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Comment by hypeatei | Hacker News Reader

These conversations usually turn into philosophical or religious arguments around life. My opinion is that suicide is completely valid and should not be stigmatized or illegal. Making it "off limits" and scary is how you isolate and drive people towards more unreliable and violent methods of killing themselves.

Yes, death is very sad and uncomfortable but it's a part of life. Whether we leave at 25 or 80 is still equally sad but I don't see it any different. It should be our choice.

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If criminalization drives people toward worse methods, then I see how it would make sense to stop criminalization if we assume it doesn't affect the suicide rate.

But are you confident that stigma doesn't decrease the rate of suicide? If you believe it does, but still object to stigmatization, why?

If I understand your question correctly: I'm against stigmatization because I believe it unnecessarily causes more suffering for the person dealing with suicidal thoughts. It shuns them and may cause them to land in a mental institution or getting arrested with both of those having cascading negative effects.

Essentially, if we remove the stigma and update legislation to reflect that, then people experiencing suicidal thoughts won't fear repercussions for merely thinking about, or exploring options around suicide.

Don't you think this could quickly devolve into legitimising suicide as something normal and valid, as opposed to something that should be avoided, through proper care, support and help?

No. Death is already something that is mostly undesirable, I don’t think making “death by suicide” more undesirable than other types of deaths helps in any way.

If someone is sick, he will tend to get treatment for his sickness, be it mental or not. If someone refuses to treat himself (and this happens a lot for non-mental sickness), there is anyway little one can do.

Finally, I think looking at where the world is hurling toward and why, I feel it should be accepted by all that some individuals want to commit suicide as an altruistic gesture.

I think maybe a way of dealing with that would be to require the person to chat to a qualified therapist about it for a couple of one hour sessions before hand. That way the people who were temporarily depressed could be helped out and the ones with something like terminal cancer could go ahead.

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