This quote is taken from the interpretation of the Human Rights Act and article 1 of the Convention on Human Rights in the Pretty 2002 case.
euthanasia
Unregulated suicide and criminalised assisted suicide
As you may gather from this blog I know madness and this situation is definitely madness.
Suicidal people are forced to take the worst deaths. Suicide prevention has focused on putting up barriers between suicidal people and good deaths, for example making ingredients of suicide cocktails impossible to acquire. While this is useful in saving people experiencing transient suicidal ideation from a regrettable decision it serves to deny a compassionate good death for those facing unending or long standing suicidal ideation. The validity and acceptability of suicide is a personal decision.
When the need to die isn’t briefly or impulsively expressed there should be the mercy to make sure a good death is provided. Instead today these remain unregulated except to criminalise those who would show the highest compassion and give the suicidal individual a good death. Instead the prevailing sense of compassion forces suicidal people to endure through a life they do not want or have a bad unregulated death. These unregulated deaths risk further suffering if they’re unsuccessful which just compounds the evils which drive people to want to die.
How is this situation in any way acceptable? It’s either madness or immorality.
Euthanasia: dogs and disability
The divide which is drawn towards mercy killing for animals and people which dictates the legality of the former but not the latter is bizarre to me. Why? Surely a person driven to feeling suicidal – the pit of despair and hopelessness – is orders of magnitude worse than what pain an animal feels. We have a wider set of sensory experiences and a higher cognitive framework to our lives compared to animals. This has a wide gamut but for some there are worse experiences. The disability factor – which can be very high for serious mental health problem – embedded in prognosis associated with mental health labels is a prediction of a worse life with fewer good experiences and significant distress. This is worse for a human than a dog because we’re different
In short, our ‘specialness’ which underpins the sanctity of life principle but it can also underpin the factors which make our pain so much worse than for animals. We have a higher set of experiences and profound suffering. We have greater needs than animals too but since this isn’t realised mean people are unhappy with their lived. Sometimes this is what’s overtly given as a reason where assisted suicide is legal for all. It doesn’t encompass the awfulness which drives conscious beings to suicide. Suicide is a product of too much pain (I have so much) which drives people like me to want to die.
Sadly, there are no solutions either and tens of thousands of people try to kill themselves every year. They’re trying to escape a shit life and “shit” in ways an animal couldn’t feel. This higher capability is a source for sanctity of life but it also explains the difference of the manifestations of pain. Humans can hurt in profound ways which animals can’t but the sanctity of life principles allow a way out from the pain…but not for people? Our difference from animals is the source of wonder and happiness but it can also be a terrible ordeal which is worse than for animals.
It is a higher but more obvious mercy killing if people truly understood and appreciated the nature of suicides by the disabled as understandable escape from a worse life which won’t get better. It is a rational response and the severity and nature of the pain is different and worse than the physical pain suffered by animals which have mercy killing.
Life is sacred but not a shit life. Forcing someone to suffer a shit life without hope is awful. No conscious being should suffer so but there isn’t the required social and structural change in systems required to change this tragic fact of life. It’s not the disabled alone who choose not to live a poor life. The selfishness is in the circumstances that drive the tragedy and the tragedy is anyone at all is driven to no longer want to live their life.
Own up to the failure and have the decency to at least offer the suicidal a good death instead of a shit one on top of all the other shit which caused a higher-than-an-animal being to want to die. Don’t prolong the torture.
Suicide is about pain and fear of future pain (and escape from this unbearable reality)
This title seems like a summary of a substantial amount about suicide. It is simple and feels like truth, certainly more truth than it’s a spurious, irrelevant manifestation of a brain impairment as is the central suicide principle and understanding in biomedical psychiatry.
If you see the pain then you’re closer to the reality of suicidal thoughts. It’s also easier to accept suicide because no one wants someone else in pain, in torture. Attacking social determinants becomes the priority and acceptance of suicide central to the principle of least harms. Suicidal suffering is simply a suffering too great and the only mental health state I’d say shouldn’t exist with a sense of certainty. Torture in all its forms is unacceptable and there must be the sense to end immitigable pain the hard way by legalisation of suicide. Decriminalisation is simply unacceptable because allowing torture to happen is unacceptable.
The subjectivity of unbearable pain is high but needs no further evidence than meeting the criteria where suicide is perceived as the solution for the individual. This is significant pain and a result of pain. The severity is the tragedy that any human being is ever driven to want to end their life or stop existing. It is a profoundly awful mental state I know better than anyone should but if you’ve not lived years of a life you don’t want to live a day longer – if you want death more than life – it might seem like feeling suicidal isn’t the worst thing a human can experience. The unique, personalised suffering which drives a conscious being to want to cease its consciousness, to escape because survival is no longer possible, to cast the most damaging assertion of the inequity of the modern day by choosing self death to leave it all behind. It is the product of a murderous and torturous process.
No one should feel it and no one should have to live through it if they choose not to.
Angel of the Abyss
Voluntary euthanasia must be legal. It’s just a matter of time till humanity grows up. I don’t need a crystal ball to state the obvious. Too long for sufferers though.
If you were about to kill yourself which method would you use?
Obviously assisted suicide would be everyone’s choice but few countries have legalised it.
Instead I’d choose a large calibre hand gun. It’s highly reliable and painless. It’s a shame guns aren’t easily available in England. I could blow my brains out and be done with this shit of a life. Or a perfect suicide pill.
I’ve tried overdoses and they’re unreliable. Suffocation is difficult and painful; it is a terror-filled way to die. Any other options?
Suicide advocates
This is a quick idea based on my recent experience of the Samaritans. (Yes. Things are that bad).
They were of no value because they’re fundamentally flawed in what they offer. A safe space to talk is useful given the suicide taboo but as the only option from this country’s number one suicide organisation it is woefully inadequate. It’s why I’ve not contacted them before most of my suicide attempts. It’s not what I’m looking for.
Who would I communicate with before killing myself? The answer may not be practical but it’s true nonetheless: someone who could fix things. An advocate for the suicidal who can attempt to change the things which force people to their deaths.
Take debt and the catastrophic effect of bad debt. Many die because of it. Now though, thanks to an important victory by mental health organisations (namely Mind’s Debt and mental health campaign), health and social care professionals can intercede on a patient’s behalf and the industry is more mental health aware. This is ultimately social change but those who advocate for someone’s mental health play a vital role. This saves many suicides.
If this already established system to reduce distress and despair not by talking about it but doing something about it was widened to encompass other causes it’s clear more lives could be saved, lives of people who otherwise might never engage with anyone about their suicidal feelings.
Suicidal people need solutions, not empty words. Suicidal souls need protection against further suffering and a suicide advocate could be the buffer between those suffering intolerable despair and the world of inequity which harms them. This is how lives could be saved: not leaving the vulnerable unprotected.
This might be the remit of current mental health services but they have a history of failure, perhaps because they eschew real solutions in favour of medication and words alone. Thousands a year die when resolving the circumstances which made them suicidal could save lives.
An after thought is the possibility of this sort of idea as an early intervention in an assisted suicide pathway. Not everyone can be saved and anyone who is involved in suicide intervention must accept this truth. Its logical conclusion is the legalisation of assisted suicide because no one should have to suffer the torture of extended unfulfilled suicidal ideation. It wouldn’t be right.
We do big ideas 