Assisted suicide should be for severe mental illnesses as well?
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. I’m not sure where I stand but this thought keeps niggling inside my brain.
I don’t.
Terminal physical illnesses are a ticking clock that by their nature don’t have survival rates that could reach a point where treatments improve.
The same can’t be said for mental illness, where treatments may well dramatically improve within a patient’s lifetime.
As well, when you research suicide repeat rates or the testimony of suicide survivors, it’s a pretty bleak picture for the times it succeeds. Nearly every person that attempts says that the moment past the point they would have been able to take it back there was an immediate regret over the attempt. 9/10 never attempt again.
It’s a horrible choice to end up making, and I don’t think it should be on the table except in the cases where it is purely skipping a very painful and drawn out inevitability. And with the rate of research in study of the brain, I think a life of unchanging treatment options for any mental illness is far from inevitable, as difficult as the present may be for some.
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I don’t know. I’m torn on this. I think it would have to depend on a lot of different things, like if all treatment options have been tried and unsuccessful.
I don’t know, though. I’m torn.
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I’d say for treatment resistant depression it should be, because thats a pretty morbid existence.
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I say no. It shouldn’t be permitted for schizophrenia. Just for painful cancers
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