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crabbyolbastard I decided to start doing some digging. Being a person who has been personally affected by someone close who chose suicide over life, I wanted to make a go of understanding the mind-set of a person contemplating suicide. I realize that it is highly influenced by the societal, cultural, and religious underpinnings to each individual situation... But I also wanted to explore what was out there.
As a recovered Catholic, and especially after watching Religulous at the theater the other day, I don't need anyone pouncing about the sacredness of every life and how suicide is a sin, etc. Who wrote the Bible and every other "holy" book out there? Men. Not mankind either - men. For Christian doctrine has by and large held that suicide is morally wrong, despite the fact that no passage in Scripture unequivocally condemns suicide. Didn't Christ commit suicide? What he did is very reminiscent to what we refer to today as suicide by cop. Was that going a bit too far? Anyway.... on with the discussion on suicide.
I did a Google search for suicide rationale because when I used reason for suicide I got a bunch of speculation about suicide bombers, suicide terrorists, etc.
I found this interesting treatise on rational suicide that seems to have been published in the Washington Post back in 2004. The whole rationale behind this movement (pun intended) reminded me of an episode of Star Trek TNG, Half a Life where Lwaxana Troi falls in love with an (alien, yet humanoid species) scientist who is due to commit ritual suicide.
This article from Stanford University is also pretty interesting. The very long article addresses a gamut of questions and indeed begins by stating: For philosophers, suicide raises a host of conceptual, theological, moral, and psychological questions. Among these questions are: What makes a person's behavior suicidal? What motivates such behavior? Is suicide morally permissible, or even morally required in some extraordinary circumstances? Is suicidal behavior rational? Okay, I had to resort to skimming after a while, it is a very, very long article. The only thing lacking is that it focuses specifically on western, Christian philosophy. Even though some of that is obviously based upon ancient, classical (Greek) thought, it is at its heart, ethnocentric.
There's this article about a documentary from 2005 about a man named Stearn who, with a series of fatal diseases & conditions brewing in his body, when he committed suicide coined a term, self-made death, where death by your own hand is made out to be a choice like any other in life.
If people are legally allowed to put a Do Not Resuscitate order in place, (not that they are always followed) create Living Wills that delineate what they want (which are sometimes ignored) - why can't they choose death? Would the people who insist on denying people who choose DNR or who order via Living Will that they do not want to ever exist on life support in turn to be accused of being selfish in prolonging the suffering of an individual? Death With Dignity is described in the latter portion of this article.
There is The Hemlock Society - which in the United States (which can't understand the Socrates/Plato reference) is called Compassion and Choices and Death With Dignity as resources about End-of-Life situations and decisions.
This wikipedia article has some non-western, cultural opinions of suicide. New to me terms: Shame suicide, Heroic suicide (though I have read of examples of both, this is the first time I'd heard it called this.) A wiki on the philosophical views of suicide. Antoher on religious views. More on the "right to die" movement.
Hrm. Interesting: "Philosophical thinking in the 19th and 20th century has led, in some cases, beyond thinking in terms of pro-choice, to the point that suicide is no longer a last resort, or even something that one must justify, but something that one must justify not doing. Many forms of Existentialist thinking essentially begin with the premise that life is objectively meaningless, and proceed to the question of why one should not just kill oneself; they then answer this question by suggesting that the individual has the power to give personal meaning to life."
I am undecided. About whether I can accept another person's suicide as a rational act. I don't deny people the choice to lead, or end, their own life, as long as they do not harm another in their actions or inactions.
In my particular case; Yes, I grieved. Yes, I was angry. Yes, I thought for a very long time that they had taken "the easy way out" of life and were cowardly in self-annihilation. They couldn't cope with a situation that life didn't prepare them for. Just because I was able to live through it, and then their suicide, doesn't mean another would or could. I can't say I understand entirely, but I've made my peace with it.
crabbyolbastard I decided to start doing some digging. Being a person who has been personally affected by someone close who chose suicide over life, I wanted to make a go of understanding the mind-set of a person contemplating suicide. I realize that it is highly influenced by the societal, cultural, and religious underpinnings to each individual situation... But I also wanted to explore what was out there. As a recovered Catholic, and especially after watching Religulous at the theater the other day, I don't need anyone pouncing about the sacredness of every life and how suicide is a sin, etc. Who wrote the Bible and every other "holy" book out there? Men. Not mankind either - men. For Christian doctrine has by and large held that suicide is morally wrong, despite the fact that no passage in Scripture unequivocally condemns suicide. Didn't Christ commit suicide? What he did is very reminiscent to what we refer to today as suicide by cop. Was that going a bit too far? Anyway.... on with the discussion on suicide.
I did a Google search for suicide rationale because when I used reason for suicide I got a bunch of speculation about suicide bombers, suicide terrorists, etc.
I found this interesting treatise on rational suicide that seems to have been published in the Washington Post back in 2004. The whole rationale behind this movement (pun intended) reminded me of an episode of Star Trek TNG, Half a Life where Lwaxana Troi falls in love with an (alien, yet humanoid species) scientist who is due to commit ritual suicide.
This article from Stanford University is also pretty interesting. The very long article addresses a gamut of questions and indeed begins by stating: For philosophers, suicide raises a host of conceptual, theological, moral, and psychological questions. Among these questions are: What makes a person's behavior suicidal? What motivates such behavior? Is suicide morally permissible, or even morally required in some extraordinary circumstances? Is suicidal behavior rational? Okay, I had to resort to skimming after a while, it is a very, very long article. The only thing lacking is that it focuses specifically on western, Christian philosophy. Even though some of that is obviously based upon ancient, classical (Greek) thought, it is at its heart, ethnocentric.
There's this article about a documentary from 2005 about a man named Stearn who, with a series of fatal diseases & conditions brewing in his body, when he committed suicide coined a term, self-made death, where death by your own hand is made out to be a choice like any other in life.
If people are legally allowed to put a Do Not Resuscitate order in place, (not that they are always followed) create Living Wills that delineate what they want (which are sometimes ignored) - why can't they choose death? Would the people who insist on denying people who choose DNR or who order via Living Will that they do not want to ever exist on life support in turn to be accused of being selfish in prolonging the suffering of an individual? Death With Dignity is described in the latter portion of this article.
There is The Hemlock Society - which in the United States (which can't understand the Socrates/Plato reference) is called Compassion and Choices and Death With Dignity as resources about End-of-Life situations and decisions.
This wikipedia article has some non-western, cultural opinions of suicide. New to me terms: Shame suicide, Heroic suicide (though I have read of examples of both, this is the first time I'd heard it called this.) A wiki on the philosophical views of suicide. Antoher on religious views. More on the "right to die" movement.
Hrm. Interesting: "Philosophical thinking in the 19th and 20th century has led, in some cases, beyond thinking in terms of pro-choice, to the point that suicide is no longer a last resort, or even something that one must justify, but something that one must justify not doing. Many forms of Existentialist thinking essentially begin with the premise that life is objectively meaningless, and proceed to the question of why one should not just kill oneself; they then answer this question by suggesting that the individual has the power to give personal meaning to life."
I am undecided. About whether I can accept another person's suicide as a rational act. I don't deny people the choice to lead, or end, their own life, as long as they do not harm another in their actions or inactions.
In my particular case; Yes, I grieved. Yes, I was angry. Yes, I thought for a very long time that they had taken "the easy way out" of life and were cowardly in self-annihilation. They couldn't cope with a situation that life didn't prepare them for. Just because I was able to live through it, and then their suicide, doesn't mean another would or could. I can't say I understand entirely, but I've made my peace with it.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-13 06:08 pm (UTC)I would quibble that a lot of Christianity (maybe not all, I can't speak specifically for the Catholics) would say that if we regard the death of Christ as a suicide, it's not so much suicide by cop as it is the heroic suicide. Guys who commit suicide by cop are people who want to die but don't have the will or courage to commit the act...people who commit heroic suicide are doing it so that others may live.
But anyway...
Under some circumstances, suicide can be a rational act, perhaps the only available rational act. I think of the people who jumped out of the WTC on 9/11. They knew that death was certain, the only choice was by fire or fall. Given the choice between being burned to death, last moments of searing agony while choking for breath...vs one last moment of sheer freedom, and instant oblivion...I'd have taken the fall.
What goes through the mind of people who make the decision out of despair? Darkness, numbness, and the feeling that there is no future. The feeling that the only choices left are so bleak that the easiest path is ending, and that in the larger scheme of things what difference does it make? After all, a million years from now I'll be dead. Whether I live to see my next birthday or whether I live to be 100, in a million years it doesn't matter very much.
Or so we think.
What we fail to consider is the aftermath, and how it can affect others. It doesn't even matter who, it doesn't even matter how distant, it doesn't even matter how lost one thinks the connection is.
A young mother in despair ends her life one night, the last thing she looks at is the photo of the boy from school she'd dated, the boy she'd sent away because she loved someone else...and hadn't heard from him in ten years.
A month after her death, the phone rings at her parents house, it's the boy calling up trying to track down the girl from school that he never forgot.
Life is like that sometimes.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 10:31 am (UTC)Not that it had suicide in it (that I remember) but - speaking of happenstance and how it can affect the course of one's life - have you ever seen Sliding Doors?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 02:05 am (UTC)I'm not sure which is right, but you can see how it influenced my answer.
Regarding Sliding Doors, I've seen most of it, enough to get the idea: happenstance of catching or missing a train changes a life. Oh I can believe that, I can see major turning points in my own life that turned on a single event. 35 years ago I happened to answer a door in Boston one night, and it had a profound effect that is still with me today (good), more recently the random seating in a restaurant is having repercussions that may last for the rest of my life (also good...I hope).