Sui Caedere
Not until recently, killing oneself either in avoidance or as a consequence of disgrace was considered the honorable thing to do. Now, it is considered as sign of mental illness, and constitutes a medical emergency. Why? Although it is the case that mentally ill people may pathologically wish to kill themselves, how is the converse of this true? Why does wanting to kill yourself a sign of mental illness?
Personally, I cannot imagine any kind of condition in my life where I would feel dishonored or ashamed enough to kill myself. Is this healthy, or do I just have no backbone?
posted by e-kvetcher at 1:03 PM
3 Comments:
It probably depends on the culture. If you are going to face really nasty consequences for whatever has happened, such as will cause a lot of pain to him and quite possibly to your family, a simple cost benefit analysis may well reasonably lead to the decision to kill yourself.
That said, I don't feel like that's so likely to be the case in this culture, and it's hard to imagine a case where it would be reasonable to kill yourself. Unless of course, a) you're mentally ill and not making reasonable decisions or b) you reasonably decide to kill yourself because you foresee a lifetime of complete misery, which only makes sense if you're mentally ill and not getting help.
you reasonably decide to kill yourself because you foresee a lifetime of complete misery, which only makes sense if you're mentally ill and not getting help.
So you're saying there are no longer considerations of honor that would make it impossible to live with oneself in today's society?
You are not allowing for any true condition of complete misery - any suicidal ideation is mental illness?
I personally find it hard to imagine a situation in which one can reasonably assume that their future life will contain too much misery to justify itself. I suppose people who are very ill, as well, but in general I tend to feel that the world as it is has enough options that a healthy person should be able to be happy a decent percentage of the time. If you could suggest a hypothesis in which life simply is rationally not worth living, I'd probably accept it, I'm just hard put to imagine any.
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