Maybe perhaps some situations call for different actions. I’m looking for opinions on what others think. Maybe this is right for you.
I know that if I was, lets say, 40 years old. My parents are dead. No family. No friends. I’m not depressed or anything. Just going through the motions and one day I decide… Game over. Enough of this, just going through the motions bullshit, I should be allowed to.
Back when I was a hospice volunteer and had to write a report of my own choice for pharmacy tech school, I researched the recourse to suicide by terminally ill patients in Oregon (where it had been recently legalized, and so was able to be studies, a opposed to the age-old practice of the doctor exercising plausible deniability but leaving a large enough quantityof pain meds). What data I could uncover through my humble abilites seemed to show that the terminal, if treated via onventional methods for depression (both drug and cognitive therapy), mostly chose to see it thorugh to a natural death.
For whatever that does to the “it’s OK for euthenasia” view.
Another point to consider is that there are people who dislike this world and themselves, and are never going to be fully reconciled to the alternative. They won’t be talked out of suicide. The best they can do is postpone it over an over. Wildebeast somehow keep eating, even with lions and hyena sitting there watching all the time, and you’ve got yourself to live with (if Marlin Perkins had pitched a suicide-prevention hotline instead of Mutual of Omaha).
Missed the window.
ETA. If I did decide to do this and actually told my friends good bye. Wrote letters, etc. and I was of sane mind, I would be upset if they called the police or tried to stop me. My life. My choice. Because if I had no friends. No family and all of a sudden someone wanted to step in and care, I would be pissed and consider them two faced of sorts. Didn’t care about me before. Don’t care about me now, sort of thing.
What is “allowed” in this context? I don’t think you’ve made that clear. Do you mean people who know you shouldn’t try to talk you out of it? Do you mean emergency personnel shouldn’t respond to the situation? That you shouldn’t be helped if you injure yourself or fail? What counts as “denying” your right to kill yourself - particularly given that if you’re dedicated to it it’s practically impossible for anyone to stop you.
I think that people with lifelong mental illness problems fall into the “terminally ill” category. Some people don’t get better with medications and treatment. They go literally decades with relentless pain, suffering, and anguish. I don’t think these people consider life to be precious. In these cases, is it right to talk someone out of a joyless existence?
I don’t think that’s the scenario for 99.99% of suicides. It’s almost always a brain chemistry (depression, drugs) issue or a situational depression, all of which are reversible in most cases.
I missed the window, but I think I explained it above. Though if it, it would be death by my own hands. Lets say I am an only child. My parents have passed on. My friends really aren’t my friends anymore where they have lives of their own. Families of their own. Sure they say they “care”, but they are never around. Say I am tired of working my 9 to 5 job day in and day out coming home to an empty apartment and it is the same ole shit.
I am not depressed. I’m of sound mind. I am just really tired of the same old shit. So I just don’t want to do it anymore. So I want to say some sort of good bye. So there is no unanswered questions (this is all fiction by the way) I say something to my friends, I don’t want them to think they should step in and do something. To call the police and try to have me change my mind or whatever.
It is this example in which I mean, I should be allowed to do what I want with my life. Because in any normal situation this is where the police would be called and be forced to some 48 hour hold or something.
There would be nothing wrong with me. I am of sound mind. I just don’t want to live any more. It is a situation like this where I don’t understand where people feel the need to stop someone.
Make sense or did I just completely confuse you? I am just trying to figure a way to explain it without it coming across as something it isn’t.
Okay lets say they are depressed, but they have attempted time and time again. They keep failing because someone always intervenes in time and fixing them. Though they keep trying to take there own life and refuse the medical and/or mental help to keep them sane or normal, when is enough, enough and you just let them do what they are constantly set to do?
Or do you just put them in a mental hospital until they are cured?
I am not saying that any of this is wrong. I am just wondering why people feel the need to save others who are set out to do harm to themselves no matter what. Do you ever give up and say, “Well it’s their life.”
I’m not trying to be ignorant or difficult. I am just trying to understand…
As a society we generally think that people who don’t want to live any more aren’t of sound mind. I realize that’s a circular definition, but I don’t have a particular problem with it.
It’s really not your friends’ & family’s job to give you a purpose in life, any more than it’s the job of the guy who stopped to help you chande a flat to help you with the car payments (In fact, I plan on asking in GQ “'save a man’s life and you’re responsible for him for the rest of his life? Actual Chinese custom or just a load of Calgon?)”
But if you were to write those letters, it’d be hard to top:
Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool - good luck.
Your friends and family will eventually accept that you’ve found the peace that either eluded you or abandoned you in life. They may feel some amount of guilt, either justifyably or not, but nobody will fully accept that death was the only peace available. The closest you’ll get to agreement is the mature realization that we don’t get to make anybody else’s choices, even if we know we’d do better.
Very true.
Wow, that was actually a slap in the face. A good one, BTW. Not in relation to this thread but for something else that is going on in my life ATM.
Hmm. Seriously. This made me stop dead in my tracks. (Pardon the pun).
I get what you are saying. Very good point.
Oh you’re very welcome! And thank you for starting this thread, as it’s given me a much-needed distraction from killing myself tonight since I’m, you know…over 40 
Hey, hey. It was fiction. 
:smack:
Ah, sorry if it came across as snark. Your wife’s emotions are very much her own, and I would never, ever think I could decide how she should react to such a situation. I do not doubt it was very traumatic for her nor do I wish to diminish her feelings. I was merely adding to the discussion.
As to the discussion, it seems that it has fragmented across a few lines :
a) people who are not in full control of themselves due to mental illness
b) people who are not in full control of themselves due to drug use
c) people who are in full control of themselves but have a chronic ailment
d) people who are in full control of themselves and are perfectly healthy
I would see helping people in group A to regain their normal mindset, but if they persisted in wanting to commit suicide I think that is their right. For groups B through D I do not feel anyone should remove the freedom of self-determination. Even the users made a choice to use, and should be allowed the consequences.
Heart disease and asthma, are not in my mind decent comparisons to mental illnesses. There’s really no debate over how your lungs or heart or pancreas or most other organs should function: the heart should beat, in sync with itself, at this given rate. The lungs should remain clear and provide enough oxygen to the rest of the body, and so on.
What exactly should the mind do? My sister’s mind does basic calculus without scratch paper; my mind stumbles over basic algebra. She asked me to proofread her papers all through grad school, because she’s as much of an idiot when it comes to the written word as I am when it comes to numbers. Which one more properly does what the mind is supposed to do? There’s no real answer to that: I don’t see how we can really define the proper function of a mind.
Is it just deviance from the norm? If so, where do we draw the line? How about police officers and firefighters and members of the military: people who, completely freely and willingly, volunteer themselves for jobs that could quite easily cause their death? My uncle was a firefighter who once had a burning wall fall on him and was seriously injured. He recovered, and fought and won a fairly significant battle to get out of a desk job and back into a position where another flaming wall could fall on him. Is that disregard for his own well-being a disease? How about my friend who just enlisted in the army, and if they don’t automatically send him, plans on trying to volunteer to go to Iraq or Afghanistan? Is that a disease?
Actually, that sounds like anhedonia, which is in fact a significant symptom of depression. It’s a misconception that depressed people are necessarily sitting around crying all the time. Another manifestation is simply just not being able to find the joy in life anymore - and it is treatable.
I agree. If someone wants to die, for whatever reason, let them. It’s their choice.
And I was always amused by the fact that suicide is illegal in some places, or used to be. This made it a crime that, if you were successful in committing it, you would never be punished for it.
A suicide would probably be denied Christian burial, which would have meant a lot in the highly religious societies in which such anti-suicide laws first developed. (I don’t know how other religions handle it).
Also, at least under English law, I believe the state was empowered to seize the property of a suicide. Someone contemplating taking his own life would have to realize that he would not only be hurting his family emotionally but potentially leaving them penniless as well.
You forgot
e) people going through a bad time, mentally healthy, who will come out of it if they live.
At least one bridge jumper said that he regretted it the moment his feet left the rail. There are a lot of people who would thank you for getting them to stop,