assisted suicide vs suicide prevention

[Rev. Rye]

Usually when we say we support assisted suicide, it's because someone has a terminal illness, or that they're already old. If it's just depression, and they're still physically young and fit, then we'll work on fixing their psychological problems.

Well, maybe if it's in a sort of prison program that's a voluntary alternative to capital punishment (I've tossed this idea around here a few times before) where a convict voluntarily kills himself because either he has no prospect of leaving prison or if they've seen the error of their ways but their crimes are so horrible they can't redeem themselves (child molestation comes to mind), but that's as far as I'd go.

A lot of the time, suicidal thoughts can be fixed. I recently watched the Ian Curtis biopic Control and it goes into detail about how he couldn't handle the pressures of his newfound stardom, and the crucial part of it was the onset of his epilepsy, which frequently hampered his ability to perform because there was no guarantee he couldn't go through a performance without having a full-blown seizure.





Things are not helped by the fact that understanding of epilepsy and how to treat it was less than optimal, to the extent that 25 years after Ian killed himself, his bassist Peter Hook sent a list of the medications he took to try to keep the epilepsy in check to a modern specialist and he said "Oh my God. This was guaranteed to kill him." Then, on 17 May 1980, he went home and hanged himself. There were a lot of other factors, but imagine what could have been if Ian actually had some proper help.

Also, it should be noted that even Dignitas is okay with suicide prevention for those who could potentially still be saved.