Right to Die

[SteelCurtain]

I mean, how many moody teens would kill themselves after the "love of their life" broke their heart? I'm being 100% serious here.

[Edwardo Piet]

I guess I just believe that any mentally and physically healthy 18 year old wouldn't choose to go to a medical facility to die. I think that a desire to die is a sign of depression unless you're in a lot of physical pain -- I think the desire to death is motivated by psychological pain if not physical.

[Edwardo Piet]

I mean, how many moody teens would kill themselves after the "love of their life" broke their heart? I'm being 100% serious here.

Too many. That's one of the reasons I'd be against it being an absolute thing -- I don't think that a person's identity is represented by a temporary state of mind. If they're not allowed to do that and they feel better weeks, months or years down the line and they gratefully say to themselves "Thank fuck I wasn't allowed to die, I am so glad that that temporary state of mind wasn't considered to represent the whole of me", or something to that effect, it's that kind of thing that makes me think.

I think that the "remembering self" is at least as important as the "experiencing self", how we feel in one given moment doesn't represent who we are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgRlrBl-7Yg

[rexbeccarox]

I mean, how many moody teens would kill themselves after the "love of their life" broke their heart? I'm being 100% serious here.

That's the thing, though: they do it anyway. In fact, in the eighth grade, a boy broke up with his gf of a few months because he wanted to go with me, and she killed herself the next day.

I do, however, think there should be rules and guidelines for recognized right-to-die for anyone under consenting age.

[SteelCurtain]

I mean, how many moody teens would kill themselves after the "love of their life" broke their heart? I'm being 100% serious here.

That's the thing, though: they do it anyway. In fact, in the eighth grade, a boy broke up with his gf of a few months because he wanted to go with me, and she killed herself the next day.

I do, however, think there should be rules and guidelines for recognized right-to-die for anyone under consenting age.

Oh, I know they do. This would normalize it and make it easier, no?

My point here is that we can't treat the right to die with help from a medical facility as a bodily autonomy issue. Otherwise we have to start arguing that children don't have bodily autonomy sometimes, or that mentally challenged people don't have bodily autonomy, or that people with mental illness don't have bodily autonomy.

I support the right to death with dignity, I just don't think at this time I can get behind medically induced suicide as a right. There's so much room for unintended consequences. Shitty parents who don't want to take care of an autistic kid pressuring them into agreeing to something they couldn't understand. People dealing with loss choosing an easy out. Religious people thinking they'll be with loved ones again if they join them in the afterlife. Elderly folks with dementia and a lot of money willed to greedy children being convinced to end it.

I sat in rooms with soldiers coming back from war and literally feeling like aliens. They longed to go back to the streets of Fallujah and the chaos of war, because that's where they felt a sense of belonging. Many of them turned to drugs and alcohol to cope, most felt suicidal at times. We would use other words because I had a duty to report, but I know what they were talking about. I guarantee you we would needlessly lose a lot of those young men and women because they didn't have adequate coping skills for dealing with the brain trauma that is a wartime firefight. Skills they would learn if the military spent a millionth of what they spend on turning these kids into killing machines on turning them back into people.

[Edwardo Piet]

I think that the fact how a person feels and what they want moment to moment doesn't represent the person as a whole, and so respecting the wishes of someone when they're in a healthier state of mind is respecting the person as their "true self" and I'm sure when their health improves (provided they're not a hopeless case) and they then thank that no medical centre agreed to letting them die when they were in that frame of mind, is important. And I think the "Experiencing self" Vs "Remembering self" is very relevant. I know not everyone agrees with me here or thinks that my point that we are not who we are in any one given moment, and especially not when we're unwell or "not ourselves", is relevant, but that's my opinion on the matter

[abaris]

Do you think the abuse would be any greater than that in any other medical field?   I don't see any reason to believe it would necessarily be more serious than in any other healthcare area.

Well, it doesn't have to be any greater. It's terminal and so the money grabbing would literally be over corpses. Again, given our profit driven system, go figure what that would mean.

[robvalue]

I chose 3; I'm somewhere between 1 and 3.

I feel it should be everyone's right. I think it's cruel to force someone to live who doesn't want to.

That being said, I feel we also have a responsibility to "save people from themselves" in some circumstances. I think the important question is whether they are in a "normal" state of mind.

This is rather tricky to define, but I'd say that it should represent the best you can reasonably expect the particular person to be in. If they want to die but you have good reason to believe they will become more balanced and lucid, then a case could be made for stopping them from acting. If this is as good as it gets for the person, in all likelihood, then let them make the decision.

Being terminally ill isn't a deciding factor for me. I'd be happy to let a child make this decision too, if there is little chance of them improving and they can't bear their suffering.

Of course all such assisted suicides have to be very carefully handled, to try and avoid coercion and so on.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Any time, any reason.

[Edwardo Piet]

Okay I'm in full agreement with Robvalue here and he expressed my opinions far better than I did.