I’m not religious in any way, but the ideas you suggest in your comment make me deeply uncomfortable, because they strike me as the ultimate betrayal of the miracle of random chance that led to our existence, with an almost lackadaisical disregard for human suffering, to the point of systemizing the process of ignoring it.
If he lived in a place with compassion he could have ended it cleanly. He didn't. Where he lived killing himself would be illegal, and would have been much harder dealing with the legality than otherwise. He had life insurance that swapped when he ended his job, he had to die naturally so it would pay out for us because there's no law protecting it.
So instead he suffered for around a year. He was kind, he didn't tell us (the family) what was going on, but about a month after he had the surgery which really f*cked him up to get rid of a tumor, the tumor was back. He just told the doctors no when they tried to help further, and died after 8 months of suffering. One might consider it suicide by inaction, but for some reason that's condoned and seen as strong.
My mom didn't understand this until a few years back when her memory started going and she was losing herself, and talked about how unpleasant life was and there being some alternative. when I mentioned that dad had wanted to as well (he didn't tell her, she couldn't handle it at the time). She expressed regret she didn't live somewhere else. Then she forgot about the discussion the next day. She spends her days with about 3 minutes of memory at a time and will till she passes.
End of life isn't just about suicide. They both wanted to live, but not in the irreversible physical form they were in. Neither legally had the option. Neither actually did it though. I bet my dad would have and I don't blame him if it was socially acceptable and legal.
You appear to have a very different mental model of assisted suicide than the comment you're replying to. I might be biased by my experience, but the mental model I parsed from the comment is the one most commonly associated with suicidal young(ish)/physically healthy people, suicide appears attractive because there is some mental roadblock the suicidal person faces, their mind can't process some aspect of their enviroment/history no matter how much they try, they can't understand it, they can't ignore it, they can't make piece with it in any way. It torments them like an itch they can't scratch. They can live their life perfectly well if they only knew how to deal with this issue, but they can't, not alone. This is the type that can be helped by more (honest) publicity and attention.
Another way of phrasing this is that assisted suicide for mental issues need not be the same as assisted suicide for physical issues, so both you and the comment you're replying to can have your way, the 2 problems are orthogonal(ish).
Sometimes it's not the community that failed; sometimes the person wanted to die.
My friend Andy Ettelson killed himself by swallowing a bottle of aspirin and pulling a plastic bag over his head. He was sure he wanted to die.
His parents loved him, his friends loved him, and he had a girlfriend who loved him. He had community.
He also was bipolar, and refused to take his meds. He didn't like the side effects.
It was heartbreaking for those around him. When I got the phone call from Alex telling me that Andy had killed himself, he said, "I apologize if I sound so emotionless, but I've been waiting for that phone call from his dad for the last ten years."
We all knew that it was only a matter of time before he killed himself, and short of institutionalizing him against his will there was little we could do.
Most psychiatric medicines have horrible side effects. The problem is we don't invest anywhere near enough money into researching how our brain actually functions, what is wired wrong in people with more severe diseases or how to minimize adverse effects. Hell, most of "getting a person on meds" isn't based on science, it's "cycle through medications and dosages and find out what doesn't make the problem worse".
Not to mention getting access to psychologists, psychiatrics and other mental health care is a hellish experience on its own because supply doesn't even come close to demand and insurance to cover for that is an utter PITA even here in Europe.
We as societies fail people with mental health issues immensely. Instead, we waste our best brains on advertising, penis enlargements and iterating on insulin and epi-pens to continuously bleed people and insurances dry.
Speaking as someone who lives with a gibbering terror of death; we all die. Blanket statements that a motivation to live is essential is an attitude that endorses profound suffering.
It is an inescapable reality that at some point in their lives people need to give up their desire to live if they want peace and happiness. The debate is only about negotiating where that line gets drawn, and it is not set in stone that the answer is how old someone is.
I find your position most uncomfortable, life as a miracle absolute best thing (toxic positivity) when they are thinking from a living a better life than most people on earth can ever dream of. This is the "lackadaisical disregard for human suffering" and want them to continue this suffering because it's uncomfortable for them and they themselves are privileged since birth. Nothing is going to make people's life better for sure.
edit: and if people (without psych evaluation or capacity to provide good life) can bring someone from void without their consent and with lots of disadvantages, then people should also have the option to leave if they don't like it. They should not be forced to live the long life by privileged once.
I am convinced that a society which doesn't want to commit the resources to help the people who need help must not forbid these people to choose to kill themselves if that is the only solution they can find by themselves. Administering death is not a treatment option society should choose, but the people themselves should be allowed to do so.
If people get good help a lot of them will choose to keep living.
There is no inherant reason to life.
The biggest issue with this topic is, that it spits in your face if someone else doesn't think lifing is the only answer after becoming aware of yourself.
But lets take a view which YOU might understand: Imagine yourself without arms and legs. Only way to move around is by asking someone else. Every means of eating or switching the tv channel is by asking someone else. That person actually doesn't even like you but its the only option you can afford.
Imagine being kept alive because alive is the main goal of all of things.
Are you aware that if a medic finds a person without arm and legs (and lower body i think), there is a suggestion to try to not helpm them?
The doctor in this documentary said that in these cases its prefered to give pain relieve medication instead of helping surviving further.
I was not able to find it thou.
Lions slowly munching on their prey alive over several hours have nothing on humans who arrange for intolerable suffering to extend over years.
I don't think I agree with the suggestions, but I certainly understand them, and often find myself contemplating what a better societal solution could be. The solution space varies by cause, in some cases there's only room for marginal improvement, if any, from changing the society. That's not to say that they're not worth pursuing, or there aren't changes that would massively benefit many people...just that it's a murky ethical grey area without any obviously correct solution.
I hope you can take a minute to consider that viewpoints like the above aren't always stemming from disregard for human suffering, but through an abundance of heartbreaking empathy.
It's probably better to avoid telling someone they don't really want to do it, and erring on the side of believing they do, even if you think you happen to have evidence to the contrary.
In my opinion, mitigating it is the clearly correct choice, because facilitating it would lead to suicides of people who would counterfactually eventually regret it. Whereas mitigating it would at least lead to “false positives” that are failures to prevent someone from suicide, rather than failures to save someone from it.
Right now this option is blocked by governments around the world.
And due to the problem, that the government can't just legalize it without save guard around it, this makes a quite good case that there has to be some government involvement.
I am totally against suicide, but I thank God I'm not in a position today where it feels like my best choice. I've been on that ledge, but what it would do to my family, and fear of divine retribution kept me here long enough to realize my problems had solutions. Religion does have its merits, namely the belief that all life is valuable, and no one is beyond saving.
I'm glad it helped you turn around how you felt and come back from the metaphorical ledge. But can you be sure that there are more people for whom religions helped persuade them to find solutions rather than commit suicide, than people who never found release from their suffering and ensured many years more of it than they would otherwise had they not felt guilt forcing them to stay alive?
I've never believed in any religion so hard for me to put myself in that mindset, but I suppose it wouldn't make much of a difference to my understanding if I did since my point is that individual anecdotes can go either way. I do at least hope that more people are helped than hurt by religious pressure to stay alive (and indeed by religion generally).
Religion has had effects in either direction, I wouldn't make any definitive claim on its overall impact. I just think it has a place.
Lots of people kill themselves without seeking professional help for various reasons, the hope is that luring them into the system will help them not actually kill themselves.
And for the people who are truly suffering and for whom there is no helping, maybe it really is more humane to let them be free.
That said, I also believe the government should provision every citizen with a personal firearm on their 18th birthday, so I guess you could say I do support government facilitated suicide.
I kind of agree with this statement, but there is not a lot of places where there is significant effort spend to help people who have big problems (especially in the US).
IMO there's no way this would ever become any sort of common occurrence, because the state would never willingly give up its human capital on that scale.
"Again, when a man in violation of the law harms another (otherwise than in retaliation) voluntarily, he acts unjustly, and a voluntary agent is one who knows both the person he is affecting by his action and the instrument he is using; and he who through anger voluntarily stabs himself does this contrary to the right rule of life, and this the law does not allow; therefore he is acting unjustly. But towards whom? Surely towards the state, not towards himself. For he suffers voluntarily, but no one is voluntarily treated unjustly. This is also the reason why the state punishes; a certain loss of civil rights attaches to the man who destroys himself, on the ground that he is treating the state unjustly."
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Book Ⅴ http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.5.v.html
[1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assi...
[2]: https://exit.ch/en/englisch/engagement-of-exit/our-end-of-li...
Isn't it possible that letting suicidal people kill themselves might actually save more in "wasted" economic output trying to save people who are perhaps beyond saving (therapists could spend more time helping non-suicidal people which could make them more productive, or less therapists needed so they retrain; maybe state aided suicide leads to more deaths and therefore more time spent grieving by friends and family, or maybe it would work out pretty much the same number of deaths but years earlier, potentially with those years otherwise eating lots of economic output out of their family & friends who are both emotionally distracted and likely spending time trying to help; etc) than gained by the possibility of some economic output from the saved person, which might happen or maybe a decade of homelessness later they die before working another hour.
I'm not convinced that politicians are against allowing suicide because they know how the numbers stack up and there's a solid economic case saying to force people to live. They're doing it, rightly or wrongly, either because they believe it's the right way for society to act, or because they think that's what the voters they need believe.
But maybe you're right that, if those beliefs started to fade, the economics would be worked out, show that my thinking above is wrong and that it is most profitable to ban suicide, and it would be a motivation for some people to cynically push people back towards those beliefs? Or maybe you think that motivation already is secretly driving propaganda or political lobbying or similar?
I can think of many possibilities for people to passively and non-economically serve the will of the state in an always-online world, but I don't think it's appropriate to openly speculate about that sort of thing since it is Unknowable. Just knowing it's possible is enough for me :)
The same state that sends its youth off to die in wars? Or that executes them when it so chooses?
Suicides in the US (where assisted suicide is illegal): 45,979 (with 1.2M attempts)
Executions in the US: 17
I'm not asking to imply you've cherry picked numbers, just that giving stats like that (number of actions for a country with no defined time period) is only telling half the story, and even though that half was enough to make your point I think the other half is worth including for the sake of curiosity :)
edit: yes seems to be 2020, search of that suicides number pointed to e.g. https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
For myself, I'm no longer suicidal, but I don't want to be reincarnated, I don't want to go to heaven (and obviously not hell), and I simply don't want to wake up anywhere at all after I die. An endless, dreamless sleep is what I hope for.
I cannot imagine how awful immortality would be in practice. Death, in due time, is a blessing.
I think it's a very similar approach to drugs in certain countries: you decriminalize them, in some cases provide government-funded drugs, provide places with trained medical staff for people to do their drugs in, and provide excellent addiction counseling. If they overdose, there's medical staff. If the drugs are government-provided, then they're pure and not cut with problematic substances. If the person wants assistance with the addiction, they don't have a criminal record, don't have to contend with an erratic supply while they wean off / switch to something else, and have lots of non-judgemental support.
I think it's quite reasonable to take a similar approach with suicide: de-stigmatize it so it's possible to talk to people constructively, and very likely engage with many for whom there's a better path. Simultaneously, provide a way for people to gracefully exit life when that truly is the best option, instead of (for example) wasting away in a hospital in pain.
Sorry but please try to avoid creating a strong opinion if you haven't even thought about the issue in hand in more indempth than 'readily'.
Btw. for further thoughts: Imagine that getting sucidie support takes 3 years. It involves different doctors, mandatory therapy and than you have the approval to do so.
Wouldn't you think this would potentially even lead to more people NOT killing themselfs? Basically helping people to commit suicide as a form of preventing sucidie?
I would believe so.
No one just kills themselfs. The same reasoning btw. (i know it wasn't mentioned but out of personal expierience i just wanna mention it) its the same with abortion. No one just does an abortion.
My suspicion is that the availability of a legitimized path to the same result, but with a far less traumatizing method for both the individual and their loved ones, might allow for transitioning people into getting help when that's not the outcome they really want and provide a respectful and humane exit for those that clinically and chronically find living unbearable.
I'm not sure that the most ethical approach to life is forcing people to continue with it against their will, it is clearly not working, and by pushing the pursuit of death underground we're likely missing tens of thousands of people each year who would turn away from that downward spiral through treatment.
The people I knew that eventually committed suicide due to chronic depression spent many years thinking about it - a year waiting list for a state authorized humane option I'm sure would have been fine with any of them. But the ones that committed suicide in response to temporary circumstances didn't have any outlet other than admitting the intent to commit a crime and facing the social and economic consequences of that being outed.
Even the number of stories I've heard from survivors about the regret as soon as it was too late to take back is harrowing.
I'd have to wonder how many push the button for the nitrogen chamber (the likely method for state authorized suicide) only to regret it in the last moment where someone could successfully abort the procedure to save them. The low level of repeat attempts would be promising for the availability of "suicide with emergency break" alone.
The religious puritanism surrounding suicide has doomed us to adopt policies and attitudes towards it as a society that probably do more harm than good.