marinuso
11mo ago
Yes, suicide is bad. Ideally there would be no suicide at all. This is part of my point.
When we do something in an official manner, we thereby give it a stamp of approval. We should not approve bad things if we can avoid it. Because by doing so, we are saying that the bad thing shouldn't be considered as all that bad. We are shifting the norms and encouraging more of it. We can't always avoid this, but we should at least always try.
If someone's dying anyway, say with terminal cancer, and we artificially keep him alive at that point (which we've gotten quite good at), we are merely prolonging his suffering. At that point, sure, just end it humanely.
But this person (and see my other comment, there are more) was not actually dying. She was in fact physically healthy. There is no argument to be made that we are prolonging her suffering. We are not actively doing anything. There is no argument to be made about freedom either. If you are physically capable of killing yourself, you always have this option.
She could've ended her own life herself at any time. And that would still be bad, even if it truly is the least bad option it's still bad, but we would at least have avoided giving the act an official stamp of approval. And maybe she never would've killed herself, and then there would've been one less suicide. This is the point that I was trying to make.
And it does seem to be accelerating. I looked up the statistics (see my other comment for the sources). There were 14 euthanizations for purely psychiatric reasons in 2014. By 2024, this had grown to 219. In the same year, there were 1819 traditional suicides. So by now, for every ten suicides we're adding an eleventh.
marinuso
11mo ago
she's earned the right to kill herself.
She's always had it, and never lost it. This was part of my point. It's the official approval that I disapprove of.
If you care to criticize this, then just about nothing in psychiatry remains standing.
This is not the way in which I meant it. By outsiders I meant the general public, society as a whole, not her psychiatrists, who I'm sure knew what they were doing and tried their best. Because even if I grant that this was the right decision in this particular individual case, I still oppose it because of the example that it sets.
The picture that is shown is of a (physically at least) healthy 29-year-old, who has people who care about her. When someone like that commits suicide, it should not get a societal stamp of approval. Let alone that we should do it for her. This will cause the societal norm around suicide to shift.
I think that we shouldn't be giving the general public the idea that society approves of just stepping out of life if you're not feeling it. I grant you that that's not actually what happened in this case. But that is what it looks like. You know what the fancy words mean, but remember that to a layman, "depression" means "not feeling it".
And in fact, I've just found another depressed 29 year old woman who was euthanized. I forgot the name of the first one, googled "euthanized depressed 29 year old" and immediately found another. This made me go and look up the statistics. Here they are, in Dutch, but summarizing: in 2014 there were 14 cases of euthanasia for purely psychiatric reasons. This is the first year for which there is data, so presumably the first year this was even done. By 2024 this had grown to 219. Line go up fairly quickly.
Meanwhile, there were 1819 "traditional" suicides in 2024. So by now, for every ten suicides we're adding an eleventh. More than that.
This really looks to me like official approval causing the social norms to shift, in turn causing the psychiatrists too (who are after all also part of society) to be more free in granting approvals, causing the norm to shift further.
Okay, not a train. That's an asshole thing to do. If you're going to commit suicide, don't involve other people.
I included it because it's the stereotypical thing to do (at least around here), but thinking a bit further, it's probably that way because when someone does it, everyone in the train knows. Probably most people have been on a train that's been delayed because of a train suicide. Other methods of suicide don't get that attention.
I do absolutely think we shouldn't be offering assisted suicide to people who are physically capable of unassisted suicide.
If she wants to kill herself that's one thing. She didn't need assistance. She was young and healthy and could've just hung herself, or jumped off a tall building, or in front of a train in some other way that doesn't involve someone else, please. The fact that she couldn't muster up the will to do this, honestly makes me question how suicidal she really was in the first place. After all, thousands of people in the Netherlands do this every year. But unlike the bedridden elderly people that are usually taken as an example in these cases, she certainly always had the option.
What I really think we shouldn't be doing as a society is validating or normalizing such a decision. That is not about the details her specific case, but about the example that's set for others. It doesn't even matter if her mental suffering truly were unbearable in some manner. Ultimately only she knows her inner mental state. To an outside observer, she was young and healthy, and she had people who cared about her. (We should all be so lucky!) And we're going to just kill her on request? That shouldn't be normal. It's what's observed from the outside that sets the norm.
marinuso
11mo ago
In the ancient Germanic tribes, men would go around with a sword to show that they were free men. More than just a weapon, it was a symbol of freedom and agency. Decisions were made by free men attending the thing and voting by raising their swords. Women, children, and slaves did not carry weapons, and could not vote. (And I say "ancient Germanic tribes", but parts of Switzerland kept this tradition up into the 1990s, swords and all.)
I get the feeling that in parts of the US, going around openly carrying a weapon carries the same sort of symbolism, even if it doesn't give you the right to vote.
marinuso
11mo ago
Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants went further in this direction than I could ever ask – for example, refusing to pass on their birth tongues once they’d learned enough English to raise their children in it
This was quite different back then than it would be now. If you live your entire life in one neighbourhood and there are a dozen other ethnicities living there, soon enough everyone will adopt a common tongue. To have separate communities you need a certain amount of space between them.
Nowadays, every Arab youth in Europe is on Arab TikTok, and people don't speak to their physical neighbours anyway, no matter if they share a language or not. With the disappearance of physical barriers, it's the language barriers that define the communities.
marinuso
11mo ago
That's completely orthogonal to embryo selection though. We don't magically gain the tech to accurately scan these things from your DNA.
And even if we had it, and decided to use it, we'd look at people's actual results, and we could do that with naturally born people in the same way. Even if they would in general end up performing worse than people born from selected embryos, you'd still not have Gattaca, even though it would be dystopian in its own way. There's no incentive to start discriminating specifically against natural-born people specifically and checking that everywhere.
We already rank people by their traits and abilities, we just do it in a more fuzzy way. For sports it's the easiest. We have them compete and see who's best. Even if we could perfectly predict this using their DNA, nothing would change.
marinuso
11mo ago
We've had screenings for things like Down's Syndrome for a while, and we do not (in general) oppose abortions in those cases. Even countries that ban elective abortions completely tend to allow it in cases of malformation, which Down's Syndrome would count as. And then you just try again. This doesn't seem too different in concept, just a lot easier and more flexible. In this case, too, the only people who don't do this are certain religious people. The genetic material is still coming from the parents, they're not actually making 'designer babies' or superhumans or anything of the sort.
We're not getting Gattaca. The problem there was that they put DNA tests everywhere in their society. That's the dystopian bit. And who would have anything to gain by doing that?
I don't think we are even functional enough as a society. If we're getting a dystopia, we're getting "Brazil". (With perhaps some shades of "Demolition Man".) We kind of already saw this during Covid with the half-working tracking apps and the like. Both in the fact that the government's attempt at oppression frequently hurt random strangers by accident while not even really dealing with the actual dissidents, and in the fact that the general populace mostly just shrugged about it all.
It's crazy that this is considered cheating. You can't seriously let someone into middle school who can't read. What are they going to do there? Certainly not learn anything if they can't read the textbooks.
In the Netherlands it's normal to be held back if you haven't learned whatever you had to learn in a year.
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