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MixedNuts comments on Ethics and rationality of suicide - Less Wrong
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Most people who're suicidal aren't even subject to particularly harmful experiences, rather, they're in a depressive mental state where their baseline level of satisfaction is extremely low.
People experiencing random negative events are likely to regress to the mean, and people suffering depression may be treated or spontaneously recover. Most people who survive suicide attempts end up being thankful that they did, and I would never argue that suicide is not usually a bad idea in cases where individuals are considering it. But there's nothing that prevents a person from having systematic causes of unpleasantness in their life, which will not simply regress to the mean and cannot readily be treated.
Very true. Things like biochemistry can cause people to have pervasive problems, and sometimes the drugs we have right now don't help. In those cases, suicide might be the best available option. My own recommendation to a person like that, though, would be to commit "suicide" in a way that lets them be frozen, with instructions to only revive them when we have developed medications that will work where the drugs they've tried have failed.
If their problem is something else that is truly systematic, then suicide might be a viable option as well, but in the heightened emotional state of someone suffering from that much pain, I genuinely do think that it is doubtful they can be as rational as we would like. They may easily overlook simple solutions that are out of their search space. That doesn't mean there aren't cases where suicide genuinely is a better option, rather, it means that if possible, those people should probably try to get help from as many people as possible to see if they can solve the problem, before they start considering suicide as an option.