Personally i am all for it, if a person is terminally ill and in great pain then i think the cruelest thing is to do is force them to live their last days/weeks/months in torment.
I also in a way think that treatment resistant clinical depression and other similar mental illnesses should be treated in the same way. If a person has battled horrible depression their whole life and tried all of the available treatment, i think it's incredibly selfish to force them to live on in pain.
If someone is feeling so terrible that they want to kill themselves why should we make them live their last few hours with such horrible feelings of guilt and isolation, wouldn't it be better to let them live their last moments surrounded by family and die through a painless injection rather than through some makeshift alternative?
Schopenhauer wrote:"They tell us that suicide is the greatest act of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person."
On a serious note. I think it's a private property issue. Your body, your property, your rules. Emotional and sentimental value of 'life' asside, discarding of your body should be no different than discarding your trash
Yeah im all for it, forcing someone to suffer is just cruel. If something happened to me and i'd become mentally and physically disabled and I couldn't even do so much as eat or drink or use the toilet without someone helping me then no way would I want to live. You wouldn't be living you'd just be existing, being a burden to other people
I had a friend who tried to kill himself multiple times…
and almost succeeded…
But it took like - 10 years for them to get his medicines right…
and now he's fine.
Maybe it was a combination of maturity and meds…but whatever.
He was doing some pretty weird stuff too - like...
burying himself in the backyard up to his neck…
Because he needed to "commune with mother earth"
- stuff like that…
and I personally - don't consider that to be too wacky of a concept…
but try and explain it to the authorities when they show up.
Just saying that life can get bent out of shape pretty quickly.
Especially when you are young and dumb.
a lot of depressed people are suicidal though, a lot of people with treatable depression. what about those guys? its not a black and white issue imo
but in general, yes, bigup dignitas
rockonin wrote:Im also in favour of 'pulling the plug'.
nah bro remember that girl who was in a coma but could hear things and she overheard the doktor trying to tell her mum to pull the plug but then she woke up and the doktor was like ooohhhh shit and the girl bax mans teeth out with a hammer
TopManLurka wrote:FTR, requirements for being a 'head':
-you have to be youngsta
-you must have been in that infamous room of ten people.
-a DMZ release is preferable but not necessary.
-please note that being youngsta is mandatory.
for people with non-mental illness who are within x years of dying (maybe 3 or some number tbd by docs) and have no chance of recovering and are suffering, sure.
they should go through a serious process where they have to convince multiple docs/judges etc that they aren't mentally ill, but it should be a quick process obvs.
for mentally ill people, hell no. i'd rather they were treated with serious euphoriants like ket or something than allowed to commit suicide (now there's a thought). i think anyone can get better with time, and since depression isn't primarily life-threatening, there's a chance researchers might come up with a cure/treatment for it within the patient's lifetime. i'd like to know what the median age of people with treatment-resistant depression is, my intuition tells me it's waaaaay skewed towards the young end of the spectrum. i just have the feeling a doctor would diagnose a 18-25 y/o with "treatment-resistant depression" cause he didn't respond to paxil and zoloft and now the kid can legally commit suicide, which is ridiculous.
if someone's truly treatment-resistant, treat them with fucking oxycontin or methadone or whatever if you have to, better than dying. although the key there is oversight cause if that became legal you know so many dumbasses would try to scam it.
i just don't think we understand depression well enough to allow something like that and i think the health care system (in the US at least) isn't equipped to handle that kind of a solution to treatment-resistant depression. you'd have shitty doctors telling kids who are going to grow out of their depression that they are "treatment-resistant" and then they'd be allowed to kill themselves, that would be a disaster.
I am in principle but there have to be protections put in place to prevent people feeling pressurised into it once it becomes a legal option. Dying relatives can bring out the worst in people.
lovelydivot wrote:We already have this - It's called Hospice…
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hospice is for people who already have a terminal illness and need comforting on their way out, isn't it? They don't go around administering lethal injections to people who've given up the will to live, do they? Not officially anyway, I'm sure it happens occasionally. It's hardly the same as "we already have assisted suicide" though!
I'm in favour. Give me a big fuck off dose of an Opiate and let me float to nowhere in a loved one's arms, but do it on my say so. I've no idea how you tighten up consent, because dead people can't attend inquests, but yeah, when I'm ready I won't want to hang around shitting all over the floor of a nursing home and struggling to focus on Antiques Roadshow through my Benzo stare. Someone get me the fuck out.
Meus equus tuo altior est
"Let me eat when I'm hungry, let me drink when I'm dry.
Give me dollars when I'm hard up, religion when I die."
nowaysj wrote:I wholeheartedly believe that Michael Brown's mother and father killed him.
i did think it would make a great bandname
