There is a very strong relationship between suicide and mental illness. If someone decides to end their own life, it is overwhelmingly likely that they are suffering from some form of mental illness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12701661
>Why do we stand in judgement declaring it wrong to decide ones own fate?
Most people who survive a suicide attempt do not ultimately end their own life. Most people who have suicidal thoughts eventually stop having those thoughts. If you think that you'd be better off dead, I don't think that you're in any way morally wrong, I just think that you're probably factually wrong. You might think that you want to die, but if you go on living, it is overwhelmingly likely that you'll change your mind. To use an old cliche, suicide is a permanent response to a temporary problem.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0004867060117274...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016503271...
Suicide is a symptom of some types of mental illness. But perfectly sane people can still kill themselves. If one wants to prevent suicide one has to accept that fact. We cannot prevent suicides if we look only to people with some sort of observable mental illness. Normal everyday people, some in the prime of life, can and do occasionally decide to kill themselves.
Aside from extremist views (ie never/always appropriate) our society does generally accept suicide in some circumstances. We give medals to people who knowingly die in order to save others. Our movies are full of characters deliberately killing themselves for the benefit of others. On rare occasions we openly criticize those who do not kill themselves where we expect them so to do (Gary Powers). It is part of our culture. We can debate whether suicide is an appropriate action in various hypothetical circumstances, but that's a rambling debate with no end.
Imho suicide is a private issue. In most circumstances our society should work to prevent it from happening, but I'm not going willing to describe every suicide as the result of criminality or mental illness.
A great many of those normal everyday people are suffering from mental health problems. The data suggests that as many as 60% of people with a serious mental health condition are not receiving treatment. A multitude of barriers prevent people from seeking appropriate diagnosis and treatment, from stigma to insurance coverage to the shortage of psychiatrists.
I have no problem with voluntary euthanasia. I have a big problem with the fact that thousands of people are needlessly dying due to treatable mental health conditions.
You're not wrong, but do note that the first paper you cited was from 2003. The CDC results published recently [1] indicate a strong rise in suicide since 1999. And more than half of the people didn't have a known mental health condition. It looks like things are changing.
Given that the vast majority of Americans have a diagnosable mental illness at some point during their lives, if anything that is evidence against there being a strong relationship between mental illness and suicide. E.g. supposedly more than 50% of college students have a diagnosable mental illness during those four years alone.
Even if we saw the statistical effect you predicted (eg. diagnosed mental health issues correlated with a lower rate of suicide), you should consider that the stigma of getting a diagnosis of mental illness, is likely to cause some people who may even know they have a problem, to intentionally avoid getting diagnosed.
Also, these: "I can't seek help because if I do have a mental health issue then my insurance is going to skyrocket / I don't have any health insurance / my insurance doesn't cover mental health."
Well it's an apple-to-apples comparison with the CDC stat about people with undiagnosed mental illness. Basically instead of waiting for people to go in and see a psychiatrist, you just screen every single person in a certain sample for every possible mental illness. This is how mental health assessments at a population level are normally done, e.g.:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disor...
I'm extrapolating a lot from a small comment, so forgive me if I've misinterpreted your comment, but I have an issue with your reasoning; I don't know what it tells us that 50% of people suffer from mental illness at any given point in their life, or how that can be suggestive of any evidence against a relationship between mental illness and suicide.
The numbers may seem telling on the face, but the rate of mental illness in cases of suicide is not based on "diagnosable," it is based on actually diagnosed cases (and jumping ahead, the NIH report linked in the parent comment certainly came to a very different conclusion than you seem to have inferred.)
There's a reason I would think that they sample populations in this way, as in terms of "diagnosable;" most centrally in order to get a more accurate count of the actual incidence, and because the rate of incidence is actually known to be higher than the rate of actual diagnosis.
This kind of sampling helps us to better know the actual rate of mental illness, and taken with the known rate of diagnosed mental illness it may allow us to learn the rate of undiagnosed cases.
What I'm saying is, we can't know anything more than that from these simple averages taken together. The NIH report tracked individuals with known case history, and that's exactly how you can know more.
It is also known that many people who are suffering as such will not seek help. Those are exactly the individuals that "The CDC's data [which] relies on reports from coroners, medical examiners and law enforcement agencies" simply can't take into account. The rate of undiagnosed mental illness is nonzero and significant (a quick search shows recent reports suggesting that it is also near 50%). If there was a perfect 1:1 correlation (say, every suicide co-incident to a case of mental disorder, diagnosed or not), you would absolutely expect that CDC post-mortem number to be lower; less than NIH number by the rate of undiagnosed mental illness.
You can compare these statistics in aggregate, and "rates of undiagnosed mental illness" are also knowable in aggregate through population sampling methods like these, but those people with undiagnosed mental illnesses, who then committed suicide, cannot be directly counted. Cases of "co-morbid mental disorder" among those individuals, as the NIH report calls it, are not so readily quantified. (I think the CDC report does not even attempt to quantify them. This is the idea of a psychiatric autopsy.)
So I think that you can't say more without knowing more about those individuals suffering from undiagnosed mental illnesses (yeah, that's the thing you unfortunately can't know.)
As those undiagnosed illnesses are ostensibly people who did not seek help, those are exactly the ones who the CDC stat won't be able to measure.
You can know something about the relative uncertainty of those measurements though – if you could say that 50% of individuals with severe psychiatric disorders are untreated, then you can have an expected value for the difference between these numbers. This also may seem suggestive, but it is also not sufficient evidence to directly draw any conclusions from.
Actually diagnosed mental illnesses can, however, be correlated with incidences of suicide, which the NIH study linked in the parent commenter's reference does. That report indicated that there was shown a strong correlation.
Disregarding all of the reports and statistics though, as a layman, if forms of treatment used are remotely successful, I would hope that suicide rates among patients with a diagnosis should be lower than the rate of suicide in undiagnosed cases. And if so, that is also going to be a driver for the type of error I'm trying to express that I thought you were not fully considering.
And is not an accurate description of depression.
If you think depressed people are just sad/unhappy - please read more on this debilitating disorder.
The majority of those with access to TV who've also seen some American media have likely felt they're missing out on the riches and opportunities that can be had that they're not fortunate to.
Is the definition of mental illness and depression and their treatments and factors the same across cultures?
To me it seems (opinion) that the only constant is... if you feel sad: there's a pill for that.
People in bad situations work hard to get themselves out. It's human pride, it's our nature. People don't just kill themselves. Are those who do "weaker beings" or have bigger struggles than those who haven't?
There's another factor at play here, in my opinion, and it's the medication.
Your statements just help perpetuate those types of responses.
Depression is not hopelessness. It is not sadness. It is not unhappiness.
Depression is a chemical state in the brain which leads to lower general emotion levels. Depression is when you feel nothing. Depressed people may self-harm to "feel something".
Depression isn't just an error of thought. It's not a lack of understanding about how great your life really is. It's a hardware error causing the software to malfunction.
If I recall correctly, a majority of people who have 'failed' suicide (for lack of a better term) have stated that they immediately regretted attempting once it hits the point of no return.
This is just an assumption, but I think the will to live greatly outweighs the desire to take your own life. Of course their are outliers (I'm thinking of Samurai Suicides performed in front of audiences) but I don't know if there's any resources that talk about their mental health.
If anyone as any counter points I'd love to hear them - but for the most part I think suicide stems from mental instability or an otherwise inevitable physical death (terminal illness, old age, etc).
One other reason it may be linked with mental health, is the fact that if mental illness is not a factor - what is driving these decisions? I can't imagine that people come to the logical 'master of my own existence' that you mention.
It's a very interesting subject, when you take the horror an tragedy out of it. Also curious what other species have high suicide rates, or if its a primarily human affliction (don't have time to dig around on this right now).
So does contraception, yet we don't consider people using it mentally ill.
I only say this to imply that "going against our very nature" isprobably not the main reason we link suicide with mental ilness, not to be disrespectful or anything. My mother killed herself so I am not someone to mock suicidal people.
> If anyone as any counter points I'd love to hear them - but for the most part I think suicide stems from mental instability or an otherwise inevitable physical death (terminal illness, old age, etc).
My mother had been diagnosed as depressed so at least part of society deemed her mentally ill, so the link from that to suicide can be made. However, having dealth with a similar diagnosis myself, and having learned to properly cope with it while staying as far away from psychiatric medication as physically possible I am quite skeptic about mental diagnosis.
On "Lila", Robert Pirsig proposes the completely not medical and just-a-personal-theory idea that, however, resonates a lot with me, that "crazy" is a social thing (you're only crazy if we have 'non-crazy' people to compare yourself against) and that taking such people to anthropologists in the hope of helping them find a culture where they would be a better fit could yield better benefits than psychiatry. Personally, while I did not physically relocate to another place, I severed myself from a big part of society that I found harmful and I have been as good as can be ever since (12+ years now).
Boy, you got that backwards. Abstinence is what "goes against our very nature as living beings". Contraception allows us to engage in sexual activity without the consequences of unwanted pregnancy or STDs.
Where did I mention abstinence?
While not my choice, I consider it just one more approach that falls under the 'contraception' umbrella, not sure how you made the link from my sentence to abstinence honestly.
Now, from a anthropocentric view of this contraception is quite natural as, like you well explain, it let us satisfy biological urges while reducing the risks and potentially undesired side-effects of them.
The point that I tried to make was that being for or against "our nature" does not feel, to me, to be a good measure of mental health.
I don't think contraception and suicide are in any way comparable. Taking a contraceptive enables to continue having sex, which is perfectly natural, without becoming pregnant. Yes, the fact that you won't become pregnant is "unnatural", but it is used so you can continue to experience a natural part of life with less risk. Suicide, on the other hand, does not have a similar risk/reward, response, or permanence. I could take a birth control pill knowing that I would still be able have a child in the future, and without an extreme response mentally or physically. However, if you point a loaded gun at yourself most people will automatically have an intense response that may include anxiety, fight or flight, fear, and self preservation. I understand the point you're trying to make, and I agree to some extent, but I disagree with that example as a counterpoint to protonimitate's comment
Suicide is about giving up. There can be a number of reasons for throwing the towel in.
For seemingly normal people, I tend to think it's because they feel like they have failed in a way that is irredeamable. Like the samurai guys, that have disgraced themselves and there is no way to go on without their honor. It is all in their head as expectations they have created.
Aside from clinical cases, I would say that most people throw in the towel because they feel like they failed and it's over. Expectations manage them. If you feel like you have nothing to live for, you can live for anything. Change thos expectations.
I'm not trying to be reductionist, this is obviously a serious issue and it many people struggle with it. But that the hedge fund manager that is "living the dreams" and wants to end his life out of that toxic environment and maybe we won't think about giving up anymore.
This is one of the most accurate depictions of suicide that I've heard:
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
-David Foster Wallace
For some, depression is an episode or collection of episodes in life. For others, it's a chronic condition. He lived decades (from other accounts) with a chronic condition and succumbed to it.
Sometimes, toxic environments contribute and I don't want to suggest otherwise, but for those with chronic unipolar depression, it is a condition that people die of. It's sad, but so long as we understand that it's illness, we can get over the polemics.
I guess what I'm trying that isn't isolated to depression and mental illness. If you have asthma you use an inhaler, but you should probably not smoke.
If you have clinical depression there are medical ways to address that, but you probably should not put yourself in situations that will make that worse.
It's not "all in their head". If they don't meet society's expectations of them, then society will treat them very negatively (probably making them an outcast, if not a prisoner, depending on what happened). People in that position, in that society, take that step because they really don't have any good alternatives: society has forced it on them.
This is somewhat like saying "it's all in their head" when someone facing a life prison sentence commits suicide. Prison is essentially torture, so it's entirely rational to commit suicide if you have precisely two choices, spend the rest of your life in prison or kill yourself.
A person in prison is facing a real prison. The expectations society sets are not prison bars. But it harder to say that society has a fundamental problem with expectations.
This is not really correct. There is in fact an evolutionary advantage in depression leading to suicidal behaviour, and it can be found in animals as well.
The theory is that every member of a species generally consumes from the same pool of resouces. If one member deems himself as a non-contributor, it is better for the species as a whole if that individual perishes. I don't have any references right now but there are recorded instances of animals 'giving up' and refusing to feed and or care for theirselves, leading to death, usually after a series of unsuccesful mating seasons. It makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
This explanation helped me significantly in being able to overcome certain emotions. It's not an 'illness', and there is nothing wrong with me. It's a natural thing, and I have the ability to resist it, just like I have the ability to resist other natural urges.
I think the impulse to suicide can arise in people of sound mind who are (or who feel) trapped by their circumstances and see no way out.
Job loss in late middle age combined with financial load (mortgage, kids in college, increasing medical costs) added to declining health and energy with which to meet life's challenges and maybe add in loss of spouse through divorce or illness - I can see how events could leave someone of sound mind feeling locked into a chronic path of decreasing rewards and agency, coupled with increasing stress and loss.
It's not clear to me that suicide is an irrational choice in such circumstances. It's certainly not the only choice, and it's terribly painful for those left behind, but I think it can be rationally chosen by someone who is not otherwise mentally ill.. No idea what proportion of suicides might be in that category.
That might be true but another poster already debunked that apparently.
Regardless of the other living beings, you are too quick to dismiss the human side of things, specifically our complex minds and our irrationality regardless of mental fitness.
Does the primitive survival instinct kicks in when suiciding? Surely.
Can it be outweighed by every single bad instant that a person has lived and what they see coming down their way? I don't see why not, and probably more so if your mind isn't thinking rationally.
But I'd argue that none of us are completely rational and so at times even 'healthy' minds can do the unthinkable.
I believe our biggest gift - powerful brain, self awareness and other capabilities that contribute to making us unique; is also our biggest curse :
"What's my purpose?"
"Is there any meaning?"
"Why do all my relationships fail?"
"Do people really like me?"
And so on ...
-- My uneducated perspective.
I do recall one man who did not survive, who seemed at peace during the video of his fall -- he was one who I think perhaps did not regret the act, but was the extreme outlier in that regard. If you are 85 and dying of painful cancer, I can also see it being an act that makes sense, made to decide one's own fate. But MOST people seem to grow out of their suicidal phases, and realize it was the wrong choice, driven by bad thought patterns. In the same way that people try to help addicts or people with eating disorders try to obtain better thought patterns, suicidal ideation seems to me to be largely a broken thought pattern we should help people overcome, not an individual decision one should respect.
That fails to explain those who attempt suicide more than once.
EDIT: I found an informal estimate from this article (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/25/in-defense-of-psych-tre...) by psychiatrist Scott Alexander:
"It is somewhat harder to find good studies on what percent attempt suicide again. By eyeballing some other statistics and trying to fit them together, I believe it is greater than 25% but less than 50%. One textbook whose studies I have not been able to verify says that 30% of untreated and 15% of treated suicide attempters try again."
This reminds me a bit of that movie "Strange Days" (where people relived others' experiences), or of course "The Matrix".
It seems, at first thought, unreasonable that people trying to kill themselves by jumping off a bridge would be more likely to regret the decision than people who shoot themselves in the head. I wonder if this is mostly a selective choosing of the survivors of jumping off the bridge to fit a narrative.
The widespread societal taboo against suicide supposes that no rational person free of undue pressures would consent to ending their own life, therefore anyone who commits suicide must have been pushed to do so by serious factors that impaired their ability to properly consent.
This line of thinking effectively re-defines 'mental illness' to be that unknown variable that pushes outwardly functional people towards a choice that surprised the observer.
So, are severely mentally ill people truly capable of living normal lives? Are they capable of making clear, level-headed decisions? I highly doubt that they were truly masters of their own existence if they decided they'd rather stop existing than suffer more illness.
And yes, I think it is a perfectly valid choice for someone to check out if that's what they want to do. Mental health or whatever aside, if you don't want to live anymore, for WHATEVER reason, I don't see why anybody else has the right to try to stop you.
My conclusion for my suicide is "bad" is because it causes pain and suffering to the ones around you. I relate suicide to stress that cannot be managed. If you feel like you need to die, then you are completely free to do anything. So why not do that? Remove that stress, till you don't feel like that's the only answer.
FWIW, I say this as someone who has had severe depression and been suicidal.
2. Sure, there may be times where a person may rationally chose to die. That doesn’t negate the fragility and value of life for its sake. Two things can be true. Some people may have a rational reason to wish to end their lives, and some people who would end their lives would do much greater harm to themselves and loved ones than good.
3. It is my firm belief that we may use #1 to evaluate the worth and even ethicality of choices and actions. Those actions which solely promulgate life or enhance its existence are ethical. Those actions or choices which violate the former are unethical. Actions or choices which solely diminish the life or lives of others or outright end lives are unethical - unless that termination of life ends suffering larger than the benefits of life. That’s a very fine line.
This have been explored philosophically in the school of existentialism, see Camus and his work.
EDIT: i guess a valid reason is significant physical pain and suffering that has no hope of being cured.
Not to sound insensitive, but it's more comparable to putting down your old suffering pet in my mind.
I’m not an expert on it, but there is a certain impulsiveness to it that suggests to me that it’s not just another choice. Terminally ill people often or maybe frequently get things in order and prepare things, almost going out of their way with limited time to take care of things for their loved ones. These things frequently take their loved ones by surprise and there aren’t exhaustive preparations.
This will be more inappropriate, but AB had a marriage dissolve because he had to travel 250+ days a year and be away from a wife and young child. As a husband and parent of two, I find that staggering, we aren’t talking about someone without financial resources that does whatever job they can to support their family, he probably didn’t need to work. To me, it’s not even a thought, I’d do a different job or somehow rearchitect my life to keep my family near. IMO, there was clearly some priority issues or something going on. If he had this supreme rationalism and simply chose to end things, where was that when he fathered a child that he didn’t spend time with? Or was this a new found clearity he discovered? Im not try to sound accusatory but I think there might be a lot of other differences in his life if this was a healthy and rational choice.
RIP Anthony and I hope his family and loved ones find peace and comfort.
Also it's pedantic in a really ignorant and dumb way, and not nearly as clever as you think it is.
There are examples of people taking their own life due to physical maladies which I can COMPLETELY understand, and choosing to end your own life kevorkian-style is understandable to most people: Robin Williams had dementia. His mind had basically completely gone before the end, his wife spoke of the rages and lack of understanding of what was happening around him.
But many people choose to end their own life when they are young, healthy, and in a pit of despair that they feel they will never escape. Depression is a mental illness which symptoms of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts. So there you go. That is why. Depression is a mental illness.
We as a society have deemed having no value of life, including your own, is aberrant behavior. I would argue that "deciding to commit suicide" for no other reason than you are tired of being alive, or want to "decide your own fate" is completely psychotic.
Also, saying "It's your choice" and doesn't affect anyone else is just insanely wrong. As I've grown older and lost people around more at a higher rate, it is ASTOUNDING the hole left behind when you lose a loved one.
I am in favor of a right to die, because I saw my mother struggle with cancer. What she went through seemed truly awful.
However, having a terminal disease is very different than having a temporary lapse in judgment about whether to continue living. Someone raising a child likely does not truly want to be gone from the Earth. We don’t know for sure, but with his known addiction history, this was likely an unintended consequence, the one he cannot take back.
That being said, I agree with your point. One should be the master of their own existence from a certain viewpoint, but we aren't. Humans are social creatures and define our lives in terms of those relationships. Even if you are a solitary hermit, you define your life in relation to the people that aren't around. I'm not trying to be clever there.
I can see where suicide can be considered the most rational response given the right social or societal context. See any number of ritual suicide practices in human cultures.
Again, even the physician assisted suicide that we debate so often make sense in the context of maintaining some notion of dignity in one's familial or social group. When you add human suffering to that situation it becomes a moral imperative, I think. That's just me though.
(Much the same holds for murder vs. other crime rates, though both may be influenced by trauma medicine advances. David Simon talks of this in The Audacity of Despair, on YouTube.)
For much this reason, suicide is seem as a definitive marker of individual, and social, dysfunction. It is the title and subject of Emil Durkheim's foundational work on sociology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(book)
But consider this analogy. If "suicide" was a just a judgement, and not a temporary insanity, then people who came close to suicide wouldn't ALL glad that it did not happen.
You would have a significant portion of people who look back and say... I really wish I had taken my life back in 95', that was a really hard year. But that is so extremely rare, its easy to lump the majority of suicidal thoughts into the temporary delusions category.
In some cases people have been contemplating suicide for decades before they do it, which is a common sign of depression. But that is significantly different than wishing that they had done it in the past.
No, in many ways and cases you aren't. As comments below note, one of those ways is through mental health issues. While I do agree that people should ultimately have the right to choose, it's simply incorrect to think that it's a simple matter of rational choice. There's very good reason to believe that, in most cases of people seeking suicide, they are not of sound mind.
This idea that you are the perfect and complete "master of my own existence" is one of the most pernicious and persistent fallacies people hold.
I am afraid you don't understand chronic depression. At all.
Because suicide is almost always preceded by years of mental health problems.
Few living things who are physically healthy and with no history of suicide ideation just decide to die just because. Generally there's some underlying cause, whether it be a longterm plan to do so or some sudden stressor.
Sure you have the right to decide your own fate, but you should consider that you affect other people. In taking your own life you’re also fucking up the life of everyone who cares about you, forcing them into a state of grief and possibly causing them to blame themselves for what was ultimately a selfish act on your part.
I have people in my life who have been struggling with mental illness for many years. If any of them decide that they no longer have the will to fight, I would not think less of them (or call them selfish) if they decide to end their own life. If I did, I would be selfish.
Depression is like a broken bone it's a physical problem with a person's body beyond their control they need help to fix it.
People who have open-heart surgery have a 40% chance of developing depression it's not that all their life they were dealing with depression this is a sudden change. That's terrifying to see depression develop so quickly like a virus suddenly changing a person almost overnight.
If a person impulsively and mortally harms themselves because they couldn't control their actions due to chemical imbalance in their brain (depression) that would certainly be upsetting.
Knowing a person's actions were out of their control and they could have been helped or healed that's quite sad. We need to help people not accept it or mock it since it is just as much a medical problem as a broken bone, and it can be treated.
There are cases of depression that result from health issues, but these definitely aren't the majority. This is just a hypothesis society has put forth to avoid taking a long hard look at itself.
Selfish is inherently a negative word, though. Maybe self focused or self motivated is still accurate and less negative.
Frankly, unless he had a hidden medical issue (like Robin Williams), I also believe Bourdain probably could have restructured his life in some way to make life better and worth living again. I'm pretty sure most mental health pros would agree that most suicides arise suddenly, emotionally, and irrationally, and can be productively prevented if the impending signs are identified early and addressed with help. Personally, I believe that suicide is never the best and only option anyone has -- barring an irreversible medical/physical condition.
I think the reason we see more tolerance for suicide today is we expect less from people in general. Forty years ago, society presumed that each of us had a continuing duty to other people -- family, friends, community, and country. This duty clearly proscribed certain behaviors which would hurt others or would fail to live up to other social duties, like voluntary military service in time of war, or working VERY HARD to overcome difficulties in marriage when children were still present in the home, and would suffer from the breakup. (I've been there. It's not a delight.)
I'm very saddened by Bourdain's passing, and I'd rather not judge him. But I regret even more his loss to his daughter and his friends. The act of suicide is a terrible legacy.
My only secondhand anecdote of Anthony Bourdain - and it’s hardly even that - is from the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu community. Apparently he would train at Ralph Gracie’s on Howard when in SF. No commentary aside from this is often a deliberate attempt by an individual at bettering one’s self.
I don't blame anyone who chooses suicide. Who am I to tell them to "man up" and deal with the torment? But I think we should do everything in our power to make staying a viable option.
I understand that from the perspective of someone who is suicidal, they might feel that they have nobody who cares about them, or that the people who do “would be better off” without the suicidal person in their life. But that thought alone is misguided and certainly not a justification for engaging in such a selfish act. Regardless of how the suicidal person feels, the people who care about them will be harmed by the suicide.
But the person who is already under emotional distress should continue to endure theirs? Is your position really that you have a right not to be emotionally upset by others? How does this position account for any form of conflict at all?
People who kill themselves are extremely aware of this. Consider that as an indicator of how much distress they are in, not how selfish they are. They're in so much pain that they would inflict grief upon their loved ones to get out of it.
If a person is being physically intensely tortured, and they kill themselves to stop the pain, are they being selfish? They are under so much distress that their only option is to end it all. They would MUCH rather not be tortured and not have to die. Suicide is jumping out of a burning building because you don't want to burn. It's not something you do because you're upset.
I think you could get into an exception if there's mutually held debt or something similar that actually does affect a person long term.
Possibly inappropriate - but why do people immediately link suicide and mental illness? Why do we stand in judgement declaring it wrong to decide ones own fate? Am I not the master of my own existence and do I not have the right to make a decision on it without a bunch of hand wringing from other people refusing to countenance the possibility that I am still of sound mind?
Living is a choice, just as death is. (apologies if this is distasteful, I'm mostly interested to hear responses)