Personally, I’m hoping we put more of an effort behind solving the problem so people won’t need to commit suicide.

Sometime in the 21th century we’ll come up with some sort of treatment. It’s just a matter of which decade.

Maybe we should increase funding now?

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/392585-heres-why-we-s...

There are 50 million people with Alzheimer’s and that number will increase significantly:

https://www.alz.co.uk/research/statistics

Solving the problem? You mean immortality?

Why ? Assisted suicide is already feasible, cost is low, and makes room for the (sadly literal) billions of people waiting for a better life.

It doesn't sound very moral to me to be willing to spend tens of thousands from insurances and such (so not exactly one's money) on individual treatment, just to get a bit more time for myself as an elderly person.

Not to be too blunt about it, but why would you need the right? It's not like there would be repercussions.

Unless you meant some kind of contract to be euthanized by the state/caregiver if you lost your faculties. That kind of thing would scare me. What if some interviewer decides they think you have lost it when you're still hanging on? We have a lot to learn about elder care in the modern world I guess.

I think he meant the right to be killed moreso then the right to suicide. However, there are other contexts where the right to suicide makes sense, such as terminal illnesses that leave your mental faculty intact. If you are stuck in a hospital bed, surrounded by doctors, with a machine reading your vitals continously, it can be very hard to commit suicide. Even if you manage to, it would probably not be as pleasent as the morpheme overdose a nurse could give you.

Speaking from the personal experience of having watched a family member die of dementia, I absolutly agree that we should have a right to die. The only arguement should be about where to draw the line.

In my case we had a woman who watched her own mother go through dementia and was very clear in both her will, and in speaking with her immediate family that she never wanted to be kept alive in that state. In addition, by the end, the entire family was in agreement that she should be put down, and (as far as I am aware) every medical professional we spoke with agreed with our decision to put her on a DNR and avoid life prolonging treatments to the extent possible. I cannot imagine that a hypothetical ethics board would come to a different conclusion.

Despite this, she stayed alive until she died of dehydration as a result of loosing the mental faculty necessary to swallow when water was placed in her mouth.

If a nurse was comin at me with a lethal dose of morphemes..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme

Yeah, still way more pleasant than any suicide I could manage on my own.

A lot of people botch their home-brewed suicide attempts, and wind up in a much worse state than they were before they tried.

Professionally assisted suicide would ideally be as certain, pain-free, anxiety-free, and dignified as possible.

I was told by a former physician (turned engineer) that the interval between realizing that you're starting to lose it and then indeed losing the wherewithal to act on your own is "a matter of weeks."

That seems too quick for me based on my grandmother's experience.

I suppose there are practical issues, especially once someone has gotten debilitated enough they don't have a lot of personal autonomy or privacy. If it were legal then one could imagine making a autonomous decision and "getting help" with the practicalities.

You would need the right because there are severe repercussions for failure in suicide.

- The stats are against you with a far higher risk of surviving any suicide attempt. Yes, in older age that risk "goes down" probably due to subconscious acceptance of the killing action, whereas a youth might use suicide as desperate cries for attention and not fully commit to go through because there's a glimmer of hope in the back of the mind that someone will save you from yourself. You can look up the stats, even shooting yourself with a gun in the head is usually _survivable_ although you may end up in far greater pain both emotionally and physically, locked in a comatose or paralyzed state and sustaining heavy damage. The 'easy' ways out that are entirely painless, even euphoric, and completely reliable methods of extinguishing consciousness are heavily guarded by gatekeepers who will make sure that it's not accessible so as to keep miserable, dependent, but profitable people in the land of the living even if that means torture in this worldly purgatory.

- The resulting involuntary commitment to psychiatric "services" which will most likely involve a long-term chemical straightjacket and physical confinement that externally may appear to be vegetative and without markers of sentience or apparent pain, but internally are a hell that few truly experience while here on Earth.

- Succession legalities that are currently minefields including the specifics of property transfer, insurance payouts, and in more theocratic/authoritarian states/communities the family members left behind may be the victims of ostracization, excommunication, or even incarceration.

Suicide bag is simple fast and painless method that can be self-administered or assisted. You just need a bottle of nitrogen and some other items.

if you get to that point you would probably not be able to conceptualize that anything is wrong. dementia starts mild, so i suppose someone with mild dementia could consent to suicide, but I think most people would hold out in the possibly of a cure or improved treatments

My father had AZ, and knew something was wrong with him through the entire course of the disease.

Same with my grandparents.

Though I do hope I have the type of personality to take permanent lack of context/memory with some form of levity. Laughing at the absurd.

There are still interesting, funny moments. Once, I had done something that angered him. He gave me the third degree, yelling at me. I started chuckling. He stopped, and angrily asked why I was laughing. I replied he hadn't yelled at me for 20 years, and it felt oddly good and familiar to have him yelling at me. It was good to have my old man back.

Of course, that took all the steam out of his anger, and he soon slipped back into the mist.

Thank you for sharing. That was a vivid and moving scene.

The scary - or comforting, depending on how you look at it -thing about dementia is that at some point you become a different person, possibly one who no longer desires to die by suicide.

Everyone in my family who has lived into their nineties suffers dementia. It is really hard to know what to wish for. Compassionate children, I guess, and the agency for them to do what they think is best.

I thought more states had this, Wikipedia says it's mostly the crazy west coasters again. It should only be a last resort. One grandmother got it, it was devastating for all. If I was in her boat, I don't know how I'd handle it. She just got worse over 3 or 4 years. It also killed my grandfather. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_suicide_in_the_United...