Assisted suicide - thought?

By the time you get to the point where you are planning your final moments and you are in that much pain, it is a sense of relief and control.. that you are finally having the final say and not the disease that is slowly and painfully killing you. It is on your terms and not on the terms of a disease you cannot control. You are able to prepare yourself and your loved one's for it and help them celebrate your life and the life they shared with you.

You know of people who have regretted committing suicide?

When you are in extreme pain, one second can and will seem like an hour if not more. Many people who choose to kill themselves want to do so before it gets to that point, where they are in so much pain that they cannot comprehend anything and they aren't even able to communicate (try having a permanent line in place with a stupid amount of drugs in place to try and reduce the pain and it does not work)..

I have my personal plan in place if that is how my end will be and it will be on my terms and I will make sure that my children are prepared for it and I will get to say goodbye to them and hug them and their last memory of me will not be someone screaming in agony but someone who laughed and smiled with them.

 

For the first couple of seconds, yes. My synapses don't fire any faster than anyone else's. It takes a finite amount of time to form a coherent thought. By then I'll be unconscious so it won't matter anymore. Besides, if you do it right there is no pain. You keep ignoring that, which is a bit disingenuous.

Then why do you think that they're so likely to change their minds at the last moment? You keep injecting the idea of excruciating pain, but that's a red herring. As I already pointed out, anyone who's serious about this can easily learn how to commit suicide in a way that is completely painless and gives them the option to change their mind right up to the moment when they lose consciousness. There is neither the physical feeling of pain nor the panicky feeling of losing control of their own destiny.

And you know this how? My wife and I are extremely stressed by the fact that where we live it is for all practical purposes impossible to plan a suicide. Most medical professionals in the USA don't even honor DNR orders. My mother's board & care facility kept her alive for several weeks against her will, sucking up $100 of her money every day. They knew how long it was going to take us to get to Los Angeles, engage an attorney and show up at their facility, and basically thumbed their noses at her and us for as long as they knew they could get away with it. Now that was stressful for her and everyone else. Even in Oregon, where assisted suicide is legal, you have to be legally competent to give your permission. Once you're no longer considered capable of managing your own affairs, the option is taken away from you. You can't make these arrangements in advance. Not to mention, you have to have established legal residence in Oregon, just as Switzerland requires, because they don't want the publicity of "euthanasia tourism." I don't know how it works in the Netherlands.

You don't seem to understand that the prospect of being forced by one's own government and its Christian overlords to endure a death without dignity can be very stressful. And the slow death itself, even more so.

Then what are you referring to, if it's not a last-minute change of mind? Your writing seems to be clear and precise, I don't see how I could have misunderstood you.

You're exaggerating for the dramatic effect. Nonetheless your point is invalid. It's ridiculously easy to commit suicide in a way that causes zero physical pain.

I understand that people have different attitudes about this. We should all be free to make our own end-of-life decisions. You, on the other hand, seem to be suggesting that no one should be allowed to plan his own death, because some small percentage of those who do might regret it.

To which I reply, hey that's the way the world works. You do your best and hope things come out the way you expect. A well-planned and executed suicide has a such an infinitesimal chance of going awry that analytically it's difficult to justify interfering with those plans beyond talking with the person and making sure his motivation seems rational.

I've been happily married for 34 years, thank you. My wife and I are in total agreement on this and we trust each other. We just can't figure out what to do next. To commit suicide because of a terminal illness while one is still in full possession of one's wits and at least partial possession of physical control over one's actions is obviously not that difficult. But the prospect of being like my mother, incapacitated by a stroke yet conscious and aware and suffering, and no longer having the ability to take control over her own destiny, and knowing that her loved ones are powerless because they'd be arrested for helping her, is agonizing.

People like you who want to override our judgment with yours simply make it even worse.

No. I'm not talking about everyone. Just you. Your attitude throughout this entire thread has been shrill, nanny-ish, and considerably less than objective. There's a strong overtone of "This is how I feel about it and I'm sure that when the time comes everyone will have an epiphany and realize that I was right, although it will then be too late for them." This is what we face in Christian-dominated America. To disagree with the nannies is prima facie evidence that we're not enlightened enough to be allowed to make important decisions about our own lives. The laws regarding recreational drugs are another obvious example.

You're changing the subject. We were talking narrowly about the few moments after the action was taken and it has now become impossible to reverse the decision. And you postulated (incorrectly) that there might be some pain. Up until that point everyone is free to change their mind. This is an easy decision to reverse so long as we have control over our actions. The fact that we may lose that control due to a stroke is the reason we wish that we could make our wishes known and have the authorities enforce them.

I've been told by medical professionals that the reason DNR orders are so commonly ignored in the USA (and, I believe, also in Australia) is that if it is honored a family member occasionally steps forward and insists that his beloved granny was out of her mind when she wrote it and sues the people who let her die. Only a few of those suits are successful, but the prospect of a million-dollar judgment and the termination of one's career scares all the other doctors, nurses, hospital administrators and EMTs in the country into erring on the side of caution.

You can imagine how they feel about assisting in a suicide.

Not to mention, they have dedicated their lives to helping people survive, and it goes against their instincts and training to let someone die, much less to help them.

Some day we'll live in a world in which you'll be able to tell us how you were able to make those plans with reasonable certainty that they will be carried out.

 

People like you, who keep coming up with what-if's that nobody asked for, bear a significant share of the responsibility for the fact that it's extremely difficult for those of us who are already staring at end-of-life issues to take charge of them.

If you still have your wits about you and are reasonably mobile and not under the supervision of a caretaker, it is barely possible to end your own life. Yet you still have to worry whether any of your friends, family, health professionals, business associates, etc. will be accused of helping you. If so it could literally destroy their own lives.

If you still have your wits about you but are no longer in good shape physically, but had the foresight to establish yourself as an Oregon resident (however many years that takes and you had bloody well better like Oregon), you should be able to engage a physician to assist you. (I'm not familiar with any actual case studies in that state so I'm making a lot of assumptions here.)

But if you've already lost your facilities and are under guardianship, you've lost your chance. As long as you're conscious and can take nutrition, there are very few health care professionals in America who would dare obey your own written orders and let you die. I know of one woman who made such a stink that she got the hospital to stop tube-feeding her until she starved to death. But they actually made her endure that agony! No one would consider speeding up the process with a drug, and they wouldn't even give her a heavy analgesic to block the hunger pangs since they don't consider that an "ailment."

This is what end-of-life has come to in America. If I sound a little shrill and rude, it's because I don't want to die like that and you have positioned yourself (perhaps unintentionally) as one of the millions of people who are going to force me to die like that if I end up in that condition. No one should have to die like that!

Okay. So considering how different we are from each other, how do you know that people who carefully plan for their own death, clean up their affairs, say goodbye, and are waiting impatiently for the agony of their illness to go away, are going to find the alleged "pain of dying" worse than what they've been enduring for the past several weeks, months or years while fighting the American system and finally being able to end it? You seem to casually dismiss the fact that many of these people are suffering from actual physical pain, rather than the psychological pain that almost always motivates suicide in younger people. Those who aren't in that state are in the other state of sensing "themselves" slipping away and leaving an empty husk for their friends and family to look at in confusion and grief.

I'll grant you the possibility of psychological pain of dying, slight as I think the possibility is in these cases. But you must surely grant the reality of the psychological pain these people are already suffering.

The doctor who was interviewed in the Post said otherwise. Even doctors can't see inside our heads, but they get pretty good at reading our body language, tone of voice, and all the other tells. These people seemed quite serene and ready to take that last step. Indeed, if they did not he urged them to wait until they had explored their other options more thoroughly and made more peace with the idea.

Most people who want to commit suicide cannot talk about it with anyone. They have access to little or no information about how to go about it, so they don't know if it's going to hurt and/or fail. They can't achieve closure with their loved ones, and that alone is enough to torment the average person.

BTW, people who survive suicide attempts, by definition are the ones who didn't know what they were doing. So it's quite likely that they did something wrong and made the experience an awful one. Well, there are also the people who changed their mind and were using a technique that left them injured. These are the people who should have talked it over with somebody. But they couldn't, because in 99.99% of the cases the person they talked to would have called the authorities and made their lives even worse while taking away their ability to end it.

If people could trust us to be kind, objective, and non-interfering in these conversations, more of them would take place and we'd succeed in weeding out most of the people who either A) have other options they haven't thought of or B) perhaps really should commit suicide but they're not ready for it right now.

You keep asking that same question. You imply that you know that it feels different, but you have provided no evidence to support that assertion. Please tell us how you know this. And don't bring up the basket cases who "survived suicide" because they didn't know what they were doing and botched it, or because they changed their mind due to having no access to competent counseling beforehand. These people are victims of a system which you seem to be supporting, although you say I'm making unwarranted assumptions. It is this system which keeps them from knowing how to do it properly, and it's this system which prevents them from finding people they can talk it over with beforehand.

If one of your friends or family came to you, said he was considering suicide, and asked for a chance to talk about it with you out loud because in most aspects of life that is helpful... how would you react? Would you betray his confidence and call the authorities?

I have no idea what "tradition" you're talking about. I do remember the account of one of the last Paleolithic tribes (nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherers) in Africa. When a member started to slow down from old age, the rule was that as long as he made it to camp every night, he was allowed to stay with the tribe and simply relieved of his duties. But the first night that he didn't make it, and delayed their start the next morning, it was over. They held an elaborate, loving farewell ceremony, gave him an ostrich egg full of water (that's a hell of a lot of water), and let him choose a comfortable place to sit and wait. Then they waved and walked away, each grieving in his own way.

My wife and I were profoundly affected by that and it has become an icon in our family jargon. We have a shorthand comment, "If I start doing [something already identified as beyond stupid], just give me my ostrich egg."

Would that we were so reasonable and compassionate in 21st century America.

Yes. And they must be balanced against the real horrors of living a greatly diminished life. You have consistently avoided speaking to the financial issues and I wonder why. Something like 50% of the average American's lifetime medical expenses will be incurred in the last six months of life--when it's clear that the treatments are utterly futile. For many people, this will exhaust their estate and their heirs will receive nothing. If they get public assistance, it's just one more zero in the National Debt, which is already very close to the point of no return.

Sure, some of that money pays the salaries of doctors, nurses, orderlies, janitors, the people who invent wonderful new medicines, etc. But if you've ever worked in the health care sector (both of us have) you know that a huge (and growing) portion of that money goes into the pockets of accountants, lawyers and bureaucrats. Why should they get it, instead of your children or grandchildren or the charity you've designated in your will (which operates at an efficient 20% overhead rate rather than the government's 80% rate)?

Because we have no legal way to make the arrangements we want to make in this country. The first one of us to die may be able to rely on the other one to help carry out his or her wishes, although they might end up in jail and so knowing this becomes that "psychological pain preceding death" that you keep talking about. But the second one is shit-outta-luck.

They didn't do their research. Anyone who read that article in the Post now knows how to set up a suicide that will be absolutely painless, allow cancellation up to the last moment, cost very little (I'd say <$100 without going to the store and reading pricetags), draw no suspicious attention, and require no assistance. The reason they didn't do their research is that they didn't know that any of this was possible. And the reason they didn't know that is that they're afraid to talk about this with anybody they know, for fear of winding up in the local psych ward "for their own safety."

Then explain why with terrorism, national bankruptcy, crumbling infrastructure and rampant unemployment, the only thing half of the people who make up our government are talking about is the female reproductive system? Well when they're not talking about who should and should not be allowed to get married, anyway.

No. In fact it's the other way round. There's been considerable coverage of this in the print media lately. It started with someone asking why it was impossible to tickle herself.

The reason is that your brain knows what you are planning to do, and also has a very good idea how it will feel. So it blocks out about 90% of the physical sensation. If it didn't do this while you're walking, for example, every footfall would be such a strong blow that it would distract you from concentrating on anything else, such as the traffic light right in front of you.

One of our members also asked about this. She wanted to know just how hard her father had hit her when she was a little girl, to make it hurt so bad. She tried hitting herself and she was starting to get bruises before it felt anything at all like her father's blows. I was worried that she'd give herself a concussion, and she thought her father must have been a superhuman monster to cause so much pain.

This is the secret to the dilemma of the playground fight, and the universal retort, "It all started when he hit me back." Child A hits Child B. To Child A it feels like a light blow because his brain is blocking most of it out, but to Child B it feels like a baseball bat. So to retaliate, Child B hits Child A so hard that his hand hurts as hard as his face did when the other kid hit him in the first place. This means that he's actually hitting Child A much harder than Child A hit him. After two exchanges like this, both children are ready for an ambulance, yet each one still insists that the other one hit him much harder than he did.

This also partly explains child abuse, without excusing it. The adult honestly does not realize how much pain he is inflicting.

So no, an accidental injury or one perpetrated by another person feels much more painful than one we cause to ourselves.

 

Ignoring the inevitable is usually a guarantee that when it happens you will have virtually no power to affect how it plays out.

More disingenuity on your part. There is an enormous difference between a murderer and someone you've asked to help you end your own life. You're talking about a tiny fraction of cases in which it may not be obvious, to an outsider after the fact, which role someone played in a death. Again, this would be virtually eliminated if there were not such an onus on it. We could simply sign a contract! Today no one would dare admit that he helped someone die so he would never put it in writing.

Most Americans are quite happy with their lives here and enthusiastically increase the level of consumerism and materialism, regardless of how one-percenters like you and me might feel about it. A considerably larger portion of them are very unhappy with the way end-of-life issues are handled, once they find themselves imprisoned in a malfunctioning body inside of a building where no one will fulfill their requests. We don't know how large a portion that is because our consumerist, materialist culture benefits from keeping them that way and sucking up their life savings, so they don't tell us what those people say or otherwise indicate to the staff. But anecdotally, I'd say 90% of the people I know who had elders institutionalized reported that they had been plaintively asked to please end it right now--usually every time they went to visit.

Our wills direct our estate primarily to organizations that will decrease cruelty to animals, make education more available to the poor so they can break the poverty cycle, and improve the plight of women in the Middle East. None of those endeavors will serve the consumerist, materialist culture. So they will do their best to make sure that, instead, most of that money will go into the pockets of people who will serve that culture, either as buyers or sellers.

Don't you think it's precocious enough to assert that you know how people feel A) without having a degree in psychology or some related discipline and B) without having interviewed them personally? Do you really want to go off the deep end and say that furthermore you know their feelings better than they do?

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You may have to go find a yogi to continue this conversation. We can take drugs to block out pain up to a considerable level, especially if we're willing to accept the second-order effects such as reduced alertness and impaired motor skills. But in our Western culture, suffering is considerably more difficult for most people to manage. The second-order effects of those drugs can be dire. Not to mention ironic, since Prozac was found to instill suicidal thoughts in some patients!

A "spiritually advanced person." Have we migrated from the science section of SciForums over into the woo-woo corner?

Once again, I would like to know how you got into that person's head (much less all of the people in that category) in order to determine that this serenity is not real? We can do a lot of miraculous things with brain wave monitoring, but have they actually decoded the pattern that represents serenity?

Why are you singling out modern culture? There were just as many taboos in the Industrial Era, the Iron Age and the Bronze Age as there are now in the Electronic Age--perhaps more. The people of the Stone Age civilizations, the early agricultural villages and the Paleolithic nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes didn't leave any records because they hadn't invented writing, but a few survived up into the second millennium CE and many people from the civilized cultures interviewed them and took notes. They had their taboos too.

Oh yeah, and that ought to be obvious since the word tabu itself was borrowed from the languages of a group of pre-metallurgy cultures: Tonga and Fiji.

Sorry, our corporate server won't let me go there. Perhaps rather than asking everyone who's reading this to take the time to view a video, you could assume that we trust you to write a synopsis.

Why not? What if it were a close relative or a close friend? Don't they trust you?

Which is what, exactly? More woo-woo?

Well then we'll just have to wait for the Baby Boomers to reach the age at which these become burning issues for them. They have bulldozed and rebuilt our culture to suit their own taste and philosophy from the days of hula hoops and Chuck Berry, through the marches for peace and civil rights, through the drugs and the motorcycles, through the born-again revival and the baby carriages built like miniature Volvos, through the SUVs and the McMansions, and now into the Tea Party and the Occupy Whatever's Handy movements. When end-of-life issues dominate their culture, you can bet there will be some phenomenal changes.

Fortunately my generation (the War Babies) is healthier than theirs so even though we're a few years older we'll reach the same stage of life at the same time and benefit from their overhaul of American law and morality. Now all I have to do is make sure I continue to be in "average" health for my age and not become one of the last casualties of my parents' morality.

Again, you're losing the half of your audience that logs onto SciForums through corporate servers.

Apparently you haven't been reading your memos. World population is finally leveling off and will begin shrinking before the end of this century, for the first time in tens of thousands of years. It's not happening at the same speed in every culture, so the poorer nations still have a huge excess population who come to the richer nations in order to prop up the Ponzi Scheme known as Social Security. The birth rate among the native population of all the Western countries has already fallen below replacement level, with Japan as the most striking example--and most ironic, since it is the country with the most restrictive laws and attitudes about immigration.

Of course it does. I just never consciously thought about those experiences as tests. Have you ever deliberately jumped down from a five-foot (150cm) height? And on another occasion accidentally fallen from the same height and made a normal, erect, safe landing? The latter is much more painful than the former.

Indeed. There was a poetry event (not really a contest) for Afro-American high school kids here a few days ago. The one that got me was this (even though I generally avoid free verse):