Suicide

[bennyboy]

I'm saying that suicide quite often is a result of mental illness, and I don't think anyone here would argue we should hold the mentally responsible for a crime.  It's not that it's so much deterministic as it is that the person has a malfunctioning brain.  I assume we're accepting the legal sense that intent must be formed at some point to hold the person responsible?  My point was that a person committing suicide most likely cannot properly comprehend the consequences of their actions, which is truly the legal litmus test.

I've been borderline suicidal in my life, as well as borderline homicidal. Luckily, I managed to kill neither myself nor others, though I've done harm both to myself and others in my life. In both cases, my feelings so distorted my world view that I was essentially delusional-- my problems weren't really as bad as I thought they were, and any sensible person could have seen that time, combined with a change in lifestyle or circumstances, could provide hope of relief without drastic measures.

Tortured people arrive at a distorted idea about what will be needed to bring them peace. And the severity of the actions they are willing to take scales with the degree of torment they feel. It has nothing, really, to do with knowledge of consequence; it has much more to do with the degree of torment subverting their care about consequences.

A suicide victim doesn't just go along fine and then step in front of a bus. He or she ponders, dwells, considers, and pushes off suicide, partly because the consequences ARE known: death, and the suffering of others. That he might not be thinking about all this at that last moment doesn't, to my mind, mean he has a guilt-free mind.