(anonymous posting as what I did may be illegal in my locality)
My mother committed suicide a few years ago. Her first attempt failed, and there was about a 2 month period where she was honest with my brother and me about the fact that she intended to try again. I decided to accept her decision and spent the time with her well, instead of fighting with her or attempting to get her institutionalised.
I think her decision to commit suicide was rational. Three years before her suicide, she'd become addicted to pethidine, an injected prescription opiate. She was in a profession that gave her ready access to prescriptions. After about a year of addiction the professional body found out about her abuse, and action was taken against her. Ultimately she failed to comply with their regulations and was banned from practicing her profession.
At the time of her suicide, she was in her late 60s, with no savings, unable to work, and in deep despair over what had come of her life. She was in poor health and had alcohol and codeine dependencies. Her assessment was that she could not see what she had to look forward to. I reluctantly agreed.
I loved my mother, and she achieved a great deal in her life. But a difficult upbringing meant that she always had extreme trouble opening up to people and forming emotionally meaningful relationships. Ultimately I think this was behind her substance problem, and it left her with little in her life.
I know that this isn't the common case with suicide. My cousin also committed suicide. He was 19, and had just failed his apprenticeship. He came from a very middle class family concerned about their social standing, and his sisters were just such fine upstanding citizens. I think he felt like a screw up. He was coming down off MDMA at the time, and hung himself. I think that's how most suicides go: it's that critical moment, and the person really does have so much to look forward to. My cousin was well loved by a great many people.
I do worry that this thread might encourage that second, tragic, kind of suicide. But I hope that this is a place where we can share taboo topics, too, so I'm willing to take the risk. Obviously I can tell few people about how my mother really died. I prefer to be open, so I find this unfortunate.
I was saddened to learn of the recent death by suicide of Chris Capel, known here as pdf23ds. I didn't know him personally, but I was an occasional reader of his blog. In retrospect, I regret not having ever gotten into contact with him. Obviously, I don't know that I could have prevented his death, but, as one with mental-health issues myself, at least I could have made a friend, and been one to him. Now I feel a sense of disappointment that I'll never get that chance.
Having said that, I must say that I take his arguments here very seriously. I do not consider it to be automatic that every suicide is the "wrong" decision. We can all imagine circumstances under which we would prefer to die than live; and given this, we should also be able to imagine that these kinds of circumstances may vary for different people. And if one is already accepting of euthanasia for incurable physical suffering, it should not be that much of a leap to accept it for incurable psychological suffering as well.
Of course, as Chris acknowledges, this doesn't imply that everyone who is contemplating suicide is actually being rational. People may for instance be severely mistaken about their prospects for improvement, especially while in the midst of acute crisis.(Conceivably, that could even have been his own situation.) Nonetheless, I think many of the usual arguments that people use to show that suicide is "wrong" are bad arguments. For example, consider what is probably the most common argument: that committing suicide will inflict pain upon friends and family. It frankly strikes me as absurd (and grotesquely unempathetic) to suppose that someone for whom life is so painful that they would rather die somehow has an obligation to continue enduring it just in order to spare other people the emotion of grief (which they are inevitably going to have to confront at some point anyway, at least until we conquer all death).
Ironically, society's demonization of suicide and suicidal people has negative consequences even from the standpoint of preventing suicide itself, as Chris points out:
It seems to me very possible that our society's fervor to prevent suicide may result in denying severely depressed people the compassion they need. This could theoretically be worth it if it prevented enough suicides that turned out to be worth preventing, but cases like Chris's raise doubt about this, in my mind. (From both angles: if Chris's decision was the right one for him, then the system is saving people it shouldn't be saving; if on the other hand it was the wrong decision, then we clearly see how the system failed him.)
Although I'm inclined to be sympathetic to Chris's view -- perhaps because I haven't always been maximally enthusiastic about my own existence myself -- there are some arguments that do worry me. Such as: if you think of future versions of yourself as separate agents, then suicide is a form of homicide. However, usually suicide is carried out on the belief that the future selves would approve of their nonexistence; and all of our decisions have consequences (often irreversible) for our future selves, so this is a general ethical problem that transcends the specific issue of suicide.
This post is a place to rationally discuss the ethics and rationality of suicide, as well as our attitudes (on an individual level, and as reflected in our institutions) toward suicidal people and, more generally, those suffering from psychological conditions such as depression.
I'm sad that Chris won't be able to participate.