Acrobatic-Cause-4925 t1_ivgbeal wrote on November 7, 2022 at 7:34 PM

I have a couple of questions that I would like to be debated about.

* Why is assisted/suicide due to mental illness still not accepted and illegal?

I know that there are countries (famously Switzerland (*1)) in which assisted suicide is legal, but a person that wants to make use of such services must meet a series of strict conditions (*2). In particular, among others, this person must suffer from an unrecoverable or highly disabling physical impairment or must be just old enough. It follows and is even explicitly stated that assisted suicide can't be offered to people with mental disorders.

I would like to understand the reason for such a broad exclusion. I know that a person can potentially recover from a mental condition and eventually achieve a fulfilling life. But, as far as I see it, as there are physical conditions for which there is no known cure, something similar might be said for mental illness.

I want to state a few reasons: sometimes (*3) a person doesn't fully recover from mental disorders. sometimes (or in some places) there isn't enough medical expertise to cure a illness that would be otherwise treatable. sometimes people are just broken beyond repair. sometimes a person just doesn't have the resources to obtain appropriate treatment.

And I'm noticing that these four reasons can be equivalently applied to physical conditions too.

Footnotes:

(*1) In my country (Italy) assited suicide is illegal and we happened to have a few cases of people going to Switzerland for the service. Marco Cappato helped people travel to the clinic and subsequently challenged the Italian law by self-reporting for some specific crimes which such law mentions.

(*2) This might be a whole other topic, but I always wondered how ethics and laws choose thresholds for various classifications.

(*3) I just use "sometimes" because I didn't research any known precise statistics.

* How is civilization dealing with the flaws of the legal system?

There have been many cases of people unjustly sentenced to prison or even with death penalty. It's clear to me that often there can't be a total certainty that the defendant was really responsible for the crime. Conversely sometimes it's obvious that the defendent is guilty, but by a glitch of the law it happens to be walking free.

Capital_Net_6438 t1_ivhfzhd wrote on November 8, 2022 at 12:10 AM

As someone who has a permanent severe mental illness - bipolar disorder - I have a strong view on your first question. 100% of our focus wrt laws on people such as myself should be on improving our lives. (My life is pretty sweet as it happens.) I've met many many people like myself and definitely never met a single one whose life could not be improved through medication, therapy - and you know, love.

SpringChives t1_ivt7fdb wrote on November 10, 2022 at 1:03 PM

>Why is assisted/suicide due to mental illness still not accepted and illegal?

Probably because to choose assisted suicide, one has to be able to make a rational decision of their own free will. Since mental illness could directly affect the ability to make that decision in a way that physical illnesses wouldn't, lawmakers took the simple way out and blocked all people with mental illnesses.

I can see the logic in that, but I don't think every mental illness prevents the person suffering from it from being able to make a rational choice, and we could rely on doctors to make that determination, just like we already rely on them to determine whether the physical conditions are incurable.

incorrectphilosopher t1_ivwy019 wrote on November 11, 2022 at 5:31 AM

I have considered assisted suicide--or rather, I have thought about what I would do if it were legal in the United States, where I live--during some of the low points of my life.

Let's just say the patient doesn't have free will. So you decide not to follow the patient's request for assisted suicide. The patient is angry at you because... the patient has the free will to be so. Proof by contradiction.

Now let's say you argue that the patient has no choice but to do that (be angry at you because you denied death). Well then I can say that you have no choice but to argue that, meaning you don't have free will, and the notion of free will doesn't exist.

Since your argument relies on a non-falsifiable idea yet demands "proof" that the patient is incurable, it is irrational. Belief in a metaphysical idea such as free will is one thing, using it to determine whether a person has the right to assisted suicide is another.

I just don't believe doctors should be the gatekeepers to "assisted" suicide. If the patient doesn't make the determination as to whether to end their own life, it is no longer a suicide, but a mercy killing (whether mercy killings are a good idea is simply a separate argument). This is especially true in a medical setting, where the patient is not likely to push the button to end their life. Factually, it's just not a suicide anymore if it's the doctor doing it. Assisted suicide is just a false label at that point.

Let's say I was desperate enough to take the poison (as Socrates did rather for contrasting reasons, instead of compromising his morals, being instead uncompromising). I would not (in the present moment) find it only a disservice, but rather a crime against my rights as a free being to have my life unwillingly in the hands of another. I would nod my head, inwardly hating the same people who released me to death, since my fate is not in my hands, but theirs. In a sense, I am no longer a free person, but a slave to their judgement without a need for due process.

And further, how would one regulate such an industry? The doctors get paid to do the procedure--presumably well--and that creates a massive conflict of interest. The patient cannot come back from the dead to complain, and the family (if any) is given the documents signed by the patient. No one can make a claim for a wrongful death, since there is no way to prove that the doctors were wrong about the patient's desire for death and lack of cure, since the patient is dead!

In short, I think that assisted (or unassisted) suicide should either be totally legal and voluntary, or totally illegal. I prefer illegality, but I consider that an invalidated opinion.

Personally, I think the reason for its illegality (and many of the legalities, social norms, beliefs, etc for societies today) is simply utilitarian and a type of societal natural selection. Something about assisted suicide must have made societies weak in the past, so societies that did not allow it were naturally stronger than societies that did. Or maybe it's just happenstance (determined happenstance, that is). But today things are different, with mental illness on the rise alongside nihilism. Maybe we are being more open minded if we allow things like that.