The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

Sartre was a believer in absolute freedom, and that suicide was a choice among many others that a person could make (and indeed, Sartre eventually did).

Camus, on the other hand, believed that suicide was the rejection of freedom. Once you commit suicide, you are no longer free to make any further choices. I tend to be more sympathetic to this view: I have an eternity to be dead, but a short time make choices good and bad.

If a mentally ill person is effectively treated the desire to kill themselves will generally subside, and at that point we know that it wasn't a rational choice but a biological symptom. The case here is much more difficult than say, assisted suicide for a terminally ill, old and frail patient.

it's not that they owe their life to us, but that we owe it to mentally ill people to care for them until they are in a state of mind in which we can be sure their decision to end their lives is not just an accident of brain chemistry. For a 17 year old girl the chance that her condition improves, even if treatment resistent at the current point at time, is actually still plausible.

Sure, the Daily Mail isn't particularly a quality newspaper, but a lie about an entire country's medical practices is quite a bit different than a lie about some aristocrat's love life. And even then, aren't eg BBC Radio or the Independent supposed to be quality news sources? The latter writes "A 17-year-old girl who was raped as a child has ended her own life through legal euthanasia in the Netherlands" [0]. What's going on here?

This is the kind of stuff that we're being told only fringe media do, the rogue blogs that will do anything that heats up facebook outrage, for ad impressions - the kind whose business model is to invent lies for maximum shares. This story isn't about euthanesia or suicide. It's about how the mainstream media took a note from the invent-outrageous-lies-blogs' playbook. About how it's totally OK now for BBC Radio 4 to report flat out lies, if only it gets people talking about BBC Radio.

This is a serious problem. While everybody is falling over each other to blame Facebook for undermining democracy, apparently the likes of the BBC and the Independent are slowly transforming into the real perpetrators. Sure, I know why: their journalists are paid by the click just as any other. But apparently any sort of fact checking went out the window there, and I wonder whether that's a viable business strategy in the long term. Why consume "quality" media if the quality is the same as the inflammatory rando blog post your aunt just shared on Facebook?

I recognize that journalism is under a lot of financial pressure, but if lies like these get willfully spread by people who should know better, what's left? How do we know that this Politico article isn't a lie as well?

I'm deeply troubled by all this.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/euthanasia-c... the headline I quoted is from the video. There's a little "oops we might've lied hihi" on the bottom of the article but they couldn't be bothered to fix the video because hey, clicks lol.

Why do you make this assertion that a rational person can't be suicidal? DFW was definitely a very rational person, for instance. I'd recommend reading Good Old Neon for an insight into his character, and a good depiction of both a suicidal and rational character[0]

> Suicidal impulses are most often fleeting relative to normal lifespan.

Key words there are 'most often', but I'm curious to know your evidence for this assertion.

> With therapy and medicine, she is very, very happy to be alive now

This is a great result for her, and you.

[0] http://sdavidmiller.com/octo/files/no_google2/GoodOldNeon.pd...