Quote:
Originally Posted by Cowperson
The point in my post would be that I think it's wrong to make a blanket statement about mental illness relieving someone of the responsibility of "choice."
Clearly there are choices made in some or many of these instances, just as you might be right to say that others are too sick to understand the import of their actions.
Cowperson
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Some of your examples seem to me to be a different species of "suicide," but I'll let that rest. I quoted the portion above, because it seems to me that this is where you go off-track a little bit--because of two things:
1. The organ you use to make choices is your brain. In a mentally ill person, it is the brain that is diseased. This affects their ability to make good decisions.
2. It's not "too sick to understand"--it's that their ability to comprehend actions, understand their lives or even engage with reality is in severe cases quite impaired. A better way to say it is "too sick to comprehend the alternatives to suicide." Again--it's your brain that allows you to weigh options and pick the best one. When your brain is diseased, that ability is seriously compromised.
I also reject the idea that depressed people kill themselves to relieve pain. As you say, there is often no "painless" way to do it anyway--but more importantly, the "rational" reason is in a sense irrelevant. Suicide is a symptom of a disease--and as such isn't really one thing or another in a moral sense. The easiest way to know this for sure is to look to all of the people in the world whose lives are complete, unending misery--and to realize how few of them actually kill themselves. The conclusion has to be this: suicide depends very little on external factors, and largely on internal ones--though there can be external triggers.
Calling suicide "selfish" is just one of those comforting, judgemental security-blankets people use as a way of avoiding something that's uncomfortable to understand--that our brains, like the rest of our bodies, are imperfect organs that sometimes malfunction--and sometimes kill us.