28 year old girl scheduled to die via AS due to depression

[Value]

21 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

BPD can be a really taxing, stubborn, life-long condition. It's hard for such people to live normal well-functioning lives because their mind is so chaotic.

It's no surprise that such people have a high suicide rate.

It's hard for a normal person to understand the hell that BPD can be and how stubborn it is.

@Leo Gura Do you know someone with BPD? I believe my mum might have it, currently reading up on it for that reason.

[eos_nyxia]

There are ways to encourage people to live and re-evaluate their lives, their narratives about life, to continue trying, without wishing to COERCE them into living.

And if you can't release your iron grip on your attachment to "life", can you truly love life at all?

Edited April 24 by eos_nyxia

[Leo Gura]

14 hours ago, zurew said:

People shouldn't downplay the seriousness of mental illness. No matter what you think  right now about  how strong your character or mind is - a bad enough psychedelic trip can tear your mind apart. 

For some people with mental illness is like this: You either have a never ending very bad psychedelic trip or its a frequently scheduled very bad psychedelic trip .

This.

[Leo Gura]

4 minutes ago, Value said:

@Leo Gura Do you know someone with BPD? I believe my mum might have it, currently reading up on it for that reason.

Preety, a former member here, had BPD and it made helping her very difficult because she could not control her emotions. It got so out of hand that eventually I had to ban her. I hope she finds help.

I feel bad for people stuck in such a situation.

Edited April 24 by Leo Gura

[Husseinisdoingfine]

Preety was banned? Damn. I've been on this forum since high school and she was always one of the most consistent posters. I wondered where she went.

[Raze]

https://www.commentary.org/articles/paul-mchugh/dying-made-easy/

 

Quote

Two factors determine how people die: the diseases they have, and who they are. In any given case, these two factors vary in salience. With sudden, terminal diseases like massive heart attacks or apoplectic cerebral hemorrhages, the disease dominates, and mostly obliterates, personality. Then does the power of nature, the “great equalizer,” render alike the death of rich and poor, wise and foolish, brave and timid.

But with slowly advancing disorders—cancer, liver failure, AIDS—who you are powerfully affects how you die. Temperament and character, apprehensions and commitments, resources and support, shape the response to symptoms. Indeed, from the point of view of society, the behavior of one patient suffering from an incurable disease can differ so radically from that of another suffering from the same disease as to influence our attitudes toward life and death themselves.

In medicine, these are commonplace ideas; the individuality of patients with similar diseases was emphasized as long ago as Hippocrates. But they have achieved a new resonance with the recent debates over euthanasia and assisted suicide, and with widespread popular concern over easing the final stages of life for the terminally ill.

Two cases in particular commend themselves to our attention. The first is that of Thomas Youk of Michigan, who in the fall of 1998 was killed by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. This act of euthanasia was recorded on videotape and, on Sunday, November 22, witnessed by over sixteen million people on the CBS news program, 60 Minutes. The second case is that of Morris S. Schwartz, a former professor of sociology at Brandeis University and the eponymous subject of Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom,1 a book that has been on the New York Times best-seller list, mostly in the number-one position, for over a year.

What connects the two cases is that both men were suffering from the same neurological disease: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease after the great New York Yankee first baseman who died from it. And yet, though they had identical afflictions, the contrast in the final moments of their lives could not have been sharper. The first man’s death was ghastly: Kevorkian prepared the site by persuading the patient’s family to leave home for a few hours, and then, when he had him alone, killed him by intravenous injection of a poison to stop his heart. By contrast, Morris Schwartz, whose advance through the terminal stages of ALS is almost as well recorded as that of Thomas Youk, died naturally and in peace, surrounded by friends and family.

Each of these two deaths thus makes a cultural statement. Judging those statements, however, is not quite so straightforward an exercise as it might appear.

_____________

Other than how he died, we know very little about Thomas Youk. He was a Catholic; he restored and raced vintage cars; he was said to have led an active life. Members of his family, who spoke about him on 60 Minutes, described him as a “fighter.”

Youk had been suffering from ALS for two years. His family called Kevorkian because, they reported, he was “in terrible pain, had trouble breathing and swallowing, and was choking on his own saliva.” On his first visit, Kevorkian performed the most cursory of medical examinations, confirming only that Youk showed severe paralysis of the limbs and had difficulty breathing and speaking. Concluding that he was “terrified of choking,” Kevorkian had him sign a consent form for euthanasia, “to be administered by a competent medical professional in order to end with certainty my intolerable and hopelessly incurable suffering.” Two nights later, he returned to do the job.

It was, of course, not his first killing. Over the last decade, Kevorkian has been actively soliciting people to enable him to “assist” them in committing suicide, going so far as to advertise his services in newspapers. By means of a device—his so-called Mercitron—capable of delivering intravenous poison when the patient presses an activating button, he has fostered the deaths of over 130 people. He defends his behavior as “symptom” relief—his treatments, he says, are not intended to kill but to relieve the patient’s distress—although his favorite medication, potassium chloride, has no role in the relief of symptoms other than by stopping the heart. This justification has nevertheless satisfied three juries before whom he has been tried for murder.

When asked by a Michigan paper if Youk had had any last words, Kevorkian, the physician closest to him in his final days, replied, “I don’t know. I never understood a thing he said.” What he did know was that Youk and his family had reached their self-proclaimed limits in tolerating the symptoms of disease. And that, for his purposes, was enough. For what Kevorkian was seeking and had found in Youk was an individual who could be used to challenge the laws of Michigan against euthanasia as he had previously challenged the state law against assisted suicide. His true intent, in other words, had less to do with relieving the suffering of an individual than with making euthanasia, as he has put it, a “fundamental American right—part of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Youk was a means to that end.

If we know little about the man who agreed to become Kevorkian’s “poster boy for euthanasia,” as Mike Wallace referred to Thomas Youk on 60 Minutes, we know a very great deal about Morris Schwartz. Not only was he a well-regarded sociologist with many publications to his name, but his dying and death were the subject of more than this one book, Tuesdays with Morrie. ABC-TV’s news program Nightline had interviewed him three times over the two-year course of his illness, and television viewers had come to appreciate his lively and brave demeanor. It was, indeed, the first of these broadcasts on Nightline that impelled Mitch Albom, a sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press who had studied with Schwartz at Brandeis, to begin visiting his former teacher weekly at his home outside Boston. Not only did Albom go on to write a best-seller about that experience, but Schwartz’s aphorisms on sickness and death have also been collected in another book, Letting Go: Marrie’s Reflections on Living While Dying.

Tuesdays with Morrie is a small book—192 pages long. It begins by describing Morrie’s life before his illness and the circumstances in which he and Mitch met. (Everyone goes by a nickname or a diminutive in this book—not only “Morrie” and “Mitch” but “Rob,” “Gordie,” “Charlie,” even “Rabbi Al.”) Then, in a series of fourteen chapters, we are given vignettes of the Tuesday visits. Through this record of the conversations between the two men, we become progressively enlightened as to Morrie’s attitudes toward dying and death as well as toward such matters as the expenditure of emotion, forgiveness, family, and regret. The final chapter describes Morrie’s death and funeral.

Although Tuesdays with Morrie is mainly a vehicle for Morrie to speak about his illness and himself, we also learn about Mitch and his family, and about Mitch’s reactions to the progress of his friend’s disease. The events of the sickroom and the way he and Morrie cope with them are graphically rendered, as are the suffering and death of an uncle of Mitch’s from pancreatic cancer. (Mitch’s younger brother, to whom the book is dedicated, has the same disease.) The net effect is to give us a picture of life in the round, and to bring home the blessed appropriateness of being able to die as we have lived—surrounded by friends, exchanging affectionate thoughts.

_____________

I will return in a moment to what, in Morrie’s case, those thoughts are. But it may be useful first to say something about the illness to which Morris Schwartz and Thomas Youk responded in so divergent a manner.

ALS is a grim, incurable, progressive neurological disease characterized by a gradual degeneration of the nerves that activate the muscles of the body. Its first symptoms can appear anywhere—in the arms, the legs, or around the mouth and jaw. But eventually and gradually it afflicts the entire body with a total atrophy of the muscles, ending in complete paralysis. Death comes from the weakening of the respiratory action of the chest and diaphragm, making breathing ineffective; if the patient is not maintained on a respirator, he will slip into a coma and die.

Although ALS is an illness that no one would wish on another, it is not the worst illness from which to die. Unlike, say, pancreatic cancer (of the kind Mitch describes his uncle and brother as suffering from), ALS is relatively painless. It does produce much discomfort from coughing, and from the aching of limbs that cannot change their position, but these can be ameliorated by good nursing care. The end itself is quiet. The muscles of respiration fail very slowly, and the patient usually has no sense of smothering but rather is gradually narcotized from the accumulation of carbon dioxide. Death often comes at night; the patient may fall asleep in the evening with no obvious change in his condition, and then just fail to awaken.

Moreover, in contrast to other incurable diseases, ALS does not produce delusional depressions of the kind that can crush the spirit by triggering attitudes of self-blame, hopelessness, and a profound sense of the meaninglessness of all human action. These depressions, which derive from the brain disorders that can accompany AIDS and Huntington’s or Parkinson’s disease, are unresponsive to efforts at distraction. They represent a form of insanity that can provoke suicide and that demands psychopharmacologic attention.

This is hardly to say that patients with ALS are not often discouraged or greatly dismayed. Such symptoms are reported frequently in Tuesdays with Morrie, and the family of Thomas Youk also suggested that he was suffering from them. But moods of this nature differ in kind from delusional depression, and are more properly thought of as aspects of demoralization: emotional reactions, provoked by actual circumstances, that everyone has experienced in minor or major forms in life and that can be relieved by thoughtful psychological assistance, professional and amateur alike. Many patients with ALS can throw off their sad feelings for long periods of time, just as Morrie did—sometimes through their own efforts, usually with help from others who understand them and what they are undergoing.

Another vital characteristic of ALS is that its victims have no loss of cognitive power. Nothing in the disease prevents them from thinking and planning as before. Conceivably, this in itself can become a burden, since patients are alert to the relentless progress of their disease toward death. But in many cases, the retention of cognitive power offers a means of helping them. Morrie, for example, was promptly informed of his future when the diagnosis of ALS was made; although his intense awareness of his fate did bring on intermittent feelings of demoralization, his clarity of mind permitted him to take charge of his situation, put aside self-pity, and undertake activities that encouraged him and gave him purpose.

_____________

Patients with ALS can do valuable work. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia made Lou Gehrig an officer of the New York City Parole Board after the Yankees—true to type, even then—cut him off once he could no longer play. He worked effectively at that job for a year. Steven Hawking, the famous professor of astronomy at Cambridge University who suffers from a more slowly progressive form of ALS, continues to do cosmological research, write, and teach with the help of advanced electronic devices. Nelson Butters, one of the most talented and productive American neuropsychologists of recent decades, edited journals and supervised psychological research right up until the last weeks of his life.

An especially ironic example is offered by the case of Noel David Earley of Rhode Island, who in 1996 began to demand euthanasia for his advancing condition and found a health worker to provide a syringe with which he might commit suicide. The date on which Earley planned to kill himself, he announced, was December 4, 1996—a date still far enough in the future as to give him ample time to tell his story and protest the laws forbidding euthanasia. In the intervening months he testified before the state government and the Rhode Island Medical Society, and contacted the American Civil Liberties Union to gain its help in asserting his “right to die”; he was given plenty of airtime, and plenty of ink. But when December 4 finally came, Earley decided he had not adequately explained his position. He thereupon set a new date several weeks ahead. Friends now had to carry his shrunken and paralyzed body around his apartment and to interviews at which he continued his protest against the state of Rhode Island and its uncivilized laws.

Finally, after a second postponement of his announced self-murder, Earley unexpectedly died in his sleep. Friends said he would surely have killed himself eventually, and they themselves were surely prepared to fight for his “right” to do so. But many also conceded that he had been at his most cheerful when crusading against the laws that deprived him of this right; he was never so chipper as when fighting to die.

_____________

The lesson is simple. ALS is a bleak condition, but give a person who has it a reason to live, and he will keep going to the end, distressed intermittently by its burdens but aided by any sense of purpose and grateful for any help. And that, indeed, is where medicine enters the picture. Specialist physicians know the progress and succession of symptoms, and the treatments that can relieve them. Skilled nurses can administer daily care—delivery of medications, bathing and cleaning the body, managing the environment of the home or hospital room—in ways that mitigate both the symptoms of the disease and its psychological complications.

No such attendance followed poor Thomas Youk. Jack Kevorkian, it is important to note, was trained as a pathologist, and had no practical experience in caring for terminally ill patients before he embarked on his crusade to become their deliverer. He takes his moral authority, moreover, not from his role as a doctor but, as I have already suggested, from political ideology—and specifically from his understanding of the libertarian philosophies of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, and John Locke. What more fundamental right, he asks, than the right to decide when to die? If, under the constraints of disease and suffering, “you don’t have liberty and self-determination,” he proclaimed on 60 Minutes, “you got nothing.”

All this, however, is a lie built on a terrible distortion. The distortion has to do with the way Kevorkian drags his ideological heroes—Locke, Jefferson, Mill, and the rest—into a realm in which their political categories do not apply. As hard as it may be to tell the difference between “true” and “alienated” desires when we are in full possession of our physical and mental faculties, it is a thousand times harder when outside forces overwhelm the self, rendering it vulnerable to unreflective impulses. Among the reasons patients with dire illnesses turn to physicians for help is that their capacities for thinking and planning have been compromised. The responsibility for drawing distinctions under these circumstances lies at the very heart of medical practice. It is the duty doctors owe their patients.

In any case—and here is the lie—the real philosophy espoused by Kevorkian is a doctrine not of rights but of feelings. For in dismissing the role of the physician as a provider of reasoned guidance, as one who helps a patient differentiate good from bad, right from wrong, responsible decisions from impulses, Kevorkian “privileges” instead the momentary inclinations of the patient, who is most often in extremis. Kevorkian himself never reviews a patient’s full history; never considers the relief of symptoms, other than via death; never invokes contemporary medical knowledge concerning the management of a patient’s disease; and never reflects on the patient’s mental state or personal vulnerabilities. He also never considers how his own proposals and practices may influence a suggestible patient’s decisions. The propositions advanced by unsettled and possibly unbalanced minds he absurdly equates with the thoughts of free and reflective citizens, and upon these unbalanced minds he then grandly confers their “rights.”

What we are talking about, then, is a special kind of nihilism, and a special kind of atomism. In the Kevorkian world view, the patient is a solitary figure, related to nothing or no one beyond himself, with neither a past to honor nor a future to influence (a future, that is, distinct from his impending death). His desires, regardless of their sources and implications, regardless of how they might be affected by cool reflection or alleviating therapy, are the only factors that count. A man named Thomas Youk complains that he is tired of life under the conditions he faces; his family agrees; without studying the circumstances out of which these feelings were generated, and against which they might be evaluated, a man named Dr. Kevorkian kills him.

_____________

How have we, as a culture, come to this pass? . In a narrow sense, the question is easily answered. When we—doctors, family, and friends—endorse a patient’s feelings of discouragement, treating them as the most pertinent fact about him and leaving him without suggestions or plans for acting purposefully during what remains of his life, then we open the door to Kevorkianism. But surely—the reader may protest—we do not all act so callously. Thank goodness, no one ever thought of abusing Morrie Schwartz the way Thomas Youk was abused; and that makes all the difference in the world. The culture may not yet be so lost.

But we cannot really leave it at that. For the fact is that, in its own determinedly upbeat way, Tuesdays with Morrie is a disheartening book. True, for people seeking commonsense instruction, it may serve—from its sales figures, it clearly does serve—a useful purpose, akin to the purpose served, for the beginnings of life, by Dr. Benjamin Spock’s famous book on baby and child care. Between them, Morrie and Mitch also offer lots of good advice of a more general nature. They tell us to accept with grace the loss of dignity that accompanies serious illness: the odors and minor ugliness of the sickroom. They tell us to take our friendships seriously, and to make efforts and sacrifices to preserve them. And the like.

But their limitations are evident, and in the end disqualifying. Like Dr. Spock, Morrie and Mitch are strong on the hows and debilitatingly weak on the whys. As a professor, Morrie comes from the “group-process” school of social psychology—a doctrine that promotes a kind of therapy based on the vigorous exchange of off-the-cuff personal interpretations and frank, uncensored opinions. He seems (again like Dr. Spock) most at home in the 1960’s, a time when talk and self-display took on a life of their own and universities were transformed overnight from places where one learned what was known into places where the point was to discusseverything.

Discussion, indeed, is the keynote of Tuesdays with Morrie, if discussion is not too elevated a word for the psychobabble, mixed in equal parts of crude Marxism and empty hedonism, that fills its pages. Throughout, Morrie and Mitch talk about the defects of “our culture” (their term), deprecating it like a couple of old hippies. “We work too hard and are too ambitious,” opines Morrie one Tuesday. Or, “Money is a substitute for love for most people.” Or, “As I’m sitting here dying neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for.” Asked what might give you that feeling, he replies: “Devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.” Such as? Morrie does not say, and Mitch never thinks to ask.

“Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do.” “Learn to forgive yourself and others.” Never “assume it’s too late to get involved.” How the agonizing choices life puts before us can be negotiated, and tragic errors avoided, on the basis of such empty maxims is never examined by Morrie or Mitch. Their vocabulary is heavy on words like love, openness, compromise, “feelings”; light on duty, responsibility, accountability.2 What one especially misses in Tuesdays with Morrie, a book devoted to the subject of death, is any sense of awe in its presence.

The mystery of human existence—so poignantly felt by everyone at the great moments of birth, marriage, and death—is passed over by our two protagonists without so much as a murmur. At one point, Mitch asks Morrie his opinion of the biblical figure of Job, and of the God Who “made him suffer.” Morrie responds: “I think, God overdid it.” From a dying man who is himself showing considerable Job-like perseverance, this is a witty remark. Unfortunately, when it comes to interpreting life and death, neither here nor elsewhere does this highly educated man stop to ponder the great questions posed by Job, not least among them the question of whether there is anything beyond our selves that can judge us and our purposes, or imbue the choices we make with permanent significance.

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I shall return. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Between Job’s dispassionate but sublimely connectedthought and Morrie’s anodyne one-liners stretches an unbridgeable spiritual chasm.

_____________

Does it matter? Morrie, after all, died the way he lived. He was jovial and spirited; he hung in there; he lives on in the minds of his friends. So what if he talked a fair amount of nonsense along the way?

The real question, though, is whether any lasting strength can be gained from an account like this one—strength that derives from knowing ourselves (as Morrie and Mitch do not) to be the legatees of inviolable traditions, cultural and professional alike, as well as members of a vast and enduring human community that stretches back into history and forward into the experience of those yet to come. Morrie’s method of managing his own death is not to be disparaged. It worked for him, thanks to his innate pluck, and to the special arrangements available for his care. But how is that method, untied to principle, to tradition, or to any sense of larger human obligation, going to help those who lack his advantages: the weak as well as the strong, the lonely as well as the befriended, the tortured as well as the pain-free?

To the proponents of euthanasia and assisted suicide, the attitudes expressed in Tuesdays with Morrie offer, alas, no prescriptive resistance. They can be no more than a sweet interlude, a brief way station along the path paved by Dr. Kevorkian—and by all the kinder and gentler Kevorkians who are waiting a step or two behind. On that path, the signpost, brief and desolating, reads: You are alone.

_____________

1 Doubleday, 192 pp., $19.95.

2 In writing this book about Lou Gehrig’s disease, Mitch Albom, who has been voted America’s number-one sports columnist ten times by his colleagues, tellingly misquotes Gehrig’s farewell speech at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939. Gehrig said: “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Albom has him saying: “Today I feel like the luckiest man on the face of the earth” (emphasis added). This little slip is of the essence of the solipsism that infects Tuesdays with Morrie.

_____________

 

 

[Nemra]

1 hour ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

I wondered where she went.

Other forum. There has been a drama here a year ago.

[Bobby_2021]

4 hours ago, eos_nyxia said:

How is anyone supposed to prove that things get better after you die without supernatural or paranormal means? Or did you mean something else?

I was only replying to him. Proof is ridiculous in these contexts. Even if you prove anything, it will not be accepted, emotionally.

4 hours ago, eos_nyxia said:

) In any case, what justification does anyone have for the sheer selfishness of telling other people to be in pain... basically for your own benefit and moral code/ belief system? So that your reality is kept safe and intact, so that your idea of a fair/ just worldview is preserved?

If n number of people apply for assisted suicide, will you accept all those n people for AS?

At some point, you got to say no.

I wonder what that point is.

5 hours ago, eos_nyxia said:

IMO it's not so different in attitude with people who are pro everyone having kids, but when it comes to doing something themselves about creating a better social support system for mothers and families, let alone actually being the person to help these people directly.... pretty much all of these people who tell others what to do with their life are conveniently absent and absolved of responsibility.

To covert your empathy to get something done in reality is a whole different ball game.

Conservatives yap about having kids but block any social schemes that may take care of kids.

Liberals yap about social programs but they are more interested in sending that money abroad to wage wars in fuck knows where.

The problem plaguing these people is ignorance.

Mere empathy is not enough. You need understanding and strong will. You need to be clear on what your guidelines. This is how you make things practical.

[Yimpa]

19 hours ago, zurew said:

People shouldn't downplay the seriousness of mental illness. No matter what you think  right now about  how strong your character or mind is - a bad enough psychedelic trip can tear your mind apart. 

For some people with mental illness is like this: You either have a never ending very bad psychedelic trip or its a frequently scheduled very bad psychedelic trip .

This is why psychedelic-assisted therapy is key. I was lucky enough to do it several times, but $700 per session isn’t cheap.  And we don’t have enough therapists trained in exploring psychedelics. My life would certainly be much worse right now had I not gone through those sessions. 

[Nivsch]

On 24.4.2024 at 4:43 AM, Leo Gura said:

BPD can be a really taxing, stubborn, life-long condition. It's hard for such people to live normal well-functioning lives because their mind is so chaotic.

It's no surprise that such people have a high suicide rate.

It's hard for a normal person to understand the hell that BPD can be and how stubborn it is.

I guess this applies to cases when the person has zero motivation to improve.

But when someone HAS motivation, and no matter how hard his situation is, if he is consistent, there is no reason he won't improve.

After all, the degree is what seperates those people from the rest and not the kind.

Almost every person has sometimes mild symptoms that remind a lite version of some mental condition, what shows those conditions originally stem from healthy humanly functions, but exaggerated due to many factors.

And for what spirituality exists at all if not to conquer our most profound mental challenges and learn from those, what I feel personally developing me the most.

Edited April 25 by Nivsch

[zurew]

1 hour ago, Bobby_2021 said:

I was only replying to him. Proof is ridiculous in these contexts. Even if you prove anything, it will not be accepted, emotionally.

17 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

I don't give 50-50. Maybe it could be 80-20. I don't know.

Which is why I say that AS is not the solution. 

You are free to prove me otherwise.

Well, all these arguments are probablistic and not 100%. Its all based on what you think you know and coming from that I think its more probablistic that it will eliviate pain rather than not. But even if we go with the 50-50, 50% chance of eliviating pain is pretty high, and that is probably much more higher chance compared to waiting in real life for someone to find a cure for you - my main point with all this is that I don't think that it is irrational to commit suicide in certain contexts , if your main goal is to get rid of your suffering.

Edited April 25 by zurew

[Bobby_2021]

33 minutes ago, zurew said:

Well, all these arguments are probablistic and not 100%. Its all based on what you think you know and coming from that I think its more probablistic that it will eliviate pain rather than not. But even if we go with the 50-50, 50% chance of eliviating pain is pretty high, and that is probably much more higher chance compared to waiting in real life for someone to find a cure for you - my main point with all this is that I don't think that it is irrational to commit suicide in a lot of contexts , if your main goal is to get rid of your suffering.

You do not take into account the possibility that the suffering could end while you are alive. Like using psychedelic assisted therapy for example. All of these things are under your control. You can change your destiny only while you are in the human body. That is the only benefit of being human for example.

If you do not take anything into account, then you are jumping into the unknown which does take control away from into fuck knows what. It is a huge gamble. And these people have plenty of karma in them. What if they reincarnate as a rat in some sewer in LA? It is a gamble, which is not a wise choice unless you have the proof that it could get better.

[zurew]

12 minutes ago, Bobby_2021 said:

You do not take into account the possibility that the suffering could end while you are alive. Like using psychedelic assisted therapy for example. All of these things are under your control. You can change your destiny only while you are in the human body. That is the only benefit of being human for example.

If you do not take anything into account, then you are jumping into the unknown which does take control away from into fuck knows what. It is a huge gamble. And these people have plenty of karma in them. What if they reincarnate as a rat in some sewer in LA? It is a gamble, which is not a wise choice unless you have the proof that it could get better.

If there would be a 100% chance that suicide will eliviate suffering, would you agree with it, or do you have a principled stand against it?

Edited April 25 by zurew

[Bobby_2021]

11 minutes ago, zurew said:

If there would be a 100% chance that suicide will eliviate suffering, would you agree with it, or do you have a principled stand against it?

Nope. Everybody would have already kill themselves already.

If something is good, I want it, and no one should be denied of it.

But the trick is to find what is good and what is not. Giving away power over your own destiny is usually not good. Because now is the only time when you have any capacity to change things the way you want.

[Alexop]

On 4/23/2024 at 11:25 AM, OBEler said:

We have more time to use our inner monologue.

Back then there was no time for this

This OMG! We are much more isolated than in the past. I am amazed how much more mental illness I find in Sweden than in my home country Romania. Here in Sweden they just go on sickleave and sit alone at home. There is nobody there to soothe them when the bullshit inner dialogue kicks in.

[Snader]

I've heard the criteria for green light on euthanasia is pretty strict and requires a tangible terminal diagnosis from a doctor/(s). Is it really, that such a statement as "no can do, you're a lost cause'' from a psychiatrist is enough?

[Sugarcoat]

She is lucky with that choice. Let her. I’m jealous . I think it should be more easily accessible considering how the world is today and how it can be , being human 

[eos_nyxia]

17 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

If n number of people apply for assisted suicide, will you accept all those n people for AS?

At some point, you got to say no.

I wonder what that point is.

IMO, a bottleneck-type effect is more than enough to deter people who might be doing it more "impulsively", which comes in the form of whatever series of passes and checks that people have to go through to reach their objective. For whatever already exists for countries that allow assisted suicide, this is likely a process that involves multiple years, I imagine at least 2-3 years at the bare minimum on top of a longer waitlist, and likely multiple psychiatric and/or medical assessments. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong...) That automatically weeds out the impulsive and those without determination, leaving a very small fraction of people who were actually serious about the outcome, have likely already thought about the outcome extensively, and have had more than enough time to come to terms with what they desire. Much like anything else which is difficult in life that involves going directly against the grain.

Though I don't think we collectively have much to worry about when it comes to this issue of influencing impressionable minds to commit suicide. I wouldn't say that it's making suicide more glamourous or accessible, since people who really want to do it, even if the motives are highly emotional and impulsive, will just do it anyway.

Which by the way, was already a known thing with certain cults and even literary works, which triggered clusters of suicides. For example, Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther" triggered many suicides when it came out in the late 1700s. Ironically, the book was written because the author himself was trying to process his own suicidal feelings, and his art came from figuring out how to make something positive and constructive despite it all.

Art is probably always going to be more glamourous (and therefore influential) than mainstream science and the government, and therefore more influential with impressionable and young minds. Should we just go back to banning art and media? (This is actually what happened with the Sorrows of Young Werther; I believe it got banned in 3 countries.)  The primary influencing factor is a fundamental shift in the emotional and moral fabric of the society first and foremost, and not the government permitting people to do something that most people fundamentally DO NOT want to do anyway.

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To covert your empathy to get something done in reality is a whole different ball game.

Conservatives yap about having kids but block any social schemes that may take care of kids.

Liberals yap about social programs but they are more interested in sending that money abroad to wage wars in fuck knows where.

The problem plaguing these people is ignorance.

Mere empathy is not enough. You need understanding and strong will. You need to be clear on what your guidelines. This is how you make things practical.

Correct. I was more thinking about this in terms of citizen involvement, people like you and I, discussing these issues on the internet. Though perhaps we should also take a look at what politicians DO first, and then measure that against what they say. Talk is cheap...

Decision-making without empathy usually leads to decisions that end up harming the people they are meant to protect though. I think of it as Essential Step 1... Without a deep empathy and comprehensive perspective, there is no foundation for anything good and lasting.

Edited April 25 by eos_nyxia

[eos_nyxia]

Added Thought:

To make it too much harder than it already is... is patronizing, since it's most often based on the assumption that people can't or don't deserve to make their own fundamental decisions about the quality and meaning of their own life and experience. If you truly care about the well-being of suicidal people (as opposed to obsessing about them being able to do it in a more "convenient" and painless way rather than killing themselves), then forbidding this is likely to backfire and cause those people to suffer more because of the sheer amount of invalidation already existing in their subjective experience. It is unlikely to stop someone from either wanting to kill themselves or actually doing it when it gets bad enough and they get desperate.

IMO this is a bit different than the government not providing assisted suicide facilities because they've decided that making decisions about death isn't their jurisdiction, just because it is not within their scope of responsibilities as a government.

Intentions and reasons matter, especially when people don't live in social vacuums.

Often it is actually INVALIDATION, ISOLATION, and self-negation at the heart of suicidal ideation, not just "pain" alone, whether psychological or physical, even if the pain seems massive and unending in scope. It's believing that you are fundamentally alone, incurable, unreachable, not understandable, unlovable, not worthy... whether by humanity, God, Life itself, etc. Or believing that it is legitimately all for nothing.

Edited April 25 by eos_nyxia

[Buck Edwards]

On 25/04/2024 at 4:38 AM, Leo Gura said:

Preety, a former member here, had BPD and it made helping her very difficult because she could not control her emotions. It got so out of hand that eventually I had to ban her. I hope she finds help.

I feel bad for people stuck in such a situation.

Poor thing. She must miss ya. She must have needed your help very badly. You should have coached her privately. Bpd sufferers often react badly to their environments and supportive environments make a huge difference. Sad that you let her go. Suicide rates are high in bpd. Who knows some help from you would have made a difference, hindsight.