Sir Terry Pratchett decided that he'd rather die while able to make the decision, rather than letting his mind be destroyed by Alzheimer's. (Granted, his passi

Sir Terry Pratchett decided that he'd rather die while able to make the decision, rather than letting his mind be destroyed by Alzheimer's. (Granted, his passing was natural, but he campaigned eloquently for the right to make such a choice.) I also knew someone who suffered great pain on a daily basis, and I have a hard time considering his suicide irrational. I knew a guy (a friend of a friend) who, through foolishness in his youth, ruptured three of his spinal discs, and had damaged two other ones. He was in constant excruciating pain. In the trailing decade of his life, he could not get sufficient pain relief to hold a job, could not get/afford treatment because of that, and basically was in a pain-filled hell, as he put it. At some point, after he'd been in near-constant excruciating pain for twenty years, he decided he no longer wanted to live. I don't think either of these men were mentally ill, or making irrational choices.