Nora_Leonard wrote:However they had the humanity to leave a note warning whoever found them/the coronoer to beware the corrosive poison they had swallowed.

mindhack wrote:

Nora_Leonard wrote:However they had the humanity to leave a note warning whoever found them/the coronoer to beware the corrosive poison they had swallowed.

I think this kind of behaviour speaks for a rational basis for some suicides. However, in my example, he had been fighting depression for years. Which was both a physiological and a mental disease in his case.

Sertorius wrote:It is idiotic to assume that a decision to commit suicide implies mental disease and needs to be "cured".

When a person decides to end his own life, it is absolutely nobody else's business.

The incarceration and torture of people in psychiatric insititutions for the sole reason of "danger to oneself" is one of the biggest disgraces in the civilised world today.

To me, it seems that a person who enjoys drinking tomato juice can't be in his right mind. But I'm no longer a child and I realise that another person's doing something I find disgusting is not a legitimate reason of declaring him mentally ill.

In [Dr. Igor] Galynker's research, he hypothesizes that this state of mind precedes the urge to act, describing it as "really severe anxiety ... like being sucked through vortex."

Patients "try to come out, but they can't," he said.

There are three things, he says, that happen in that state: an endless cycle of hopeless thinking that cannot be controlled, the frantic sensation of being trapped and physical sensations that aren't based in reality.

ryanphilostudent wrote:As a person fortunate to be studying philosophy and by this i meaning having the time to sit and think for large quantities of time without the worries that everyday life can give I have pondered a great deal the meaning of rationality, reasoned judgement and decision making.

I believe that it is entirely reasonable for someone to choose to commit suicide on rational grounds if rational is that which can be put into a valid logical form that is backed up by intuitively sound premises. Disability is something of a relative term built in a societal construct. Is needing glasses a disability? in the same way as missing limbs?
Is it irrational to choose to commit suicide on the basis that you want to experience it and simply cannot wait such and such years. I wouldn't say we know for sure what death is, none of us has experienced it directly and those that have don't tend to speak about it. For many people Death is oncoming doom filled with anxiety and fear and often we deal with the same feelings by facing them head on as opposed to ignoring or running away. An example of a thing that may produce the same feelings could be; an important exam, starting a new job, doing anything new really.

Anyway, that's my opinion and thanks for listening

Ry