gr8mom said:
I don't believe in suicide I think it's a cop out. That being said there's no reason to keep someone alive if they don't wish to live, i.e. artificial resperation and such.
Do you think all suicide is a cop out? Even in the case of somethng like ALS (a/k/a Lou Gehrig's disease), in which the person is slowly going to lose all ability to move, including the ability to swallow or breathe, but will remain mentally intact and have full sensation. So they will feel everything, be aware of everything, but be unable to talk, move, breathe, eat, move, or control their bowels and bladder. They will have to be feed by a tube, breathe by a machine, wear a diaper +/- a urinary catheter, and be wheelchair-bound. The progression of all this is a bit variable, so the person faces all this without being able to anticipate when they will lose yet another independent function. There is also an associated dementia that some people get and some don't, so the person also must consider that they will lose their ability to reason as well.
In these situations, I don't see suicide as a cop out. It should be a personal decision. Some will decide to continue until the end (this is easier if they have access to excellent medical care, which is not true for everyone) and some will want to choose their death. I have no judgment of them either way; it is not a situation I am in, nor can I truly understand how it must be.
As an aside: One person who has continued to live with ALS is Steven Hawking, the famous physicist, and the world is a better place because of this. He is exceptional in just about every way imaginable, and I wouldn't use his experience as an argument for or against a terminal person wanting to take his own life. But he has a website (
link) that I find fascinating with regard to physics/cosmology and inspiring in terms of his attitude. Here is part of what he says about first learning he had ALS as a young doctoral student:
Not knowing what was going to happen to me, or how rapidly the disease would progress, I was at a loose end. The doctors told me to go back to Cambridge and carry on with the research I had just started in general relativity and cosmology. But I was not making much progress, because I didn't have much mathematical background. And, anyway, I might not live long enough to finish my PhD. I felt somewhat of a tragic character. I took to listening to Wagner, but reports in magazine articles that I drank heavily are an exaggeration. The trouble is once one article said it, other articles copied it, because it made a good story. People believe that anything that has appeared in print so many times must be true.
My dreams at that time were rather disturbed. Before my condition had been diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realised that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I were reprieved. Another dream, that I had several times, was that I would sacrifice my life to save others. After all, if I were going to die anyway, it might as well do some good. But I didn't die. In fact, although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying life in the present more than before.
