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I'm sorry about your parents, there is nothing that makes me more uncontrollably sad and incapable of holding my tears than the slow decline of aging and diseas

I'm sorry about your parents, there is nothing that makes me more uncontrollably sad and incapable of holding my tears than the slow decline of aging and disease, even more so when the decline happens to those who raised you, the ones that have been your earliest memory of what healthy and adult humans look like. You appear to have a very different mental model of assisted suicide than the comment you're replying to. I might be biased by my experience, but the mental model I parsed from the comment is the one most commonly associated with suicidal young(ish)/physically healthy people, suicide appears attractive because there is some mental roadblock the suicidal person faces, their mind can't process some aspect of their enviroment/history no matter how much they try, they can't understand it, they can't ignore it, they can't make piece with it in any way. It torments them like an itch they can't scratch. They can live their life perfectly well if they only knew how to deal with this issue, but they can't, not alone. This is the type that can be helped by more (honest) publicity and attention. Another way of phrasing this is that assisted suicide for mental issues need not be the same as assisted suicide for physical issues, so both you and the comment you're replying to can have your way, the 2 problems are orthogonal(ish).

throw321501508 4y ago
Agreed totally with what you are saying, if they're allowed to be orthogonal. But right now they are not, it's all one thing, in most places and in how people think about it. The GP was very absolutist on how they were approaching ending one's life.
aperson_hello 4y ago
There are people whose brain chemistry is so screwed up that no amount of treatment is going to fix their depression. Treatment-resistant severe depression is a big issue. Is it society's role to prevent that person from doing what they want to do to when that thing would also avoid the constant pain that they're currently undergoing? Why isn't it up to that person to make the choice to end their own suffering? I'm not proposing this as the best path for all or even 98% of cases...but I'd claim for those 2%, it's akin to torture to force those people to stay alive when they don't want to consistently and for a long period of time.
- blooalien 4y ago
  On top of which, we now live in a society where insulting, ridiculing, and just generally harassing or terrorizing anyone "different" (but especially those with depression or other "mental issues") is the normal behavior of most humans, making any attempts to live a "normal" life pretty much an impossible to tolerate waking nightmare hell-scape for many who suffer with "major depressive disorder" (or whatever it's being called this week.)

throw321501508 4y ago

Agreed totally with what you are saying, if they're allowed to be orthogonal. But right now they are not, it's all one thing, in most places and in how people think about it. The GP was very absolutist on how they were approaching ending one's life.

aperson_hello 4y ago

There are people whose brain chemistry is so screwed up that no amount of treatment is going to fix their depression. Treatment-resistant severe depression is a big issue. Is it society's role to prevent that person from doing what they want to do to when that thing would also avoid the constant pain that they're currently undergoing? Why isn't it up to that person to make the choice to end their own suffering? I'm not proposing this as the best path for all or even 98% of cases...but I'd claim for those 2%, it's akin to torture to force those people to stay alive when they don't want to consistently and for a long period of time.

blooalien 4y ago
On top of which, we now live in a society where insulting, ridiculing, and just generally harassing or terrorizing anyone "different" (but especially those with depression or other "mental issues") is the normal behavior of most humans, making any attempts to live a "normal" life pretty much an impossible to tolerate waking nightmare hell-scape for many who suffer with "major depressive disorder" (or whatever it's being called this week.)