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In 2016 ISIS attackers bombed the airport in Brussels killing over a dozen people. A seventeen year old girl was present but uninjured. This May she chose to be euthanized because of her psychological trauma. She was 23 and she had no physical injuries. The news of her death was just announced recently.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html
This seems absolutely insane to me. I don't doubt she was suffering but she was only 23. A lot could have changed over the next 70 years. She wasn't terminally ill, she didn't have cancer, she wasn't paralyzed from the neck down. She was very sad and very scared and had attempted suicide twice. But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.
I used to disapprove of euthanasia but wasn't strongly in favor of making it illegal, even though it was never a choice I would make myself or approve of making for a relative. But cases like this have made me strongly opposed to it. It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases. The people saying that allowing euthanasia is a slippery slope have been proven right in my opinion.
I believe she made the wrong choice but I strongly object to removing that choice. We should have exit rights to life. If you can't choose to end it all I don't think you can truly be free. My fiance is a psychiatrist that works at a public hospital where she sees some of the most chronically afflicted, she has stories and I'm aware that there are many common ways of being that I would choose death over. I trust no one but myself to decide what those states are. This is not because I trust the medical establishment but because I do not trust it.
She tried committing suicide twice and failed. Suicide isn't difficult. A couple helium balloons and she'd have had a painless death. Maybe she wasn't intelligent enough to use google? Maybe she wasn't rational enough? Or.. maybe she was crying out for help, but kept getting the wrong answer. Maybe, deep down inside, she hoped that the 'official' route would have some actual pushback. We'll never know.
I have a strong suspicion that this woman is dead because we live in a society where we put victims on a pedestal. She was a legitimate victim, and that led to heaps of attention and sympathy and pity from people around her. They likely did everything for her. Her PTSD became an excuse for everything. Soon people got tired of feeding into her victimhood. She became a burden. And she could recognize this. But she's basically been trained to see victimhood as a way to get attention. So she does a cry for help and has a lame attempt at suicide. This likely happened when someone pushed back on her just a bit. And then she got more and more attention, and it became a shield. For awhile. But how long can you really put up with someone like that? So she does it again. And eventually she's led down this path, having been rewarded every step of the way for being a victim. Maybe she saw this as the ultimate reward. The pinnacle of victimhood.
Who knows, I'm probably wrong.
But she knew the path she was on was going to lead to hear death. At least in Canada, they ask you again before giving the final lethal injection, warning you there is no going back after it.
It seems she did successfully commit suicide, and in a way with a lot less terror than jumping off a bridge. Maybe (seriously) we should make people face that terror before they commit suicide (is that what you're proposing? "Show you really want it -- cut your hand off to prove it."), but I don't think so, personally.
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Neither is basic bodybuilding/fitness, and yet many people fail to do it even when they express a desire to be fit. Concluding, by some "revealed preference" sophistry, that they don't "actually" want to be fit is stupid in my very humble opinion. They want to be fit. They simply don't have the willpower to follow through. Those are different things.
Suicide takes less than 1 second of action, and zero persistence through pain or discomfort. It is closer to watching tv than bodybuilding. If you told me you badly wanted to watch tv, but a tv was in the other room and you simply lacked the will to walk in there and turn it on I absolutely would question the depth of your desire to watch tv.
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What does this term mean? Is it intended to attribute any form of intent to her actions, as if 'some part of' her wants to be put into psychiatric care or weekly therapy? The rest seems to imply so. But what does that mean? Doesn't it make much more sense to say - she's just messed up and acting rather incoherently for various reasons, alienation from modern life, no coherent will or desire, etc, so even in 'committing suicide' she has no particular reason to actually kill herself but appear like it.
Like, can someone actually make an argument that the average suicidal person is, in any sense, doing a 'cry for help'? Why would that be true?
Or does it just mean 'she is doing a bad thing, and therefore we should help her, metaphorically'? In which case, what's the point of calling it a 'cry for help'?
Clearly her dying was dumb, and the people who 'assisted it' were dumb to do so, but she doesn't need to be, in some claimed sense, "actually seeking for inpatient psychiatric care, really, she's consenting i can just intuit it", but rather just doing something dumb.
This is where people usually go "what? you're saying she committed suicide because she wanted attention? that's cruel" when I've seen others make my point above in the past. And it's a terrible argument, something can seem mean and be true, but ... is it true? Attempting suicide 'for attention' can happen in some sense, but filing the paperwork for state-assisted euthanasia seems like a remarkably bad way of getting attention. As does suicide in general, honestly.
But presumably during all of this, she had a job, friends, activities other than the PTSD thing, where he was getting 'attention' of sorts. What happened to those? If she lost them due to the PTSD, then ... maybe the suicide was related to what caused that and not seeking attention. And if not, then how does on get to a position where one attempts suicide for attention but still has other stuff going on in life? It makes sense if there are other primary causes, but not like this.
Even if 'cry for help' just means 'she wanted friends and attention and the only way she could get that was to commit suicide', that doesn't really seem plausible, and makes even less sense when 'help' just means therapy/hospitalization. But 'wanted friends and attention' doesn't make sense as a significant explanation for most suicides (noting the obvious selection bias, everyone I know of who's committed suicide had lots of friends and regularly talked with many), so...
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The thing is, depression is often a result of thinking too much. The more you think about reality, the more depressed you get, because reality is extremely depressing, we are a convolution of dust floating forever through an uncaring and unending universe of chaotic stupidity, hurting others and being hurt simply by existing. Or maybe it's a result of thinking more than usual, but not quite enough to be happy about your situation. Either way, it's generally not stupid people who get depressed, exceptions like me set aside, and so while I definitely think everyone should be allowed to choose how they live (or don't) their lives, I think promoting that idea is the absolute dumbest thing we could do about it. Attempts at suicide maybe don't need to be punished, but they should certainly not be state sanctioned - not for the person who attempted it, but for everyone else yearning for an end to the misery circus.
I agree with you (except for the parts where you imply that reality is unbearably dismal). It seems like a lot of people conceive of suicide as a rational decision that one makes when the expected value of future pain exceeds the expected value of future pleasure. If that were true, suicides wouldn't spike in response to a suicide being reported and made salient by the popular press (the Werther Effect).
Suicide certainly involves some degree of ennui or internal torment, in the trivial sense that no one would kill themselves if everything is absolutely awesome, but every normal life involves plenty of ennui and internal torment.
More common as a cause is people spending too much time contemplating suicide, thinking through the mechanics of it, and elaborating philosophical justifications for it. I think people talk themselves into it, and that doing so is a more proximate cause of suicide than the absolute degree of anguish they are experiencing. I think it's literally a memetic hazard.
And having the state procure the suicide validates that choice, makes it more salient, makes it part of the marketplace of respectable choices that individuals make.
its not necessarily about the state though, it should be allowed for a private business to offer, even suggest, euthanasia to people. if more people end up killing themselves than otherwise would, its not a problem because there was no coercion involved, and you can not determine for other people what is good for them, because pleasure and pain can not be measured.
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Exit rights to life are intrinsic, you just have to actually commit suicide. Granted, it's not easy, but it's not impossible either.
I tend to agree with OP that this slope has proven alarmingly slippery.
If we're taking for granted it can be done outside I'm not sure what exactly the difference between the top and bottom of this slope is.
In some ways it's a higher lift to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to get the state to sanction your death, in some ways it's a higher to off yourself personally. But you don't have a principal-agent problem if you're the one killing yourself. Besides, that option can't be legislated away. Not sure how I'd feel if it could.
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When a society does not have medically-assisted euthanasia, the implied goals of the society are to improve people's situations so that they don't want to kill themselves. The goal will not succeed for everyone. But there's less of a, "Don't like it? Then quit" attitude.
Countries with ubiquitous medically-assisted euthanasia seem to have determined that in a lot of situations people should just quit instead of receive support or help. For example in Canada people are being euthanized because they are disabled and are not receiving the financial support they need, or they are unable to see loved ones due to Covid precautions. Patients have recorded hospital staff pushing assisted-suicide against their express wishes.
These people might be making the rational best decision for themselves at the individual level, but society might be failing them overall. When society gives itself the out of, "They can always just kill themselves," there is less incentive for it to try to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems.
This is sorta misleading .From what i gather from the article, Canada's healthcare system is so bad that a handful of people are choosing euthaniza, not that they are being killed against their will or to save costs. It shows how despite how much people complain about healthcare costs in the US, which is an understandable complaint, things could still be so much worse.
In countries without Euthanasia, people being denied access to medical treatment leads to dissent, disagreement and debate over policy, and potentially, the policy being changed in future. Seemingly, in countries with Euthanasia, it (at least in this example) leads to suicides. Not all pressure valves are good. Euthanasia permitting greater misrule as angry people instead become dead people is a plausible problem.
I think our current governments would euthanise a lot more than just the elderly if they could.
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I understand there are some aesthetic issues, especially with the actual transition from no-euthanasia to yes-euthanasia but I can't imagine that if we had always had it as an option that we'd seriously considered rescinding the option. Hospital staff pushing it is a whole other thing, I would certainly not want it incentivized in any way. Nature and society have always failed people and always will, we have to organize what we can around that possibility. The OP isn't an example of something society seems able to fix, despite much effort we cannot reverse this person's trauma, I think we should try but I also think we should try developing FTL travel and cold fusion but support other sources of transportation and energy production in the meantime.
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Doesn't that require assuming that society doesn't prefer trying to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems? I doubt anyone who favors euthanasia in these circumstances is any less eager to find nonlethal solutions than people who oppose euthanasia.
This is intuitively correct. The kind of personality that goes into the helping professions are generally not indifferent go f*** yourself types.
Well they're not at first.
Do you know many nurses, firefighters, medical practitioners, etc? There's definitely a lot that do it for altruistic reasons, but you'll also find a lot of people who become extremely jaded and detached. And probably by necessity, as seing people hurt all day can destroy your mind if you don't put some barriers up.
But were it true that the care takers are always the caring people manifest, we wouldn't have so many instances of neglect and malpractice.
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I guess, but I also feel like it's terrible to have to make it painful for people. Ask almost anyone how they want to die, and they'll say something like "painlessly and in my sleep". How many people actually die like that? Very few. I don't expect most suicides are as painless as lethal injection would be.
I've come to view the physical pain of suicide as a feature rather than a bug due to its deterrent effect. You have to really, really want it, and I think that's a good thing. But ODing on fentanyl seems... well, not fun, but better than most other methods.
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I was under the impression that painlessness was debated. Looking it up, this issue seems to be a complete shitshow.
As I understand the arguments, lethal injection is only painful and unreliable when used for executions. When the same chemical is used for good lethal injections a moral-ionic bond flips and makes it painless and humane.
Once I started noticing things like this, it became impossible to stop.
I don't understand why we suck so much at killing people in humane and dignified ways.
Why the fuck are we messing with chemicals and gas and electricity and whatever random stupid things when firing squads have existed for centuries and are reliable, quick, inexpensive and painless?
Is it because people want a more presentable corpse? Do people hate martial aesthetics? Is it too much fun coming up with new ways of executing people using the latest gizmos of science?
Are you sure death (ceasing to exist) is swift-enough following a bullet in the brain? Frankly, I'd feel more comfortable speeding up to 200km/h and hitting a tree.
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Firing squads are more troublesome than you’d expect.
We abhor a mess, and anything that can be perceived as undignified. There’s also an impact on the executioner(s). We want the criminal gone, but we’d prefer not to do it.
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Firing squads are messy and easy to screw up. The guillotine is quick and reliable, but even messier.
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Honestly I'm confused why a bolt gun or some sort of pneumatic guillotine isn't used. Latter is literally impossible to fuck up if you put enough PSI behind a heavy enough blade.
Sure, from the moment you cut the head it's irreversible (maybe technically not quite, given cryonics...).
As a subject, I'd prefer something that disintegrates the actual neural network than letting it die from blood loss.
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Some effect similar to the euphemism treadmill, perhaps? No matter what method you use, that method will steadily lose favour due to it being associated with killing, so you keep inventing new ones to shed the old emotional baggage.
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Yikes, I didn't realize until I just looked it up myself. It's strange, when I look up whether it's painless for people, everyone seems to say that, no it's not. When I look up whether putting pets to sleep is painless, everyone seems to say, yes, it totally is. Do they use different drugs in these scenarios? Is the protocol different? Or are people just fooling themselves into thinking their pets are having peaceful deaths?
They seem to be painless. Speaking for fairly direct personal experience, you're essentially put to sleep, and then your heart stops. Direct witness reported seeing no distress (witness to Canadian euthanasia administrant).
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I think pets are put to sleep with a barbiturate overdose, while executions involve some bizarre cocktail of drugs that persists only because the anti-execution lobby will seize on any change to the status quo as an opportunity to create years of delay and billions of dollars of legal fees for the state.
Can you elaborate? Why would the anti-execution lobby want more painful deaths?
They don't. They want less executions total. The problem is that the tug-of-war can result in bizarre things on the ground as what gets done is what's easiest to defend (rather than what is best).
That said, IIRC there are some places that have stopped using LI entirely because the anti-execution lobby managed to get literally every pharmaceutical manufacturer to cease selling to prisons. It's not solely a "status quo is god" thing.
I'm not really sold on the DP in first-world countries myself, at least as a coercive measure. Lifers should definitely get the option, though.
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I think they just want to oppose executions with any and every legal argument they can make without risking their lawyers' law licenses. It just happens that changing the status quo increases the surface area for legal challenge.
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For the same reason the green lobby "wants" higher carbon emissions - most people aren't utilitarians.
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Not sure. I would guess the cocktail is different—I didn’t see anything about potassium for animals—but I don’t think I can confirm without a lot of bleak reading.
For fairness’ sake, I have seen both yes and no argued for human pain. By all accounts it seems to beat electrocution.
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