I probably have an unpopular opinion on this, but I feel that people who wish to commit suicide should not be prevented from doing so. By all means, if someone wants to get help or needs counseling they should be able to get it. But if in the end their choice is suicide, we should be making it easier for them, not harder. I think that if I ever wanted to commit suicide I would be less likely to seek counseling out of…
I think it's important to recognize the difference between allowing someone to do something and striving to get someone to not do something, even if it's allowed.
I read an article once that said that when suicide was illegal in the UK, the rate was a lot lower. I'm not sure if that was true or not, but as a thought experiment: if making suicide illegal lowered it's occurrance, would you support that?
I don't know if all countries that had such a law removed it, but in some countries, attempted suicide was a crime punished by death penalty.
I probably have an unpopular opinion on this, but I feel that people who wish to commit suicide should not be prevented from doing so. By all means, if someone wants to get help or needs counseling they should be able to get it. But if in the end their choice is suicide, we should be making it easier for them, not harder. I think that if I ever wanted to commit suicide I would be less likely to seek counseling out of…
I agree that it ought to be a free choice if it's coming from a place of sanity, but our society really must further research and understanding of underlying causes of those suicides which could be classified as systemic to our culture, which looking at suicide rates around the world and historically is the majority of America's suicides. Some reasons for suicide are almost unavoidable (e.g. thinking of a recent NPR story about a mother who lost her children), yet many suicides are ultimately a product of our way of life, of what we are taught, of how we were raised, of how we form social groups, of the types of pressures we put on each other, of struggling to pay bills, of living here in the first world among gaping income disparity (I remember an article from a few years ago linking income disparity with suicide rates), etc.. I don't claim to know exactly how our culture creates suicides or how it could be changed, but it's got to be acknowledged as the source of a lot of depression and suicide and as an area that needs more serious thinking.