Processing our mortality

[bennyboy]

I wonder, is there such a thing as suicide not driven by a chemically imbalanced depressive state?  Factors such as drug abuse and prolonged physical suffering can bring about the same storm of chemical imbalances seen in clinical depression.

I'm thinking of the recent "right to die" story about the 27 year old girl who had terminal brain cancer, and was granted the legal right to end her own life at a time of her choosing when the physical and emotional anguish became unbearable.  Is there a line to be drawn here?  She must have certainly fit the diagnostic criteria for clinical depression, but do we consider her choice a rational and philosophical one, compared to...say...Robin a Williams', who was suffering from Lewy Body dementia?  

I can think of very many cases where suicide would be a rational decision, maybe even a noble one. A soldier behind enemy lines might commit suicide to avoid being interrogated and causing great harm to his fellow soldiers. One might commit suicide to make a strong point, as Tibetan monks do when they burn themselves to death in front of the Chinese legislature. One might see suicide as the greater good-- for example, a very strong environmentalist might decide that humanity is a cancer to the world, and decide no longer to participate in our rape of the Earth. An old person might decide that instead of costing his family hundreds of thousands in health care costs for terminal cancer, he'd rather sit on the beach with a bottle of sleeping pills and watch the sun come up one last time.

As for the right to die-- it clearly CAN be rational, but with a caveat: we've all had times in life where we were so sick that if there were an "end it now" button next to our beds, we might have pressed it just to end the pain-- even though a few days and a couple bottles of orange juice would have been enough to get through it.