Never.
I would. But in that case you’re on the clock so to speak - waiting too long risks medical harm to the pregnant woman. I know some actvisits don’t care for it as it can create hardship to make two trips, but personally I’m fine in theory with the 24 hour waiting period between registration and the procedure that is common in many states. The devil is in the details of course, as a number of states impose counseling requirements I believe are slanted.
Meaning, for who?
Meaning for the self, and meaning for others, are different sometimes.
The other person’s suffering is far too easy for me to “endure”. When I’m not the one in pain, things appear much simpler than they really are.
Please no.
There’s a lot I could say here, but I feel like Scott Alexander says it better than I could.
Again, my point of disagreement is not on the ethics involved of letting some hypothetical perfect philosopher commit suicide – nor even on the fact that perhaps some cases genuinely are these perfect philosophers including Sister Y herself. I am trying to emphasize the practical point that in the real world, attempted suicides are rarely perfect philosophers and almost always people who have made sudden, impulsive, and very bad decisions.
[…]
I want to end this section with a study – small, but encouraging – that cognitive-behavioral therapy (aka That One Type Of Psychotherapy That Sometimes Works) reduces suicide 50% in at-risk populations. Think about that. What percent of suicides do you think haven’t had cognitive-behavioral therapy? 80%? 90%? Whatever that percent is, half of them would have been fine if they had just had access to a good psychologist.
The whole article is worth reading. The reality is that the vast majority of suicides are:
- Brought on by (treatable!) mental illness (90+% of attempted suicides are by people with treatable mental illnesses!)
- Impulsive (as seen by the way suicide rates drop when it becomes harder to commit suicide)
- Regretted by the person who commits them should they not complete
Now, it’s one thing to say, “I have late-stage ALS, the rest of my life is going to be spent in horrible pain and I’m going to lose everything that makes me myself, I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and I would rather die on my own terms than suffocate at some point soon in a vegetative state.” But… that’s not most suicide. For most suicide, the adage “a permanent solution to a temporary problem” is entirely accurate. Hell, there are plenty of cases where people tried to commit suicide and realized mid-attempt how stupid what they were doing was - one case cited in the above article is of a patient who tried to overdose on pills, realized what a stupid mistake she was making, and called 9-1-1 herself:
Most realizations are slightly less dramatic, but my work in a psych ER taught me that many 9-1-1 calls about suicides are from the victims themselves. I remember one patient, a typical case, who overdosed on pills. As she lay on the ground starting to feel sick, she thought about her problems a little more deeply, thought about how her family would feel, and decided she preferred to live. She called 9-1-1, they sent an ambulance over, and the hospital managed to keep her alive until the drugs passed out of her body. This is quite common. It also contradicts one of Sister Y’s strongest arguments – that the reason many people avoid suicide is out of fear of making the attempt. A non-negligible number of people who have already made the attempt and just have to sit back and day find themselves changing their minds and actively working to save their own lives.
So no, suicide should not be freely available to all who want it. And I say this as someone who, in January of this year, was seriously considering it. I had days after work where I stood on the bridge over the Isar on my way home looking down at the rapids below, and thinking, “If I jumped, I wouldn’t have to deal with this any more.” There was one day where a phone call to my mom probably very literally saved my life (discounting, for the moment, whether the fall or the river would have been enough to actually kill me). And all this over a shitty job that was stressing me out and an abusive employer. I could have just quit and things would have instantly gotten better!
Anyone considering suicide should, at the very least, go in for a psych evaluation, and spend a significant amount of time in psychiatric care (if at all possible). Depression is typically temporary.
Suicide isn’t always taboo. Sometimes it’s seen as doing the decent thing. Sometimes it’s even heroic - Captain Oates, for example.
But you aren’t (TTBOMK) in the situation Oates found himself. Please, seek help if you need it.
Because it causes vast and abiding pain and suffering to people who care about the person who commits suicide. Because preventable death causes societal disruption. Because it can be viewed as disrespectful to the Creator.
I’m not necessarily saying these are GOOD reasons, though after multiple suicides in my close family I can personally recognize the truth of the first, but these are the reasons that it’s a taboo (at least, taboo in MOST cultures over the course of history).
Should a sane person be allowed to rationally choose to end their life? Maybe. But the catch is, wanting to end one’s life is itself evidence of lack of sanity. That’s some catch, that catch-22.
Seriously, depression can often be treated. But one of the symptoms of depression is the conviction that it can’t be. If a depressed person who’s convinced that life can’t be any good kills themself, they’re also ending life for the well-treated person who knows that it can be, and who wouldn’t want to die.
I don’t agree with this. mental health should be an objective field, but it is also used to enforce social stigmas. It used to be a sign of mental illness to be gay, for slaves to run away from their masters, for women to disobey their husbands, to disagree with the communist party, etc. The idea that suicidal ideation is always a sign of mental illness, and that those mental illnesses can be treated are both false assumptions.
Suicide isn’t always due to depression. Sometimes the depression is a side effect of low quality of life, not the cause of low quality of life.
Suicide is due to low quality of life (people with high quality of life do not think about or commit suicide). Sometimes we really can’t cure low quality of life. Life can go to shit for some people and it really doesn’t get better. I’ve known people who had a car accident at 17 and who were in chronic pain every day for the rest of their lives. They had low quality of life and I can’t blame them for thinking about suicide.
Cite?
Because in my limited experience, seen from the outside, the people who commit or attempt suicide very often are not the people who “should.” They’re the people who have “so much to live for.”
But maybe you can back this up with some statistics. Do the chronically ill or disabled commit/attempt suicide more often than the physically healthy? Do the poor suicide more often than the financially well-off? Do people in third-world countries suicide more often than those in the first world? Over time, do suicide rates go up or down when a society’s standard of living goes up or down?
To piggy back on what Thudlow Boink just posted…
The suicide rate among middle-class white American males has skyrocketed over the past 10 years while it has held steady for blacks and Hispanics.
White middle-age males are still at the top of the power and economic hierarchy. So why should they be offing themselves any more than anyone else?
Well, it’s because perception is more important than objective reality. If your idea of success is running your own business and being the uber boss, but reality has you working at the bottom of the totem pole alongside people you’ve always imagined you’d be overseeing (women and minorities), then you will see this as failure…even if there is virtue in being a working man. If your idea of success is having your own home out on a big plot of land in the country, but the bank just foreclosed on your suburban rancher, you will see this as failure…even if statistically speaking, you are still doing better than all the schmoes who’ve never owned a home. Because you’ve been told your whole life that renting is for losers and deadbeats, not solid, hard-working, rugged individualists.
Truth is, people who have been on the bottom of the socioeconomic strata are used to be on the bottom. The pain they feel is the dull kind that persists mainly in the subconscious. People who have always on the bottom can talk about the shittiness they are going through with family, friends, and community and not have to worry about being judged. They can ask for help because they have been asking for help since the day they were born. But this isn’t true for people who have spent a lifestyle thinking of themselves as “winners” and who are now confronted with the reality that they aren’t any different than anyone else. If you perceive yourself to be the only person in your social circle who can’t get a “good” job, then no amount of “look on the bright side” platitudery is going to convince you you aren’t a loser. The angst is going to be in the forefront of your mind–robbing you of the ability to be optimistic.
Where I agree with Wesley Clark is believing it is up to the individual to decide whether his or her quality of life is worth living. That decision shouldn’t be up to some outsider, who has no idea how it feels to be in a specific circumstance and has no concrete solutions for a person who is stuck in said circumstance. It is easy for me to tell a economically anxious white guy to “suck it up” like my people have been doing for generations, since I don’t have to be the who one has to unlearn a lifetime of social programming. I don’t have to be the one who has to put on a happy face at family get-togethers, pretending my minimum wage job is just as good as someone else’s six-figure professional career. The economically anxious white guy does, though. It is hard to “suck it up”. It is also true that not everyone who “sucks it up” is a productive member of society. Most of the guys sitting in prison have done some version of “sucking it up” and it landed them on the bad side of the law. I don’t think suicide is any worse of a coping mechanism than homicide.
I think we can and should offer counseling to people, but we have to accept that it’s never going to be enough for some people–not as long as prevailing cultural values and norms contribute to dysphoria.
I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer to that.
Life always involves some suffering. For the vast majority, the benefits of continued existence outweigh death. The problems comes in at the edge cases.
My late spouse lived with chronic pain, disability, and certainly some suffering for all of his 57 years… but he did NOT want to die. He enjoyed his life, it had “quality” as he defined it, and even in his final days asked for pain relief and not an end to his life.
Other people facing the exact same situation - same level of chronic pain, ability/disability, might find the situation intolerable.
We should do more to eliminate suffering and dysfunction in the living - I do believe that for some the problem isn’t “I don’t to live” but rather "I don’t want to live like this" - if their suffering/problems could be alleviated they’d want to continue with life. That applies both to the physical AND the mental. We should work to eliminate as much suffering as possible in things like terminal illness - it’s not unknown for people in areas where physician suicide is legal to have their “final cocktail” of pills or whatever but never actually use it. Having the option to end things, having the control, it what provides comfort there and some folks, once they have the control and the option, don’t find a need to use it.
We need MUCH better care for people with mental health problems.
Then there are the people who have protracted mental illness, long-term incurable physical problems, and the like. While my knee-jerk reaction tends to be “no way!” my more rational side thinks that, subject to heavy control and scrutiny, suicide might be the lesser evil there. Maybe.
There are just too many people, though, who attempt suicide and later regret it, or don’t find a need for it, and live many years of life they’re happy to have. So I think we still have to intervene in the vast majority of cases and stop the self-killing.
Like Robin Williams?
His body was behind the wheel for a week before it was discovered. This was his life.
This guy lost his high-paying job several years ago and never found his footing afterwards. I think he had good reasons to be depressed. But I also think it’s crazy that he offed himself. Could be I would have done the same thing if I had been in his shoes, but still, he chose a very extreme solution. It is hard to imagine that he had exhausted all the available options, but mayhap he did. I don’t know.
I think mostly it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but I can certainly understand it in certain circumstances.
There are several situations where quitting a job without notice is acceptable. Your physical and/or mental health being in immediate jeopardy because of that job is one of them. BTDT, and I hope nothing like this ever happens to me again.
As painful as this is for relatives and friends, there is one situation where suicide is understandable, and that’s when a person has been diagnosed with a hopeless, painful, terminal illness. However, it’s a decision that can only be made by that person, which is why most places that allow assisted suicide have so many obstacles to its use. I have read that in Oregon, less than half of the people who are approved for it ever fill the prescriptions, and less than half of those end up using them. The most common reason is because the person died naturally prior to the date they set, but some of them also get to that time and date and decide they aren’t ready to do it yet. Many of the people who don’t fill the prescriptions say that knowing it was available to them gave them an element of control that they didn’t previously have.
Robin Williams, IMNSHO, did not commit suicide. He simply chose the time, place, and manner in which his life was ended.
The autopsy revealed that he had Lewy Body Dementia, which is like a cross between Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and much worse than either. Its first symptoms are paranoia and depression, and people can live incredible amounts of time with it - as in 10 or 20 years in the “late stages.”
I had read many times that the suicide rate is highest per capita in the elderly, and I never believed that until I got that job at the big hospital. They are often easy to cover up because the person had other health problems, and it’s so common after the death of a spouse or a child.
In many such cases the distinction between “suicide” and “end-of-life care” becomes completely blurry. In my 89-year-old mother’s last illness, she finally demanded sedation and just slept for three days till she died. I definitely think society should support people making such choices for their own peace and comfort in those situations.
Yup to both of these. We need to be positively promoting a more resilient mental outlook of acceptance, equanimity and compassion, rather than just encouraging people (or tbh allowing unchecked consumer culture to encourage people) to gauge their happiness by their external status and accomplishments. Not that that will be a panacea against mental illness per se, but at least it’ll improve the overall herd immunity to misery and despair.
I used to have a good job (heck, I flew airplanes as a hobby so I had some money) and lost it, and went through hard years of unemployment and underemployment. It’s true ageism exists in the job market. Eventually I landed a permanent gig at a retail store but I had to accept a reduced income and lifestyle. Not everyone makes that jump, and this society views such people as “losers”. If you don’t keep climbing up the corporate ladder and getting a higher wage you’re a “loser”. If you aren’t the boss you’re the “loser”.
That’s an example of someone who is depressed because of circumstances - if you change the circumstances you’ll likely change the depression. What Mr. Weglarz/Corbis needed was a decent, steady job first and foremost. At least at first glance. It’s possible there were other things going on, but without the means to support himself what was there?
Heck, over the last ten years I lost the highest paying job of my life, seven family members to death, and I recently lost my home of 20 years and am now in a smaller place so I have downsized my income, family, and stuff/residence significantly in that time. Yes, there have been times I felt like complete crap over all that. It would be weird if I didn’t - I’ve had episodes of anxiety, insomnia, lack of appetite, headaches, an inability to find much pleasure in anything, and lots and lots of worry. Never suicidal - I’m too stubborn an optimist - but I could certainly see how going through those sorts of things could push someone that far. At times it looks hopeless and you’re bombarded with negative messages by the surrounding culture. I also swallowed my pride and applied for things like food stamps and, of late, contacted a social worker to help me find new housing I could afford on my wages - stuff white, middle-class and above people tend not to do because they don’t think of themselves as “those people”.
That’s a different problem than someone who is depressed and/or suicidal due to an intrinsic biochemical or brain-wiring problem. We actually CAN help someone get new housing, or a new job… if we want to do that (from what I’ve seen the US as a society mostly doesn’t give a shit if people sleep on the sidewalk or can’t find work, but sure is eager to spit on people who finds themselves in such situations). We aren’t as able to adjust faulty brain functioning, although we have had some success in that area in recent decades.
Bullshit. He killed himself. He committed suicide. Don’t call it by another name.
Yes, he DID have a horrible disease - that is one of the circumstances where many people who otherwise are opposed to suicide might consider it justified.
Heh. It’s anecdote time. Years ago, I was working in a hospital. While I was getting some fresh air one day I saw an elderly woman sitting very still in a car in the driver’s seat. I knocked on her window and she responded. She was very gracious about my concern.