40,000 suicides annually, yet America simply shrugs

I think most women have thought about abortion to some degree and formed an opinion on whether it's the right choice for them, or under what conditions they would entertain the idea of an abortion versus keeping the child in an unexpected pregnancy. In these cases, you're right: discouraging women who have thought about the process would be seen as in bad taste.

But what if the woman was being pressured to abort (or to keep) the child by outside pressure? Then intervention would be seen as supporting the woman, not as interfering, and it'd be in good taste.

IMO, suicide is very similar. A large proportion of suicide attempts are people who go on to regret it and successfully seek treatment. I don't think it's too much of a leap from that to the idea that a large proportion of suicides themselves are being done for the wrong reasons, i.e. the "outside pressure" of a brain that is suffering a mental illness.

After short-term medication, long-term therapy, and some lifestyle changes, we live mostly normal lives and have two happy children.

So you're damn right I'm asserting that there's a right decision and that I knew better than her in her chemically imbalanced state.

Now, this is one scenario that has a happy ending. I don't know what I would think about someone chronically and incurably suffering. But the idea of absolutely unfettered access to assisted suicide scares me.

- The word "platitudes" and the scare quotes around "cure" indicate that blanket skepticism towards depression therapy of the kind I see from conspiracy nuts. You disqualify yourself from serious discussion that way.

- "coping methods on how to deal with the facts of a sad and sorry life" indicates that you believe depression is caused by external rather than internal factors. This runs very much against well established knowledge. If you suffer from external factors, those should be improved, and it's primarily up to you to do that.

- In cases of depression where therapy is ineffective for some reason, should this be considered morally equivalent to someone wishing to die to end their suffering from cancer, MS, etc.? This is absolutely worth discussing. The main problem I see is that we know that depression generaly is curable - so at what point do you decide that a given case is not?

The vast majority of the anti-suicide efforts were just—insulting in her case, in a lot of ways. There were a lot of people and organizations telling her very loudly not to kill herself, and that it would get better if she just stuck it out a little more and saw a therapist. There was a legal and medical system willing to lock her up, for a fee, and keep her from actually physically harming herself. (This terrified her. She said her stay in a mental institution had been horrific and entirely unhelpful—they basically put her in solitary and kept her from doing anything at all, for hours. They wouldn't even let her have a pen and paper to write with because they were concerned that she would use it for self-harm.)

But there was nobody actually providing a way to make her life less painful. She came from a wealthy background and had good health insurance, so could afford weekly therapy sessions and psych meds. Some of the pills would work, for a few months or weeks at a time, but none of them were permanently helpful—and most of them took weeks to titrate up to an effective dose, so with each switch there would be a huge gap of time where she was as bad off as ever and nobody knew if the next pill would even work.

The anti-suicide efforts were like—it was like she was burning alive, and there were all these organizations and people in place determined to keep her from shooting herself to end the pain. But there was nobody who could actually stop her from burning.

I don't know. It's an awful situation all around. There are definitely a lot of people who are just temporarily upset or suffering from mild and easily treatable depression who do benefit from things like fences on bridges and national help hotlines. But more research is definitely needed. Someone else said in this thread that what we should really be doing is trying to keep people off the ledge entirely, not just trying to keep them from jumping, and I definitely agree there. What we really need is ways to keep people from wanting to die, not just ways to keep them from committing the act.

You assume 100% self ownership of one's life, which I find silly. Society makes large investments in individuals and typically they have long term duties that cannot rightfully be abandoned.

The grandparent was saying it should be easier for people to kill themselves, and I think the parent was trying to point out that this isn't a perfect solution since there are so many who think that suicide is their only option but there are really other options.

~80% of those 40,000 suicides were men. I've a feeling if it were 80% female there would be a lot more attention given to it.

There may be mental failings involved which are outside the control of the individual, but I don't think that's the whole story or we'd have to throw the idea of moral agency out the window (I picked the example I did because the person neither appeared nor claimed to suffer cognitive impairment AFAIK). We are actors as well as being acted upon by our environment and biology; insofar as our activities impact others, we have some responsibility to regulate them.

In the USA, life insurance does cover suicide, as long as it is not within 2 years of the issue date.

https://www.google.com/search?q=bereavement+leave+law