What do ya'll think of it?

So, there are talks about assisted suicide in terms of excruciating, long-term pain (inoperable cancer, for example), but what about in terms of mental health? Should a person with depression or a mental disorder that cripples their will to live have the right to assisted suicide, or should they just tough it out?

I have no idea how much assisted suicide costs in the long run, but my gut tells me it's cheaper than being hospitalized for something long-term. I'd like to see some opinions on this, as this is a topic that weighs heavily on my mind.

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Heavily situational, if someone has nothing to look forward to but excruciating pain due to a physical problem I'd lean towards it being permissible, but if it's more of an emotional or social issue the focus should be on counseling or medication.

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One could make the same argument when it comes to physical anguish instead of mental. There are counseling and therapeutic services for cancer patients and survivors, and pain meds have come a long way (though addiction is something to be mindful of).

One could say that living day-to-day off of medication isn't living at all, but hello mental illness.

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I'm more picturing scenarios where even with medication an individual wouldn't be able to live a semblance of normal life. Just pain while bedridden.

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Depend on the situation really, I don't think it's a topic I would want to talk about.

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One things for sure. We know my Grandma would not have wanted to live for those 10 years as a mindless husk once Alzheimer's fully took her. After that my Mom made it very clear that if she were diagnosed she'd take her own life before she let herself be reduced to that.

And that's why my (paternal) grandmother had a DNR order on record (though it was kind of ignored at one point but that's a bit of a different issue). It's kind of interesting that DNR orders are a much less contentious subject.

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I'm all for assisted suicide. If you want to die and don't have the means to get it done, it's an act of cruelty to keep you alive. And I think the key point here is the "no means to get it done" part, i.e. if you're a vegetable, paralyzed, or surely gone fishing.

If you're suffering crippling depression, but is otherwise physically fit, at least enough to tie a noose around your neck or down a bottle of pills and scotch, then no, don't have someone else take your life. Be glad you're not at the point of actually being able to commit suicide yet, and seek whatever help is available. Apparently you don't want to die, really, because if you did you would've.

You guys know where I am on this topic. But, sadly, it's an area in which I have trouble finding common ground with contemporary secular morality.

Life. It is what it is.

As always my thinking is a bit on the futurist side, I am thinking of the time when we are all functionally immortal and in that case certainly everyone should have a right to die when they choose.

But when disease and aging are gone and accidents and murder are rare voluntary death will be by far the biggest cause of death. Which is why I would punish suicide (punish their family) so as to encourage people to go through the proper channels where therapy and other means of restoring passion for life are exhausted before death is approved.

I dread the idea of humans becoming more or less immortal mostly due to the fact that I have no faith in humanity not destroying the planet at the same time more so than we already are.

I find the overpopulation fears as an argument against immortality stupid. Going by that logic we might as well execute everyone over an arbitrary age to lessen the strain on the planet. But we waste entire fortunes to extend the lives of our loved ones by mere years and they spend those years often in pain and suffering all kinds of ignominy caused by old age.

It seems vastly superior to eliminate the source of human suffering and make losing a loved one a rare event that happens after they lived a full life and not a cruel tragedy and an inevitability. Imagine not having to lose your parents or grandparents, your friends and to spare your kids the pain of losing you.

Long story short fixing the hurdles that immortality presents seems vastly better than swallowing the medicine of "mortality."

Well I mean the population going lower would be good in many countries but you can do that in ways that don't involve killing anyone people but instead educating them to not have more than 2-3 kids. It's a silly thing to argue though as I really really really doubt immortality will ever be a thing and even if it was it'd be something only the rich/the powerful would have access to. I can see the only real way for immortality being something akin to Ghost in the Shell with cybernetics and if we ever got to that point after years and years of all the social issues there'd likely be quite a few regulations.

I think regenerative medicine that opens the way for biological immortality is much closer than you think. What with gene editing and repairing and our ever increasing understanding of the human body and diseases. There is also the thing where new understandings and procedures may extend your life by X years in which time another does it for Y and so on until you are finally safe. But still something tells me I will still end up being the last guy to die of old age or disease

Though I will add that you and people like you who think that long life (a better term) will create misery, poverty and chaos may end up ensuring that only the rich and powerful (or even nobody) gets the treatments to save their lives. Fear and poor ideas (if we can and should reduce child birth now for ecological reasons, why not do the same then?) could not only retard this technology dooming millions but bring about even worse kinds of thinking as we approach a world of full automation. Don't spread fear, spread hope.

I'm not worried about 'poverty, misery, and chaos' though yes they are problems (some of which will get worse) and they will need solutions since immortality doesn't make all of societies problems go away. I'm worried about us destroying what's left of the natural world to have billions more human on this planet as we already have put incredible strain on our resources but I guess we can be the immortal beings living on a desert rock with no way off. Another issue is that an immortal society will end up with a huge social divide as well as obviously the person that's been alive for 1000 years is going to have a hell of a lot more than the person that's been alive for 100 though sure we can fantasize that we can create a classless society. You also don't have the progression of society any longer with those with 'old fashioned' values dying off. If people from the 1800's were still around I bet you none of the changes that have occurred over the last 80 years would have happened.

I hate the idea of 'dooming millions' and acting like death is not a natural part of the cycle of life as well. In the end people are still going to die in a immortal society as well just in much more violent and painful ways. The reality is that immortality is not only benefits and comes with a fair share of negatives that may or may not have resolutions.

Sure, death is natural. So is dysentery but I doubt you'd be okay with by shitting yourself to death before reaching the age of thirty. Us humans have always paved all over nature when it was bad for us, why would death of all things get an exception?

Ultimately from my PoV all your arguments still fall prey to the "medicine is worse than the disease" issue. Yeah there will be serious issues but we will work through them. What you are arguing is same as the guy who would not want us to eradicate smallpox because it is natural and keeps the population down. Or the guy who thinks we should still be having massive wars every thirty years because they represent "a unique hygiene of the world." I think even you would say that is faulty logic from our high seat in the <current year> or maybe you do agree with them, which is beyond morally repugnant to me.

I don't get the fascination with eternal life. I dread the thought of living forever.

I'm not going to argue that death and finality is what gives life meaning, or that without it we would live pointless lives, because I think that's a relative matter, and it varies from person to person.

What I will argue, however, is that it'd run the risk of growing tediously boring. For anyone with steady and consistent routines life is pretty much a series of repeating patterns appearing with slightly different coats of colour each time. I'd argue that most people in the world already live a sort of Groundhog Day-life, and have done since the dawn of civilization. It'd take unending and constant change to make an eternal life even slightly bearable.

Aye, there's the rub.

Seriously, both alternatives I can anticipate horrify me - the zero-point of oblivion and the expanding infinities of madness. My only and most desperate hope is that somewhere beyond the capacity and confines of my fleshy meat brain there IS room for a third option and a greater, more wholesome truth.

But that's enough of my serious face for one day. Let me go take a pratfall or something to keep things silly.

EDIT: This is actually the subject of the great artwork "The Torment of Existence Weighed Against the Horror of Nonbeing". See my avatar.

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In the end none of the things you've said have convinced me humans will magically stop being idiots by the time we were to ever invent immortality nor have you provided solutions to the few issues I presented (and there are more).

Meh, you worry too much. We get tedium every waking day and obivion each night we sleep. We do fine regardless.

We do fine with limited tedium and limited oblivion, sure (and the fact that we do sort of baffles me. I can't explain how suicide isn't the number one cause of death, on a global scale, but I feel it should be).

Imagine tedium, or oblivion, ad infinitum. That's scary. Infinities and forevers, by their very nature, bring anxiety to the human mind. Absolute void is the same. Infinity is as silly a concept as division by zero when trying to rationalize it. We're practically incapable of imagining it for real.

There's also the neat psychological effect where time 'speeds up' as you age as a year in your life at 90 is a much smaller part of your life than when it was when you were 10. The way to combat that is to constantly learn and do new things as you get older. Of course living forever means you'll never ever retire so most people would be stuck in a tedious job doing the same thing for centuries so they'd likely take their own lives in time.