The Euthanasia That Wasn’t
politico.eu
politico.eu
- David Foster Wallace
The essence of Liberty is the ownership of one's own life. You owe it to no one - not even a hypothetical Future Self - to stay alive at all costs. Just as all humans have the right to live with dignity and without pain, we have the right to die in the same manner. I hope that's acknowledged one day.
A suicidal mind is often one caught in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality, even if it comes from internal wiring going haywire instead of external substances.
Preventing someone from killing themselves is in their best interest most of the time for that reason. Suicidal impulses are most often fleeting relative to normal lifespan.
My wife tried to kill herself a few times when we were younger - I wrestled knives from her hands and had to get a safe for pills (which she agreed to in her better states). With therapy and medicine, she is very, very happy to be alive now.
If it isn't someone you are personally willing to take some responsibility for, as you did with your wife, then I think it is wrong to insist they live.
I'm quite open about my long history of being suicidal and the various underlying reasons why. People on the internet often want to tell me "chin up, tally ho, here's a suicide hotline number." They generally don't want to do anything whatsoever to help with any of the actual underlying problems.
In fact, they usually make me feel like they are merely using me as their "good deed for the day" to make themselves feel like good people. It generally pisses me off and makes me feel crapped all over.
I'm pro right to die, but this article casts light on how very complicated the issue is. I would be horrified to learn that "I got raped and now want to die" is some new standard for helping women kill themselves. I just can't even begin to come up with the words for how mixed my feelings are about this girl's story.
Exactly. People, even kids, kill themselves because of "lack of perspective". Lack of a (reasonable) future. Lack of any reasonable hope for change. People aren't stupid and mental illnesses (the non-medical ones) don't actually prevent thinking. That means the first thing to realize is that a desire to kill yourself isn't illogical. Maybe it's a mistake but maybe it isn't.
Which of course is terrible and of course absolutely not what society expects of help. Here's this kid. She's broken. Find the miswire in her brain, cut it or something, and bring them back fixed. And then you read the story of the kid. Was "diagnosed" with Autism by a teacher with no psychological skills whatsoever. From that point on systematically increasing repression was used against this kid, and of course as a psychological/social worker you cannot change their situation. That, youth services will not let a psychiatrist do. They need to be fixed and accept whatever "help" other people feel the need to provide, decided by whoever gets put in charge by the government (they "just happen" to never ever be the people who actually take responsibility for the child). That's your only function. Oh and by the way, if you can't do it in 6 weeks (can be up to 16), the kid will be violently taken away by the police, in cuffs, and someone else gets that job. Oh, and if they commit suicide in your clinic, they'll bankrupt you and maybe you'll go to jail. Good luck !
So the problem in this girl's case is not just that her conclusion, that there was no perspective on a better life ... well let's just say it wasn't a particularly stupid or obviously wrong assessment of her situation. The things she didn't have control over weren't getting better over time. And she tolerated being treated like that "for her protection" for at least 3 years ... Do you really feel you'd last that long ? Kids are actually far more resilient than adults when it comes to being suicidal, but enough punishment ("help" provided involuntarily, like in the case being discussed here) will get the better of them soon. Every 3 months you get moved somewhere else, in cuffs, and the next thing is tried on you. That might be good, it might also be 12 weeks in an isolation cell. You just don't know. Hell, because they just take whatever is available right at the moment they move you (because your current placement ends you have to leave, doesn't mean they have somewhere else for you to go). So the social workers, your parents, even the juvenile judge also doesn't know, except perhaps a day or so in advance. Good luck feeling optimistic about your future.
So of course youth services itself was the cause of the lack of perspective. "Safety" for the child, imposing safety on her is what killed her. Escalating to heavier and heavier repression every time. As soon as she worsened in care someone should of course have pressed the abort button, EVEN knowing she was cutting herself or suicidal. Send her home and say she can stay there unless she chooses otherwise. Why ? To prevent doing more damage. To make it clear that her home was still there, and that the situation really is salvageable. But if you as a social worker or psychiatrist take that chance, and the result is that it was too late, and the kid does commit suicide (or worse: their parents or someone they're exposed to back home takes advantage of the situation), you'll be eaten alive by society. So nobody does. Everybody avoids responsibility, and thus taking chances on not treating kids is barely ever done. The odds are actually in favor of doing this. Even people who've tried to commit suicide, only 3% actually follow through with it, meaning the symptom disappears in 97% of cases, which is far better than treatment accomplishes.
About 400 kids are placed (which means locked up against the will of parents and child) "for their safety" for every 1 case of actual abuse in the Netherlands. Social workers build cases against these kids that aren't checked for accuracy (it is an actual policy for them to write down everything they hear, and to never check), there is no defense possible, there are children's rights, but no way to sue child services if they are violated, so there might as well not be. There is no actual appeal process against the youth court (technically there is, but whatever "protection measure" they put forth is always immediately executed, appeal or not, nor is it canceled on a succesfull appeal, it is re-evaluated by the original judge (after, of course, another waiting period). This heavily punishes appeal since if an appeal is filed, no adjustments (such as visitation by your parents, or a friend, or more phone numbers you get to call, or ...) are possible until the appeal is heard, sometimes years later)
It is very clear that at this point the system damages many more kids than it helps.
BUT there is money being handed out. For example, if you have a handicapped kid, and you need help paying for a wheelchair, this is done through youth services, with "pgb" (meaning money that "follows the kid"). Parents can even use this money to pay themselves (very badly I might add, but it's something) for watching the kid if the care required is heavy enough that the kid can't be left alone. Or to get them after school lessons for free. Or ... Also schools, institutions, even things like children's farms can get extra money through the system, if they get "problem" kids assigned to them, and so kids are being forced into it, sometimes by their own parents. But where the real damage is done is where social workers are both being made responsible for deciding on care, and paid for providing care.
The perverse incentive is of course that one can easily see that institutions', schools', social workers', ... optimal strategy is to "treat" kids that are normal to begin with, diagnose them with something like "autism", and "treat" them. How many social workers, how many schools, how many institutions do this ? Hopefully not too many, but it's equally obvious that it's rather unlikely to be zero.
This has resulted in that apparently a solid 11% of Dutch kids have a serious psychiatric problem necessitating professional aid in any one year. Internationally, it's not even 3% (and that number is over 18 years). That number is rising. Just for autism, 2.5% of Dutch kids are diagnosed with it, whereas international numbers are between 0.6% and 1%.
It's so scary to see that our systems are full of misaligned incentives, a classic economics problem. The fucking textbook agent-principal dilemma. And nothing changes. (Or just so very slowly.)
The other aspects, about issues of the system, are of course also valid.
I was raped at age 12. It took me two decades to recover, and I got vastly better support than her.
Lots of tape victims seem to never really get over it. Most of the world seems to not know how to heal that kind of trauma.
I cannot imagine that a single dose of a drug has any hope of fixing something like that. If you cannot trust anyone around you because of a long standing track record of mistreatment of you, taking happy pills to make you happy with this horror show sounds like a really bad idea to me, one that would reduce your ability to adequately self advocate in a dangerous social setting.
I also live with an incurable medical condition that is classified as a dread disease because it so negatively impacts your life.
On the upside, I am getting healthier when the entire world says it cannot be done. As my physical health improves, my suicidal tendencies are trending down because I'm not so extremely miserable 24/7.
On the downside, basically the entire world is openly hostile, openly attacks me for talking about that, openly dismisses me as a lunatic who is making that up, openly discriminates against me over that -- for example, I've had moderators on multiple forums tell me I'm the problem when I got attacked in violation of the rules and I got thrown off instead of the people attacking me -- and on and on. That alone is enough to make things look pretty damn hopeless.
There is no winning here.
And that's for someone miraculously getting well when that's supposed to be impossible. If I actually was facing the steady gruesome decline my condition is supposed to cause where life is horrible torture today and you can count on things just getting steadily worse for all of your tomorrows, I would have killed myself ages ago. There is no fucking way I would fight to survive with such a prognosis.
Many people need solutions for torturous health issues or torturous social problems rooted in the bad behavior of other people. For such people, seeking to tweak their brain chemistry like they are the problem that needs to be fixed is part of the problem.
The trouble is when this idea becomes circular, e.g. "anyone who would choose to kill themselves even though their life doesn't seem that bad to me must be in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality."
In other words, to apply your proposal would require determining whether someone is "in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality" without knowing or factoring in whether they are suicidal. That's probably easy enough in the two obvious examples you listed, but accidental deaths due to intoxication or recklessness are already a less tricky issue than what we normally refer to as "suicide."
But I think you're saying a week isn't enough to determine things for sure? If so, you need to read what I said more closely.
I said a week is a basic filter, that can figure out an urge is temporary most of the time. It won't tell you an urge is not-temporary. It either says "temporary" or "unsure".
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...
Don't you believe that such cases exist? Presumably there are also people who want to die, no matter what. But there are also people who just go through periods of depression. I also had the issue as a youth. It sounds to me as if you are hellbent on denying the OP's point by pointing to the extreme examples of suicidal people. What's wrong with trying to save at least the people who may only have a temporary attack of suicidal thoughts?
It only takes a fraction of a second to pull the trigger, if a gun is at hand, or to jump off a bridge. Then you can't reconsider anymore.
I'm in sympathy with the OP's post (the one with the DFW quote). The post I was responding to, seemed to suggest that people who are suicidal should generally not be taken seriously - that they arrived to their ideations by delusion - without acknowledging the other possibility.
I'm positing a counter-claim that not all people that are suicidal are also irrational, and I provided one example that I don't think so extreme, that was referenced in the OP's post. Robin William's case is another example though his decision was spurred by physical ailment[0]. Keith Flint (singer of the Prodigy) is a better example, he claimed his own death to be 'a positive thing'[1] (have no special love for the band, just a good example)
These examples could be outliers, I don't deny the possibility, but I must at least acknowledge that they exist - which was my whole point. I'd go further to say that we under-estimate how many people are both suicidal and rational.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/03/robin-williams-... [1] https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/04/im-done-kill-keith-flints-bru...
edit - mistaken claim about post/grammar
If I sign a DNR, it isn’t the place of anyone else to say “but he didn’t mean it like that”. Same for (what are assumed by observers to be temporary) suicidal ideations.
This strikes at the very core of personal autonomy.
What I am speaking of is of a person plainly expressing their own intent, perhaps to the contrary opinions of medical professionals, family, legal professionals, et c.
Obviously if that expression of intent was coerced, there is a question of legitimacy of the expression of intent itself. But that is not really what we are discussing.
There is of course room for legal opinion on whether or not the documentation of the intent is valid or not. But the intent itself cannot morally be questioned by any second party for any reason, on any grounds. Our bodies are our own.
If they lack the ability to do so for some reason should they be assisted?
Is that should a moral imperative?
Obviously the best thing to do is to minimize the numbers of people who end up in such situations by addressing root causes. But that is something society has proven unwilling to deal with at scale. There will always be some people who have intractable suffering, with no tolerable outcome possible, and they deserve a peaceful way out.
Assistance is a whole ‘nother ballpark. I don’t think it’s a moral imperative for anyone to do anything for a second party that the first does not fully consent to.
If someone is not able to sign a DNR it must be because they have no autonomy over their medical care at all at that point. Which of course happens regularly but needs precise controls and protocols, and of course is rife for abuse.
Generally the presence of an intervention versus choosing not to intervene provides a clear dividing line. In this case, the choice not to force feed someone who is refusing food is why this is not euthanasia.
I think for example if someone has a previously executed DNR, I would say a valid medical proxy would not be able to override it. I’m trying to recall an instance when I filled out such a form for my wife before a procedure, I seem to recall there even being a section on resuscitation and whether the appointee could make that call?
The examples you give are in the order of hours. Fair enough.
What if someone is in this state of despair for a week? A month? A year? Ten years? When do you draw the line of temporary?
The day I kill myself it will be a long thought out choice.
Not many people can handle that without disrespecting the perspective, or worse, wanting violence applied against my will.
The arrogance of some people to think they know best for me is amazing.
P.S. I'm not suicidal now, it's a family condition that will mean (likely) one day I'll be deteriorated to the point I will want to check out.
As a psychologist what I've grown outraged by is the hypocrisy of current approaches to suicide, in that they are all focused on stopping suicide, but not the pain that drives it.
We talk about taking away guns and pills, putting up fences around parking ramps and bridges, monitoring social media, and so forth and so on. But we do nothing to address the psychosocial ills that drive the suicidal person to their state.
Labeling the suicidal as "mentally ill" does nothing but allow the living to wash their hands of the accumulated insults that drive someone to where they are, to feel good and then walk away from the most difficult issues to address. It places the blame on the person who is suicidal. It's not about protecting the suicidal, it's about protecting the living from guilt.
Sure, there are many people who obviously suffer from some sort of biological insult, but there is also a large grey area of those who have some kind of handicap, who are then thrust into horrific circumstances on top of that. And there are those who just get a bad lot in life.
These issues are spilling over into euthanasia in a way that's starkly highlighted by this case.
I'm not saying healthcare professionals should be forced into something they see as murder, or murkily close to it. What I'm saying is that as a society, our focus should be less on preventing people from accessing the means of suicide -- or euthanasia as the label may be -- and more on the sources of pain that drives them to it.
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.
(Note: way beyond social contract.)
“Remember that the door is open. Don’t be more cowardly than children, but just as they say, when the game is no longer fun for them, ‘I won’t play any more,’ you too, when things seem that way to you, say, ‘I won’t play any more,’ and leave, but if you remain, don’t complain.” (Discourses I.24.20)
“Has someone made smoke in the house? If it is moderate, I’ll stay. If too much, I exit. For you must always remember and hold fast to this, that the door is open.” (Discourses I.25.18)
https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/epictetus-on-...
I think this is a better summary than what you can get from a random comment in hacker news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVdF0k4DN1U&t=197s
The Myth of Sisyphus is the name of Camus’ book about suicide, and Sisyphus’ plight is its central metaphor.
- The universe has no innate meaning, and if causality exists (which is still an honest debate in metaphysics) it is unknowable to us. Camus calls this condition the Absurd.
- In an absurd world, our choice is limited. We can make decisions with an outcome in mind, but that outcome is by no means guaranteed.
- Ultimately, a person’s purpose in life is created by the individual as a means of escaping existential despair (which Sartre calls ennui) as a response to an absurd world.
- But within this purpose, there are always choices. Sisyphus has limited choices in his situation: his purpose in life (or afterlife in this case) is to roll the boulder up the hill for eternity. He is free to choose not to roll the rock up the hill — but this would invalidate his purpose.
- If Sisyphus chooses to not role the rock up the hill, it is akin to suicide in that he has given up his purpose. If humans have any purpose in life (which isn’t certain in the case of a deterministic model of causality), it is to define our own purpose in life. This isn’t a choice we can avoid, and the meaning we assign to life ceases to have meaning as soon as we die.
Existentialism is an intensely personal philosophy. It makes no assumptions about other people or societies writ large; only that people are free act in accordance with their chosen (and some would say arbitrary) purpose. It was a reaction of Camus and Sartre’s experiences in Nazi-occupied France — a situation where choices were extremely curtailed, but required the individual to make them nonetheless.
TLDR: there is always hope, even in an absurd world. The world is largely arbitrary and meaningless, so your choices only matter insofar as they define your existence. Or as I like to define it, when you stare into the void of nihilism you see only your own reflection.
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.
Let's say you're having a persistent depressive episode, and have had suicidal urges and possibly even attempted it in the past. Let's further say that you've been attempting treatment consistently from multiple approaches, for extended time intervals, and none of them have yielded improvement. Is there a point at which the suicidal urges should no longer be considered irrational?
There's a viable argument that their urge to end themselves is a direct result of their condition (e.g. if we removed the condition, the desire would evaporate), but there's also a viable argument that their urge is an increasingly rational response to extended suffering with little hope of improvement.
Unfortunately, while I'd like to say the answer to this is more objective ways to quantify prospects for improvement, I don't currently know of much research on the horizon that would enable this, as too much of how our psychiatric care works is currently guess-and-check, and we don't even know where we'd look if we had good near-realtime monitoring for neural interactions.
(The above hypothetical does not reflect my life experiences - I've never been at risk of self-harm for the lovely malaise of depression that pervades my mind, but a few years ago, I was given a treatment which, for a little while, made me much closer to neurotypical functioning - but it stopped working after a few months, not because I had stopped receiving the treatment, and having acute memories of how pervasive this problem was, and how much nicer life could be, is probably the closest I've been to that particular precipice.)
And in particular when it comes to young adults there is a significant possibility that treatment resistant mental illness improves or sometimes vanishes, often in the late twenties or early 30s. In the case of a 17 year old girl I think precaution dictates that we stay on the side of treatment. I think to end the life of a minor without terminal illness is very hard to justify.
And I thankfully never suffered from depression, but have a family member who did. She came very close to ending her own life, and explained to us repeatedly that she did not want to live. When it took a turn for the worse we had her hospitalized against her will, and now several years later she is thankful for the fact that we did. And I think I'd feel the same way. Mental illness can change the perception of people so much, it really seems to hard to me to take these wishes just at face value or see them as personal choice.
You know what you don't get in an isolation cell ? An optimistic outlook on life.
Even in those circumstances patients often figure out how to commit suicide anyway with the very limited tools they have there. There's plenty of examples of patients that figured it out after 2 months or so. Of course there's also examples people who haven't figured it out after years, but I doubt anyone who's seen that considers it a good outcome.
You have to realize that you're choosing between 2 alternatives. You cannot just choose against something. What I've described here is the only alternative, and yet I feel like the vast majority of people would give these people an alternative, even if it was suicide. I don't think you'd really consider 10 years of this a better alternative to suicide if you were to go and see one of those patients.
And of course, there is the alternative "provided": get the staff angry enough (damage a few of them permanently for example, systematically attack them psychologically and pester them), and there is a point where they will throw you out (will make things worse in the short term of course). That's another thing that can't be prevented.
And I get it. There are other problems. Who judges these people ? Because obviously there's problems there. Who decides if a request is sincere and not forced ? Who executes such requests ?
But still allowing suicide is not the worst thing to do.
Are we running out of people? Can we make life bearable for them? No, and alas not really. Sure, we offer drugs, and counseling, and whatever, but sometimes those amount to nothing, because you can't give them what they need/want - kinship, family, love, a loving mother/father, a better childhood, etc.
I'm not saying life is not precious. I'm saying, that exactly because life is precious because it allows you to experience the journeys, pursue happiness, find joy, retrospect, and go out knowing it was precious. But if none of these happen, if none of these are available, if you can't give any of these to these people, then their life is not a life.
And ... separating brain chemistry from rationality is an error. If her current state is 90+% determined by her brain chemistry, and our medicine and other treatments can't reverse it, then it's a rational option to solve it by giving up on that brain with its chemistry and all.
The deeply shocking story on such a controversial issue was irresistible, and became a top news item all over the world overnight. Pothoven’s name was soon trending on Twitter in Italy. News reports repeating the false claims were published from Australia to India to the United States.
Yes, the article touches on many things, many of which are hot button topics. But the actual title of this piece is really about how the story was misreported in many countries due to it's controversial nature. It was click bait to the max.
I posted a long comment earlier and deleted it. I'm quite open about my history of attempted suicide, having been sexually assaulted, etc.
I think it is possible to heal. I don't know that I know how to really talk about that. I do know that the widespread meme that such things are simply unfixable is part of the problem.
There doesn't seem to be any good way to talk about that either. So I'm going to stop here.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/05/an-anguishe...
It's a huge crisis and there's no good way to talk about it.
I do freelance writing and blogging and I've been dirt poor for years. There is a long history of me either commenting on how the world expects good writing for free, which simply doesn't work, or me complaining about my situation in specific. The reaction on HN is pretty consistently hostile. I've often basically been told to STFU and go get a real job.
I have yet to find some means to adequately convey that it's a system-wide issue. It's not just one whiny loser.
This is a global crisis impacting the quality of our journalism, and that impacts political freedom and many other important things.
It's especially crazy making because my writing sometimes spends time on the front page of HN, but I'm still talked at like a leech who is trying to "panhandle the internet," a thing someone (on a different forum, not here) literally accused me of for trying to monetize my websites while homeless. Like if you are poor enough, working for a living is not allowable and your work can't have value and you are merely a beggar.
This piece took about two weeks to write, did fairly well on HN, got dramatically more traffic and discussion than anything else I've done and made zero money:
https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-hand-li...
I used to have ads on everything. HN hates that and uses ad blockers more aggressively than most traffic sources.
I've removed ads from most of my sites and moved to tip jars and Patreon. I get told I'm begging.
HN actively looks for ways around pay walls. Etc ad nauseum ad infinitum.
That mental model of "get traffic and somehow magically make money from it without charging anything" is rooted in using ads to monetize it. Even before the ad blocker wars tanked earnings worldwide on that model, HN aggressively used ad blockers.
Everyone says "Well, not my problem. I'm not paying you. Figure it out your damn self." while actively sabotaging every possible pathway to making money off of producing good content. If you point out that this boils down to an expectation of slave labor to fill the front page with engaging content, you can count on downvotes and ugly replies.
This is actually one of the things that makes me suicidal. I feel like I can't breath. I'm poor because in part because of this shit, then told my poverty is evidence of incompetence, thus reason to justify not hiring me, etc.
It's a trap I can find no way out of, no matter what I do. Playing along with what people demand, such as removing all ads, makes no real difference. There is no point at which good writing independently created etc etc that HN/the world says it wants actually leads to a middle class income. Then classism kicks in and you might as well go kill yourself. The world won't allow you to make your life work. Fuck you.
If you complain, expect a beat down. 0_o
Today, writers try to be both writers and publishers, and they find it extremely difficult. That's no surprise; professional publishers also find it extremely difficult to monetize their content. Writers applauded the web for disintermediating the relationship between them and their readers, but publishers had an important role to play; they promoted content and made sure that people paid for it.
Blogging and expecting to be paid for it is like a developer releasing their code for free on GitHub and then expecting people to pay to use it. Some developers can build a "community" who will pay, but most will fail.
However, developers do make money from people who want particular software, and writers can work on a similar model. I make a decent living ghost writing for executives and writing marketing content for tech companies. I don't write what I want or what I think is most important, but I make a living doing something I enjoy.
Things like scientific research, roads, health care (in many developed countries outside the US), education, the BBC in the UK and ABC in Australia. Yes, the government funds it.
We can tie this in with a desire to do something about underemployment, by job-guarantee type government programs. On the minimum wage perhaps, but that's better than some people get now.
And the internet would like me know I'm immoral and ruining the internet for doing that kind of work. See this recent comment by me in reply to those accusations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20035958
Twenty years ago when I was homeschooling, I could find all kinds of high quality free goodies online to support that. It wasn't long before all the good stuff began disappearing. One woman who provided Italic resources removed all her free stuff from the web and became a consultant.
These days, a lot of what's online is low quality and cannot be trusted because it exists to sell you something. Blogging done to draw traffic to a business site and explain to you why their product or service is superior is inherently not unbiased. Journalist us supposed to be objective and serve the good of the people.
I know a lot about topics like homelessness, raising twice exceptional children and managing serious health issues with diet and lifestyle. Homeless people, parents with 2e kids and people with serious medical conditions cannot afford to pay me for my knowledge.
We currently have serious social issues. I'm quite confident I know things that would provide a path forward.
But I need to eat. I can't do it all for free. Me writing product descriptions so I can eat does not put any if that information out there.
These are all inherently hard problems to solve in their own right. Monetization of these spaces is also inherently hard.
And it's information that is on track to die with me while our social problems deepen because it isn't monetizable.
The hell of it is, I don't need that much to live on.
I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN. Men here routinely tell each other "You have a lot of karma on HN. You must be very competent." No one says that about me. When I point out the discrepancy, I get attacked and dismissed as some twit obsessed with pointless, meaningless internet points. When I talk about my frustration with HN failing to be a networking opportunity for me because of my gender, I get mocked and told it doesn't work that way, never mind the overwhelming evidence that it absolutely does work that way for men who desire to use it that way.
I'm not stupid. I do freelance writing.
Looking to make sure I eat by doing the kind of writing people here decry as ruining the internet, and to hell with producing the kind of writing that makes it to the front page of HN doesn't begin to solve the larger issue that this article brings up: journalism itself is in crisis, which is how this misinformation spread so widely to begin with.
This is a serious problem. Encouraging me to cave and just do more freelance writing only serves to keep it alive.
It's a problem that has world changing consequences, and not in a good way.
I'm sure you mean well and you imagine that this is just about feeding one pathetic loser. You couldn't possibly be more wrong.
I'm a woman. If I get adequately fed up and decide to throw in the towel and cave to the status quo, I can marry well to escape poverty.
I'm reasonably certain I would rather die for reasons that aren't especially pertinent to this discussion and that I doubt anyone here would actually understand, believe or care about.
I talk about my situation as testimony to the problem space. Please don't miss the big picture here.
If my problem can be addressed in a manner that moves the needle on the larger issue, that's worth something. But your advice amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I've been basically crawling naked across broken glass for about a decade. I'm flabbergasted that none of this ever really sinks in with anyone. There's always some new BS excuse to push aside the real issue and act like I'm just dumb and not trying hard enough.
Which makes me feel like the world might actually be doomed. Not because it has to be, but because, wow, there is no getting through the amazingly thick skulls of a large gathering of generally intelligent and competent people.
This is not "one dumb woman can't figure out money." That's not what this is about.
These days it seems more like "burn VC money like there's no tomorrow, try all sorts of shady shit when you feel the investors' breath on your neck".
It's called "The Hand Licking Incident." If you search that, my article should be the first result. You may also find it copied elsewhere. One of those copies is with permission and proper attribution. Some others are without permission/attribution.
It was discussed on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18842009
See also tips on what you can do on your end to correct a 403 error:
https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/hosting/technical-matters...
I know I could do more, but this is one of the reasons that I subscribe to both our local newspaper and one of the two large nation-wide newspapers in my country. If the local journos don’t get paid, there will be no one keeping an eye on what happens in municipal council. When I start working full-time again I will strongly consider subscribing to more publications, perhaps the other nation-wide newspaper.
[Slightly edited]
That smacks of "Let's not bother to go after pedophiles. Their fine. Let's just start putting their victims to death to conveniently sweep this under the rug."
That's far worse than the horrifying stuff going on in the Catholic Church where a grown man can rape and impregnate his 9 year old step daughter and the church says he's all good, but the girl was excommunicated for getting an abortion to protect her life in the face of carrying twins while just a tiny child herself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Brazilian_girl_abortion...
Sex crimes are particularly hard to deal with. People sometimes say they would like the death sentence for rape, but if you do that, you can count on rape victims being routinely murdered to silence them and protect the life of the rapist.
This is a hard, hard problem to solve. I would be terrified to learn that the Dutch government, which has a positive reputation globally for it's track record on women's rights, was fine with putting a child to death because grown men raped her.
I cannot possibly overstate how deeply dystopian and terrible that news would be.
Her having to kill herself by refusing nutrition, dying of thirst and starvation, because society decided it knows better than her whether she should live or not, that's truly horrifying.
To me it sounds like she was a terminally ill person: they tried everything for years to "fix" her problem, but failed completely and the condition even worsened.
She wasn't out of her mind and had a temporarily crisis, got help and regretted her previous suicide attempts; she had the goal of ending her suffering by ending her life for a long time, after having seen all the "help" others offered not working at all, she regretted the previous attempts failed, and was determined to try again and again until it worked.
And for a long time, she had to live in agony, just like a terminal cancer patient in countries without assisted suicide (most of them), was denied a way out repeatedly (not just the petition for euthanasia, but her failed suicide attempts that probably failed because of intervention of other people), and ultimately killed herself using one of the worst, horrifying, agonizing suicide methods imaginable, because that's what was available to her with other better options having been taken away already. The thirst and hunger, and feeling your body slowly break down, over days, must have been excruciating, and yet she thought that was better than continuing to live her life in the constant dread and agony she was in.
There certainly are a huge number of suicidal (at one point) people who are in temporary crisis, or have conditions that can be managed and improved (e.g. bipolar people often report that medication does help), but this wasn't that. This was us telling the cancer patient that they gonna suffer and wither and eventually die, with no hope for things to change, but no you cannot just end it now because it would make us feel bad about ourselves somehow, fuck you for even suggesting that.
> “Last Thursday, a guy I went to college with, Mark Rife, committed suicide. As I understand the story, three years ago his wife Sarah died due to complications from a fall off a 75 foot waterfall. She fell; he dove in after her. Against all odds, they thought she had recovered. Life had returned to some degree of normal; but then six months later, she died in her sleep. Mark was devastated.
> In a video he left behind, Mark describes leaving Sarah’s funeral, driving who knows where and simply wanting to die — but he remembered the time they watched the film Juliet and Her Romeo, a film he loved, and he remembered Sarah’s question: “Do you think Romeo would have still killed himself if he’d waited 1,000 days?”
> So, Mark went on a 1,000 day odyssey, with funds from Sarah’s life insurance policy, to give him time to see if his choice would still be the same. Would he still want to kill himself? Mark traveled, explored, met knew people. He says he “followed every impulse.” Mark had been a pastor in Hawaii, and he left his life behind.”
> Long story short, after 1000 days of living and exploring 22 countries around the world, Mark Rife decided that he DID want to kill himself. He didn’t want to live in a world without Sarah and he was out.
http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/the-1000-days-of-mark
Mark blogged every step of his 1000 days of travelling and seeking happiness. Tumblr deleted his blog the day he killed himself. To their credit, Vimeo left his video up https://vimeo.com/27856790
I wonder if his decision would have been the same had he stayed in his home community with others who loved him.
I also remember the story of a guy killing his family after a divorce, hoping to be together with his children again in the afterlife.
Lies can kill...
Only if he thought she was in hell. A pastor would know that you can't commit suicide and enter heaven.
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.
Calling this a serious problem is an understatement. It's an outright disaster, and it only adds to the already growing public distrust of the media.
There is no question in my mind that it would have turned out very differently if she had been just one year younger at the time. She would have gotten trapped in The System, no doubt exacerbating her suicidal feelings, both because the people in charge of 'protecting' these kids don't seem to be particularly kid-friendly, and because she was prone to clashing with authority figures (who, it goes without saying, tend to be petty and capricious). On more than one occasion my friend was told that she had engaged in an "illegal act" for attempting suicide - that's not helpful to say the least.
I have to admit though that I'm having trouble accepting suicidal ideation, especially in minors, without at least exploring treatment options. We as a society have an obligation to not make suffering worse, and we often seem to fail this basic test.
I know all the arguments, and even used some of them when I was younger and more naive. Now that I am here I see things differently. Someone I cared very deeply about reached the end of their rope this past winter and nothing and nobody short of locking them in a box was going to stop them, and even then they probably would have found a way. I keep thinking I should have realized how imminent it was and done "something", but for the life of me I can't think what, as they had tried the things available and nothing helped. What they needed was more than society was willing to give and that's the case for the majority of people I have seen go. Very few are lost no matter what with no conceivable way to survive...its just not available to them. Yet that same society tells them they cannot opt out. At what point do we stop trying to make people stay alive and suffering and give them safe and sure ways out? It's not an easy question. One that isn't as simple as "legalize suicide" and done. But there is a cultural idea in the West that it's NEVER the answer, that it always gets better, and those things are not true either. As I feel the day creeping closer for me I know I will have to deal with it alone and afraid, secretly, and with my best homemade effort, since there is no other way out of this life, and I cannot seem to solve the problems that would allow me to stay in it. I'd just ask people to put themselves in the shoes of people in such a situation, and think about how it would feel if you were at the literal end of your rope and people fought to keep you here and suffering. Nobody would want that...but like so much in life we don't extend such truths to others.
As someone who was once suicidal (but got past it) I can totally vouch for this.
And that's the problem: suicide is irreversible, so it's a good idea to have a protocol in place to make sure that all the other possibilities really have been exhausted before folding up the tent. I'm alive today because I was able to entertain the possibility that I might be wrong about death being the only way out even though at the time I was pretty damn sure I wasn't. And I am mindful of the fact that just because I was wrong doesn't mean everyone in a similar situation is.
It's a tough problem.
I see your plight, and I give you the freedom to feel how you feel (not that you ever needed it from me...)
I mean sure, was she given a lethal injection in a clinic ? Well, no. Is this not euthanasia ? Why the hell not ?
1) the girl is in fact dead
2) because she wanted to die (after being locked up in youth services for years, including months in an isolation cell)
3) the "original event" is that she was ("probably") raped at school. Repeatedly. She has never divulged what actually happened.
4) according to her own words, she has been locked up in ~30 different institutions in something like 6 years. In at least a few cases against her will and against the will of her parents. [1]
In one case, this was done because she could not immediately be treated by a psychiatric clinic, where youth services then saw fit to lock her in an institution (without school, without access to family, ...). She was not suicidal before this, and became suicidal here.
In several other cases she claims it was because psychiatric or youth services "help" did not find her cooperative or make enough progress and then sent her to be locked up, because that's just what they do (loosely translated from her post linked below). She also claims she met a great deal other youths that were in a similar situation (not able to be treated, and then locked up instead).
She claims she was put into an isolation cell for months, constantly scolded by the employees of youth services, punished unfairly and arbitrarily and that generally she left youth services' care in much worse shape than she entered, when looking for help.
5) she was assisted in committing suicide, even if that was not active suicide, but rather starving herself out.
She's written a book about it. "Winning or learning" (Winnen of Leren) by Noa Pothoven. Dutch book. About experiencing trauma at a young age. About the enormously negative influence the Dutch help system had in her life. No translation available.
[1] https://www.hsleiden.nl/binaries/content/assets/hsl/lectorat... (in Dutch)
Because it's a suicide. We already have a word for what happens to people who die after refusing food.
In fact the only reason the word "euthanasia" is being considered at all is because before she died she ended up in an end of life clinic that also provided assisted death services to other patients.
This is exactly like accusing someone of having had an abortion because their miscarriage was diagnosed at Planned Parenthood. (A scenario, I point out, that now seems a whole lot more likely given the horrifying way this is being portrayed in the right wing press)
What people seem to be conflating here is the idea of involuntary care and "euthanasia". It's true that sometimes courts will allow doctor's to force-feed patients through an IV. For various reasons (I'm no expert on Danish medical law) that didn't happen here. And that is a controversial area of medical ethics and worth discussing calmly and rationally.
But to freak out, shriek on social media and HN, and call this "euthanasia" is straight up ridiculous spin. And the ONLY reason this story even has legs is because of the facility. If this happened in a hospital it would be a routine tragedy and not a political flytrap for right wing moralists.
Making them comfortable. Taking care of other needs (washing, teeth, ...). Some level of pain medication. General support.
> It's true that sometimes courts will allow doctor's to force-feed patients through an IV
Which did happen in this case by the way (with a stomach probe not with an IV). For years. Including months spent by this girl in isolation cells.
> routine tragedy and not a political flytrap for right wing moralists.
I'm not sure I've seen this used as a right wing moral cause (I don't understand why you'd say this, it's not about immigration, it's not about money, ...).
Or if it's just that the state and the help system spectacularly failing this girl (in fact arguably causing her suicidal tendencies while attempting to solve other problems with brutal repression). Yeah perhaps. It did happen though.
If you want to talk about care, talk about care. Medical ethics is a hard problem.
There is a very good basis in this case to accuse the Dutch government, more specifically the Dutch youth care system, even of murdering this girl. By torturing her for years, at times for self-serving reasons, until she took her own life.
Euthanasia is saying we love you and there's nothing else left we can do to help you. What happened to this girl seems to be the opposite.
I would just call it incredibly sad.
It is not euthanasia as defined by Dutch law. Which is something a lot of the media reporting the story are getting wrong. And is the main point of this article.
It is also not euthanasia in the more literal sense of a "good/merciful death". Slowly starving yourself to death is not a good way to die. It is pretty much the opposite. If her request for euthanasia was granted she would have died in a much more humane and peaceful way. Unfortunately for her it was not possible to be euthanized.
Phrases like "tortured to death" are somewhat excessive, but mainly because it sounds more like gross incompetence and depraved indifference than active malice.
I haven't bothered investigating enough to have a opinion on whether your description is accurate though.
We tend to euthanize animals when we can't justify the expenditure of treating them. We generally view fellow humans as having an inherent right to our best efforts to help them, rather than in terms of their value to us.
I have relatives who are doctors and perform legal euthanasia as part of their job. I've heard their stories and they are without exception a combination of very sad and heart warming. This is not exactly the most popular part of their job and it usually comes at the end of a very long process. To give you the context, euthanasia is legal but it comes with a lot of strings attached. Basically it's only legal if a very strict protocol is followed. It's at their discretion to say no and not a right but a privilege for the patient. There are always second opinions involved. This protocol exists to both protect the doctors involved and the patients involved. It's biased towards a "no, unless". Not following it can land you in court with murder charges or lose you your medical license.
I also have relatives and friends who have died after volunteering to die this way; and I've had the conversation with my parents about their wishes when this becomes a topic for them. They are both healthy and fine now but well aware that this can change. They regularly attend funerals of people they know where the person died after euthanasia. This stuff is completely normal for several decades now and there is no political support whatsoever for rolling back the rules around this. Even moderate christian parties have pretty much given up on this topic as lots of their own members would choose this option. Most people don't actually like the prospect of a long painful death.
Simply put, euthanasia is a popular choice among patients and less so for the doctors that help them who are biased towards addressing the suffering. People actually notarize their decisions to agree to euthanasia and people like my parents have a lot of anxiety about ending up in situation where they'd want this but it would no longer be possible due to their degraded mental state.
Euthanasia is actually quite common elsewhere but you might be thinking of it in terms of the traditional euphemisms that exist to protect the doctor and relatives involved. More traditional ways of euthanasia that are common in other countries involve sedation, stopping treatment, or simply "allowing someone to die", which is a euphemism for drugging them into a coma and then deliberately not feeding them. Also there's the ever popular morphine overdose and a few other options where somebody puts their finger on the scale. It all amounts to deliberate acts that result in the patient dying. As this is highly illegal nobody talks about this openly. For the same reason it's hard to get solid numbers on this. But considering that everyone dies and that several of the leading causes of death are quite nasty towards the end, you can make some deductions.
What happened in my country was recognizing that this kind of thing was quite common and exposed the doctors involved legally in a way that felt very wrong and unreasonable as basically all they were doing was respecting the patients wishes. So, we fixed it to ensure it gets done properly or not at all.
I have been suicidally depressed, institutionalized. I'm better now. I suppose if I actually attempted to kill myself, but failed, paramedics that find me ought to let me go, or perhaps even finish me off if, say, I am in agony due to the method I used? Why wouldn't they, since after all, I've clearly chosen to die of my own free will? Yet, I now know that I was mistaken during my depression. Life is not about hedonism, not about maximizing pleasure experienced, which inevitably, inexorably, leads one to the conclusion that if there's just not a lot of enjoyment in one's life, and this has been persistent, then perhaps checking out is a good idea?
The path an individual life may take is unknowable, both to society and to an individual themself, even if the individual has attempted suicide. Negate this, and all human rights are instantly negated, as now all there is, is predicting who might be better off dead, as there is after all, no point in prolonging their existence, and they should be encouraged or gently nudged to at least consider the path of least suffering, because this will end their pain and decrease the overall suffering of the humanity. This is all because we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we and they know how their lives will play out. We do not, and no one knows, and therefore they must have certain rights, to maximize the near infinite potentiality of the individual human.
Society and government must not ever approve of this. I didn't believe euthanasia (and this is euthanasia, the real case is even worse than the original story) in the case of the terminally ill was a slippery slope, but then we get this case, seemingly out of nowhere, from an ostensibly enlightened, progressive, European country. I now see that making exceptions for the terminally ill is not safe, it just won't stop there.
And why is the approval of the laws and society sought anyway? Suicide is a mechanically trivial action. You can literally order poison hemlock off Amazon, no assistance is needed, and anyone committed to kill themselves obviously has no regard for their society, as they plan to deprive their community of any benefit they could have given it. Therefore, they should not expect society to sanction their ill-considered desires.
Dostoevsky predicted all of this 150 years ago. Read Crime and Punishment if you disagree with me, yet deign to consider yourself an intelligent, educated person.
I think you'll find that ISIS executioners believe that they are doing the right thing.
I feel the same about people lobbying against assisted suicide. I have no other word for people who willfully condemn people to literal torture then simply monsters. I dont see a meaningful distinction to some psychopath predator in the absolute detachment from other peoples suffering. Forcing terminal people to live for a few more month or even years enduring absolute agony is just wrong. There are no two sides to this or ways to look at it. They are getting tortured because you think they should be tortured. Your motivation and intention doesnt mean anything, this is the naked result, there is no reason to sugarcoat it.
You are not other people. I am glad it worked out for you, but the arrogance to think that you know and should decide what others should endure is mind boggling to me.
Also to take her as an example, instead of terminal patients you also would be willing to deny assisted suicide, in her case it would have been directly inflicted torture to keep her alive via force feeding.
It's likely that she did have capacity to make that decision, which is why the courts didn't intervene.
Who are you to tell anyone what life is about?
I don't necessarily agree with the actions of her family and doctors, especially as she was so young, but is it really just to want to condemn someone to lifetime of reliving their trauma? Some people can never get over their past trauma, and they carry it their entire life.
It it just to say that they must live their entire life in pain until they die of some other cause, just so that their friends and family don't feel upset because they chose to end their own life? Or at some point, do we say "we did everything they could, maybe this is for the best"?
A robust package of intensive trauma-informed community mental health treatment could probably have helped her.
Here's a blog about it.
Rotten Apples, on Poisoned Branches, in Toxic Orchards: https://thediagnosisofexclusion.wordpress.com/2019/05/28/rot...
Out of Sight and Out of Mind: https://thediagnosisofexclusion.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/pro...
When the Help Hurts more than the hurting does: https://thediagnosisofexclusion.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/whe...
(and a bunch more on that site).
The fact that this has prompted over 40 comments and good discussion would seem to suggest it is on-topic.
Furthermore:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
Touché! Thanks for pointing that out. I agree and I won't complain in the future.