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Comment by koningrobot | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Fry should speak for himself. People can have very good reasons to want to die. Reasons that are so good that, besides outweighing the value that their life has to them, still have enough oomph to carry one over the high doorstep of fear and pain that comes with taking one's own life.

Life is not infinitely valuable. Its goods can be outweighed by bads. People who really just want to go should be respected and we should help them get out of here.

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> People can have very good reasons to want to die.

You seem to have missed context here. The context being him talking about his depression. He's not talking about suicide in general, he's talking about suicide of the clinically depressed.

We don't have the full interview here for context, so I don't think either of us should be absolute on this, but I would guess that he's specifically speaking within the bounds of suicide rooted in mental illness. In fact, I would place very good odds that Stephen Fry would highlight the issues inherent in assisted suicide but still support it on the whole.

I was present at the interview, so - as far as my memory allows - I /do/ have the context: he was very much speaking specifically about his own situation. He was responding to the question "What's it like to be Stephen Fry" in a forthright and incredibly moving way. There were audible gasps from the audience at some of what he was saying, but it never came across as self-important, etc. merely a very honest, painful, and genuine recollection of a specific event that occurred and its meaning in the wider context of his life.

Full interview will appear here in a few days - http://www.comedy.co.uk/podcasts/richard_herring_lst_podcast...

Interview now available

That's substantially different than suicide due to physiological imbalances. It's fine to raise awareness of that separate issue, but let's not conflate these things.

Fry said that in a very specific context, you shouldn't assume he meant it as an absolute statement.

I suffer from mild clinical depression, and know first-hand that one of the things it does is fuck with how you mentally weigh things. Things of no importance when you're clear of mind take on momentous importance when you're affected. This 'let the ill take their own lives, it's what they want' is lazy and suggests that you're not actually familiar with the issues involved.

He’s not talking about suicide in general, but suicide resultant from a particular kind of depression.

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