it doesn’t help.
Why shouldn’t the survivors resent the suicide?
Again, that is minimizing the suffering of those who didn’t kill themselves.
Again, it’s scolding the survivors for the emotions they feel in their grief. Why are their feelings less legitimate? Death from illness or accident often cause resentment in those left behind, why shouldn’t suicide?
I wasn’t relating the story to compete, merely to show how each situation is individual.
I never said the pain isn’t legitimate. But resentment rarely helps anyone.
Recognizing, and validating, the *perception *that the suicidal person was experiencing at the time can help the survivors to AVOID feeling resentment.
Finally, resenting the suicide isn’t the same as resenting the person for committing suicide. Resenting the person isn’t helpful, resenting what happened is natural.
Yes, but it’s not free. Ever. Someone has to make a profit…at least in the US.
The sad thing is that finding a way to pay for help is often what keeps people from getting it. The few avenues available for subsidized or free psychiatric care require patient impoverishment.
You have my sympathies, but how do you know that her problems were transient? From her POV they might have been the latest problems in a neverending series.
Just because someone seems happy enough to talk to, you don’t know what has been going on in their lives.
Additionally, some problems are personal, or become personal.
What I mean by that is, most people can shrug off losing a job or two because either it had nothing to do with their skill in the job, or they knew it was never the right job for them. It doesn’t penetrate the shield we put around our ego.
Now imagine someone that’s never found anything they felt they were good at. And they get fired for basically not being up to scratch. Very different story.
I’m not trying to say that that alone would make a suicide “rational”. All I’m saying is, you can’t look at someone else’s life and say they just killed themselves for transient reasons and/or your problems are comparable/worse.
That’s not something anyone said, or implied. It’s absolutely consistent to do everything in order to prevent suicide, yet not morally condemn those who ultimately see no other way out.
The point of most people so far has been that there’s no way to gauge who suffers how much. But this just means that you can run the entire selfishness argument backwards: those demanding that somebody who suffers extend their suffering to spare them can just as well be seen as selfish. Which of course just means the argument is bullshit in either direction.
I agree with basically all of that. The problem is just, how do you decide? Somebody kills themselves. Were they a selfish bastard or one of those rare cases where you deem it justified?
Again, I agree, we are obligated to do anything in our power regarding prevention. But we are not obligated to contempt towards those our efforts couldn’t reach.
But by the same token, you can’t ask of the rest of the world to behave in a way to minimize harm coming to you.
Individually maybe, but I’m not convinced that the aggregate impact of a suicide on friends, loved ones and the community is less than whatever the suicidal person is facing.
That, I think is why people describe it as selfish, along with the idea that most suicides might be helped in some fashion if there was a suitable intervention at the right time.
All that said, I think it’s hard to argue with the suicide of a terminally ill person or something similar. Depression on its own doesn’t really qualify in my book though; I’ve seen too many people recover from it with proper therapy and medication to think that suicide is acceptable in that case. It’s understandable, but not necessary if that makes sense.
I think frequently it’s because the suffering person simply didn’t tell anyone, they kept it all inside. As usual, it does not apply in all cases (my sister did, in fact, tell us she was feeling badly so she would be an exception to that) but that does happen. Complaining no one knows you’re hurting because you didn’t communicate you’re hurting is BS.
Scolding the grieving and saying “you shouldn’t feel that way” rarely helps either, but that’s what you’re doing. Anger, resentment and the like are normal reactions to the the suicide of a friend or family member.
In other words, you disapprove of a very normal and common reaction to suicide. Shame on you survivors, how dare you feel resentment! That, too, is BS in my opinion.
Rather than publish an entire suicide note and subject everyone here to a novel length post on the matter maybe you could just take my word that in this particular situation I know enough about what was going on to have some clue about the matter.
She wasn’t at all happy at the time (if she had been portraying herself as such we would have been suspicious given everything going on at the time) and she was in therapy at the time.
First, I never said my problems at the time were comparable or worse.
Second, they were transient. I’m sorry if you’re reaching to justify something here but those are the facts. This wasn’t a random stranger or someone hiding mental illness or walking around untreated. Bottom line I disagree with her reasons. From my viewpoint - which you seem happy to completely dismiss or discount - she was wrong in what she did.
I don’t have an obligation to assume those who succeed in killing themselves were automatically justified, either.
Until proven otherwise I’m going to assume “selfish bastard”, because I believe that is what the vast majority of suicides are.
Saying “they were wrong” is not the same as holding someone in contempt.
But that is what we require in a civilized society - we have traffic rules to minimize the risk of harm when driving, we have sound curfews and limits to minimize the harm caused by disruptive noise, we have penalties for one person causing harm to another.
I absolutely DO ask the rest of the world to act in a way to diminish risk of harm to me, and likewise I am obligated to avoid causing harm to others.
I was just speaking generally there, not accusing anyone of anything.
I’m not discounting what you’ve said; obviously you’re going to win a contest of “who knows more about this thing that happened in my personal life”.
I’m trying to offer another perspective.
The idea that many who attempt suicide have just had one or two setbacks and otherwise their life is great is a common one. Even assuming your analysis is correct, you extrapolated from it to imply that ‘permanent solution to transient problem’ is common.
But I don’t believe it is. I think most people who attempt suicide believe that either their problems are permanent, or are likely to be replaced by equivalent (or worse) problems.
And in many cases, they may be right. That alone doesn’t make a suicide rational, I’m just trying to describe what I think is a more realistic idea of what suicide is about.