wavefreak58 wrote:
herbeey wrote:
I'm sure everyone who has been saying that asking about how to do it least painfully demonstrates that they don't want to do it has plenty of personal experience in this area, but it still strikes me as wrong. It's nice to think that this might be the case, but that doesn't make it so.
The only way that could be valid reasoning is if you construe suicide as an impulsive thing.
Suicide is not about a painless way to die. Suicide is about ending unendurable psychological pain. The method becomes immaterial.
Suicide for those with a terminal illness is a different matter of course.
a - "Suicide is not about a painless way to die."
b - "Suicide is about ending unendurable psychological pain."
c - "The method becomes immaterial."
I agree with a and b, but c does not follow.
Maybe in your personal ethics, suicide should only be able to happen when the person is willing to be put through another metaphorical hell to die. My personal ethics find that pretty sick.
The method is not immaterial. In a suicidal state, one's expectation of what any given method entails might become significantly distorted. I had a friend who thought that because so many of their friends had hung themselves (and not in the quick way) then it can't be that bad. Suicidal people definitely can fear the method, but their mind can also distort in ways that minimise the
anticipated suffering.
But even when the suffering isn't minimised, it seems so inhumane to be forced to go through even more excessively hellish experiences in order to get out of the current hellish experience. When you want to get out of a hellish experience (ie, you're suicidal), I would've thought it goes without saying that the one thing that isn't 'immaterial' to you is hellish experiences, and that they are the one thing you are seeking to minimise/avoid.
Suicide is not usually a rational thing. While truthfully, never actually having committed suicide makes my thoughts speculative, in my worst periods of depression, method was far less important than escaping the mental anguish. Ironically, the only thing that prevented completion of such an act was my obsession with ethical consistency which is part and parcel of my mental map vis-a-vis my place on the spectrum. I could determine no justification for suicide that was not at its core selfish and doing something that selfish contradicts a rather intricately constructed ethos. Had I resolved this conundrum, method would have been entirely immaterial.
04 Jan 2011, 6:58 am
