A society that treats suicide as a rational way to treat mental illness is not a society I want to have anything to do with.

I think the original point was that suicide is not always a sign of mental illness.

Most suicides being attributed to mental illness is one of the great (not necessarily deliberate) deceptions in our society.

There was a great article posted here on HN a while back by a number of highly-regarded psychologists that stated most suicides in men (who make up most suicides in raw numbers) are not actually due to mental illness at all, but rather cultural and philosophical factors combine with certain events in their lives leading to a sense of irreconcilable failure.

Hell, seppuku is a form of ritual suicide that has nothing at all to do with mental illness but it arrived at by a set of personal and moral values.

I'll see if I can dig the article up.

Guess it depends on how you define mental illness- humans have a very strong biological drive to survive.. there's an argument to be made that a thought pattern that contradicts that very basic need is aberrant.

Sir Terry Pratchett decided that he'd rather die while able to make the decision, rather than letting his mind be destroyed by Alzheimer's. (Granted, his passing was natural, but he campaigned eloquently for the right to make such a choice.)

I also knew someone who suffered great pain on a daily basis, and I have a hard time considering his suicide irrational. I knew a guy (a friend of a friend) who, through foolishness in his youth, ruptured three of his spinal discs, and had damaged two other ones. He was in constant excruciating pain. In the trailing decade of his life, he could not get sufficient pain relief to hold a job, could not get/afford treatment because of that, and basically was in a pain-filled hell, as he put it. At some point, after he'd been in near-constant excruciating pain for twenty years, he decided he no longer wanted to live.

I don't think either of these men were mentally ill, or making irrational choices.

Even if one is free to commit suicide, he or she is not free from the consequences. At a minimum, suicide is very hard on the loved ones of the deceased. Suicide is not in the same personal choice category as getting a face lift or smoking a little weed.

No man is an island, even if he feels like one sometimes.

Keep in mind that I'm making an ethical and moral argument. To a large degree, whether suicide should be legal is another discussion. To say someone shouldn't commit suicide isn't the same thing as saying it should be a crime to commit suicide.

Suicide often removes a crushing burden on loved ones, in the case of incurable disease and heavy medical bills. It cuts both ways.