Das Denken an Selbstmord ist alltäglich. In seinem
Buch-
Selbstmord
veröffentlicht 1988, sagt Earl A. Grollman " fast jeder bei
einem
Zeit oder andere erwägt Selbstmord " (zweite Ausgabe,
Leuchtfeuer
Betätigen Sie sich, P. 2). In seinem Buch-
Selbstmord: Die für immer Entscheidung,
veröffentlicht
1987 sagt Psychologe Paul G. Quinnett, Ph.D., daß "
Forschung hat
gezeigt, daß eine erhebliche Majorität Leute
Selbstmord
betrachtet haben
in auf einmal ihre Lebensdauern und ich bedeuten Sie
betrachtete ihn ernsthaft "
(Kontinuum, P. 12). Dennoch ist das Denken an
Selbstmord
Allgemeines sprechen die Stirn gerunzelt nach und durch sich
ist genug zu resultieren
in der unfreiwilligen " Hospitalisierung " und in sogenannter
Behandlung in a
psychiatrisches " Krankenhaus ", besonders wenn die Person in
der Frage
denkt an Selbstmord ernsthaft und lehnt (sogenannten)
ambulanten Patienten ab
Psychotherapy zum Erhalten diesem des Denkens geändert.
Die Tatsache, das bevölkeren
incarcerated in Amerika für sind das Denken und die Befassen
Selbstmord
deutet das trotz an, was die US-Beschaffenheit über freies
sagt
Rede und trotz der Ansprüche Amerikaner bilden häufig
über
Amerika, das ist
ein freies Land, viele, wenn die nicht meisten Amerikaner
nicht wirklich
innen glauben
Freiheit von Gedanken und Rede - zusätzlich zum
Zurückweisen
Individualrecht, Selbstmord festzulegen.
Demgegenüber die Behauptung, daß Leute
ein Recht zu haben
denken Sie nicht nur an, aber, Selbstmord festzulegen ist
durch viele gebildet worden
Leute, die an einzelne Freiheit glauben. In seinem
Buch-
Selbstmord innen
Amerika, veröffentlicht 1982, Psychiatrist Herbert
Hendin, M.D.,
sagt: " teils als Antwort zum Ausfall der
Selbstmordverhinderung,
teils in der Reaktion auf Verpflichtung Mißbräuche und
möglicherweise hauptsächlich in
Geist des Annehmens alles, das nicht physikalisch niemand
schädigt
sonst sehen wir den Selbstmord, der in zunehmendem Maße als
grundlegender Mensch befürwortet wird
Recht. Viele solche Fürsprecher bedauern alle
Versuche, Selbstmord zu verhindern
als Störung mit dem nach rechts. Es ist eine
Position succinctly
ausgedrückt durch Nietzsche, als er schrieb, ist `There ein
bestimmtes Recht vorbei
welchem wir einen Mann das Leben berauben können, aber,
keine, durch die wir können
berauben Sie ihn Tod. ', Genommen von seinem
Sozial- und psychologisch
Kontext, Selbstmord wird durch einiges lediglich als eine
Ausgabe von persönlichem angesehen
Freiheit " (W. W. Norton u. Co., P. 209). In seinem
Buch der Tod von
Psychiatrie, veröffentlicht 1974, Psychiatrist E.
Fuller Torrey,
M.D., sagte dieses: " es sollte nicht möglich sein, Leute
zu begrenzen
gegen ihre Willen in den Geistes`hospitals. ', Dieses
deutet das an
Leute haben das Recht, sich zu beenden, wenn sie wünschen.
Ich glaube
dieses ist so " (Buch Chilton Co., P. 180). 1968 in
seinem Buch warum
Selbstmord?, Dr. Eustace Chesser, ein Psychologe,
erklärt: " das Recht
, irgendjemandes Zeit und Weise des Todes zu wählen scheint
mir unassailable.
..., Meiner Meinung nach ist das Recht zu sterben der letzte
und größte Mensch
Freiheit " (Pfeilbücher, London, pp. 123 u. 125).
Auf Im Selbstmord
veröffentlicht 1851, sagte Arthur Schopenhauer: " es gibt
nichts innen
die Welt, zu der jeder Mann einen unassailable Namen als zu
hat
seine eigene Lebensdauer und Person " (H. L. Mencken, ein
neues Verzeichnis von
Quotations, Knopf, 1942, P. 1161). In
Buch-auf-nehmen Sie auf Band auf
Audiokassette Version ihrer Buch- Lebensdauer 101,
veröffentlicht 1990,
John-Roger und Peter McWilliams erklären uns: " die
Übereinstimmung von
Beschreibungen von einer ausgedehnten Strecke der
Einzelpersonen Punkte zu
Möglichkeit, daß Tod nicht so falsch sein konnte...,
Selbstmord ist immer
eine Option. Es ist manchmal, was das Leben
bearable bildet.
Wissen wir
nicht absolut müssen hier sein kann hier sein bilden
wenig
einfacher. ", Suzy Szasz, ein Opfer von
KörperLupus Erythematosus,
bestätigt diese Ansicht in ihr Buch, das mit ihm
lebt: Warum Sie Nicht Haben
Gesund sein, nach einem akuten Flare-up ihrer
Krankheit glücklich zu sein
während, welches sie Selbstmord erwog: " ebensoviel ein
altes
Philosoph hat, ich fand die Freiheit, um Selbstmord
festzulegen beachtet
befreien " (Prometheus Books, 1991, P. 226). In den
alten Zeiten
(circa 485-425 B.C.), schrieb Herodotus: " wenn das Leben so
lästig ist
Tod ist geworden für Manngesucht nach Schutz. ", In
seinem Buch
Zunge Untamed, veröffentlicht 1990, Psychiatrist
Thomas Szasz wie
serts: " Selbstmord ist ein grundlegendes menschliches
Recht. Gesellschaft nicht
haben Sie das Moralrecht, durch Kraft, eine Person zu
behinderen
Entscheidung zum Festlegen dieser Tat " (öffentliche
Sitzung, die Co., P. 250- veröffentlicht
251).
Zu
diesen Anweisungen über Support, damit
das Recht festlegt
Selbstmord, füge ich meine Selbst hinzu: In einer wirklich
freien Gesellschaft besitzen Sie Ihr
das Leben und Ihre nur Verpflichtung soll die Rechte
von anderen respektieren.
Ich glaube, daß jeder erlaubt wird, als der alleinige
Inhaber von behandelt zu werden
selbst oder selbst und seiner oder eigener Lebensdauer.
Dementsprechend I
denken Sie, daß eine Person, die festlegt, Selbstmord
mittendrin seine oder Rechte ist
wenn er so bereitgestellt tut, tun ihn oder sie so privat und
außen
Gefährden der körperlichen Sicherheit von anderen.
Familie Bauteile, Polizei
Offiziere, Richter und " therapists ", wer eine Person
behinderen
die Entscheidung zum Beenden seine oder eigene Lebensdauer
verletzen dieser Person
menschliche Rechte. Die häufig ausgedrückte diese
Meinung die Möglichkeit von
Selbstmord schließt psychiatrische Behandlung aus, selbst
wenn er auferlegt werden muß
gegen den Willen der möglicherweise selbstmörderischen
Person ist falsch.
Vorausgesetzt die Person in der Frage nicht die Rechte von
verletzt
others, that person's autonomy is of more value than enforcement
of
what other people consider rational or of what other people
think
is in a person's best interests. In a free society where
self-
ownership is recognized, "dangerousness to oneself" is
irrelevant.
In the words of the title of a movie starring Richard
Dreyfuss:
"Whose Life Is It, Anyway?" The greatest human
right is the right
of self-ownership, one aspect of which is the right to life,
but
another aspect of which is the right to end one's own life.
Whether or not a person supports the right to commit suicide is
a
litmus test of whether or not that person truly believes in
self-
ownership and the individual freedom that comes with it, the
individual freedom that many of us have been taught is the
reason-
for-being of American democracy.
One reason some oppose the right to commit suicide is
theological belief that is sometimes expressed this way:
"God gave
you life, and only God has the right to take life from you."
Using
this reasoning to justify interfering with a person's right
to
commit suicide is imposing religious beliefs on people who
may not
share those beliefs. In America where we supposedly have
freedom
of (and from) religion, this is wrong.
Another reason some people believe it is ethical to
interfere with a person's right to think about or commit suicide
is
belief in mental illness. But a so-called diagnosis of
"mental
illness" is a value judgment about a person's
thinking or behavior,
not a diagnosis of bona-fide brain disease. So-called
mental
illness does not deprive people of free will, but on the
contrary
is an expression of free will (which reaps the disapproval
of
others). Those who say mental illness destroys
"meaningful" free
will or who call the beliefs of others irrational (and
therefore
necessarily caused by mental illness) are accepting the idea
of
mental illness as brain disease without adequate evidence or
are
refusing to accept the beliefs of others only because they
differ
from their own.
Sometimes people oppose the right to commit
suicide because of belief in a sort of entirely
non-biological
mental illness. The error of this way of thinking is that
without
a biological abnormality the only possible defining
characteristic
of mental illness is disapproval of some aspect of a
person's
mentality or thinking. But in a free society, it shouldn't
matter
if the thinking of a person meets with the disapproval of
others,
provided the person's actions do not violate the
rights of others.
Furthermore, there isn't any good evidence that mental
illness
by any generally accepted definition is usually involved in a
person's
decision to commit suicide. In her book about teenage
suicide,
Marion Crook, B.Sc.N., says "teens considering suicide are
not
necessarily mentally disturbed. In fact, they are rarely
mentally
disturbed" (Every Parent's Guide To Understanding
Teenagers &
Suicide, Int'l Self-Counsel Press Ltd., Vancouver, 1988, p.
10).
Psychologist Paul G. Quinnett, Ph.D., makes this observation in
his
book Suicide: The Forever Decision: "As we have
already discussed,
however, you do not have to be mentally ill to take your own
life.
In fact, most people who do commit suicide are not legally
`insane.' So it seems we have a very interesting problem.
To
prevent you from killing yourself, doctors like myself will
stand
up in court and say something to the effect that, by reason of
a
mental illness, you are a danger to yourself and need treatment.
But - and this is the weird part - you may, in a matter of a
few
hours to a couple of days, get up one morning and say, `I've
decided not to kill myself, after all.' And if you can
convince us
you mean what you say, you can leave the hospital and go home.
Question: Are you now completely cured of your so-called
mental
illness? Obviously not, since the chances are you were
never
`mentally ill' in the first place. ... As I have said, I do
not
believe you have to be mentally ill to think about suicide"
(pp.
11-12). Dr. Quinnett's statement is a clear admission
that
allegations of mental illness to justify incarcerating
suicidal
people often are deliberate dishonesty, even by the definition
of
mental illness that exists in the minds of the professionals
who
make the allegations of mental illness. They make these
allegations of mental illness even though they know they are
false
because involuntary psychiatric commitment laws require a
finding
of "mental illness" before involuntary commitment may
take place.
Making deliberately false accusations of "mental
illness" under
oath in a court of law to satisfy commitment laws for the
purpose
of discouraging suicidal thinking or preventing suicide is a way
to
avoid coming to terms with the fact that incarcerating people
only
because they happen to think their lives are not worth living
or
because they have attempted to end their own lives is a form
of
authoritarianism and despotism. In the case of people who
have
only thought about (not attempted) suicide, it is imprisonment
for
mere thought-crime similar to that illustrated by George
Orwell in
his novel 1984.
Even people who
oppose the right to commit suicide
because of their belief in mental illness sometimes can be made
to
understand the erroneousness of their biological theorizing
or
their belief in some kind of non-biological mental illness by
asking them if they would see any point in living if they
were
suffering from a terminal disease involving excruciating,
unreliev-
able physical pain or were completely paralyzed from the neck
down
with no chance of recovery. Once people admit there are
any
circumstances in which they would choose death, they often
see
suicide is the result of a person's personal judgment about his
or
her circumstances in life rather than a biological malfunction
of
the brain or some conception of non-biological mental
illness.
Some may feel it is right to use force to prevent
suicide
because of their belief that the potentially suicidal
person's
desire to die is probably temporary and will probably go away
or
subside if he or she is forced to live a short time longer
until
the acute emotional reaction to a recent traumatic event has
faded
with time. Those advancing this argument sometimes
acknowledge a
person does have a right to commit suicide if he or she is
not
acting impulsively. But most evidence indicates few if any
people
who commit suicide do so impulsively. As Earl A. Grollman
says in
his book Suicide (in which he opposes the right to
commit
suicide):
"Suicide does not occur suddenly, impulsively,
unpredictably" (p.
63). In his book Suicide: The Forever Decision,
psychologist Paul
G. Quinnett, Ph.D., says: "I have talked to hundreds of
suicidal
people... If I can make another guess about what has been going
on
inside your head and heart, it is that you have had long and
difficult discussions with yourself about whether to live or
die"
(pp. 18-19). Rather than being impulsive, suicide is
something
people do after long contemplation as part of their efforts to
deal
with what they consider intolerable life circumstances.
The usual justification for involuntary incarceration
and
so-called treatment of those considering or attempting suicide
is
alleged dangerousness to oneself. But even people who don't
agree
with the principle of self-ownership should ask themselves:
dangerousness to oneself in the eyes of whom? To an
onlooker,
suicide may seem to always be harmful to the person ending his
or
her life. But that's not how the person committing suicide
sees
the situation. People commit suicide because they decide
continued
living in their particular circumstances is a greater harm
to
themselves than death. This is made abundantly clear by
Francis
Lear, editor-in-chief if Lear's magazine, in her
autobiographical
book, The Second Seduction: "I ALWAYS HAVE an
`exitline.' A stash
of lithium. A building tall enough to kill, not maim, for
godsake,
not maim. One goes out in suicide, one simply goes out,
gets out,
wriggles, bolts, and does not some back merely smashed up or,
as
the first priority, left with the ability to feel. One does
not go
out in a half-assed manner. Suicide has many consequences.
It
will hurt people who love you, it can splatter the sidewalks;
but
its purpose, the reason for its magnetism, is that it is the
only
guaranteed, surefire way to end, blitz, detonate a critical mass
of
suffering. Suicide, reduced to its pure essence, is a
delivery
system that moves us from pain to the absence of pain. If
the gods
contrive against us and the planets are in disarray, if the
earth
cracks open beneath us, we must always have a way out"
(Harper-
Perennial, 1992, p. 26). As Dr. Eustace Chesser said,
"Suicide is
a deliberate refusal to accept the only conditions on which it
is
possible to go on living" (Why Suicide?, op. cit., p.
122).
A
person's reasons for choosing death may or may not make
sense to other people. In a free society, however, that
doesn't or
at least shouldn't matter. It is a very personal and
subjective
determination, so how can anyone else reasonably claim to know
that
a suicidal person is making the "wrong" decision in
terms of "dan-
gerousness to himself" or herself as experienced by that
person?
As William Glasser, a psychiatrist, says in his book
Positive
Addiction: "we should keep in mind that we can never
feel another
person's pain" (Harper & Row, 1976, p. 8). In
general, I agree
with psychiatrist Mark S. Gold's assertion that "suicide is
a
permanent solution to a temporary problem" (The Good News
About
Depression, Bantam Books, 1986, p. 290). However,
the
determination of whether it is best to suffer through a
miserable
present in the hope of getting to a possibly better future is
a
value judgment. A person could legitimately decide a
hopefully
better future does not justify choosing to experience an
unbearable
present. No one should claim the right override, by force,
a
person's value judgements and decisions about something as
personal
as this.
Another factor to consider is that mental health
professionals, contrary to their claim that they are
preventing
suicide, more often are unwittingly promoting eventual
suicide. In
an article in the May-June 1974 New York University Law
Review
titled "Involuntary Psychiatric Commitments to Prevent
Suicide",
New York University sociology professor David F. Greenberg,
Ph.D.,
says studies on psychiatric suicide prevention "have been
either
inconsistent or negative" and suggest "that
institutionalization
may not prevent suicide, but, in fact, may result in more
suicides"
(p. 256, emphasis in original). Considering the harmfulness
of
today's biological "treatments" in psychiatry, the
dreariness and
sometimes cruelty of institutional life, and the effects of
psychiatric stigma, such as lowered self-esteem and
discrimination
in education and employment, increased rates of suicide among
suicidal people who get psychiatric "treatment"
compared with a
similar population of suicidal people who do not get
"treatment"
should be expected. The value of recognizing the right to
commit
suicide is not only respecting individual freedom but
preventing
the harm and cruelty that often go on in the name of suicide
prevention.
While courts have gone both ways in right-to-die cases,
judicial decisions defending the right to die are not unusual
and
are gaining favor. In his book Death With Dignity,
published in
1989, attorney Robert L. Risley points out that in general
"court
cases clearly established the right to bodily integrity,
confirming
that the basic right of self-determination includes the right
to
die, and that it overrides the state's duty to preserve
life"
(Hemlock Society, Eugene, Oregon, 1989, p. viii).
The U.S. Supreme Court addressed the question of
whether
the U.S. Constitution protects the right to die in 1990 in the
case
of Cruzan v. Missouri, 497 U.S. 261. In the words of
Time
magazine, in this case the U.S. Supreme Court "declared
for the
first time that there is indeed a right to die" (July 9,
1990, p.
59). Of the nine justices, all except Justice Scalia
acknowledged
the right to die is a federal constitutional right. In his
con-
curring opinion, Justice Scalia argued vigorously against the
reasoning of the majority and dissenting opinions, both of
which
acknowledged the right of self-determination is a
constitutional
right and that it includes the right to die. Justice
Scalia
opposed the view of the other eight justices, arguing
vigorously
against what he called the right to commit suicide. But in
this
respect he stood alone on the Court.
Since the rationale of these cases is that people have
a
right of self-determination that includes the right to die,
they
support my assertion that suicide is a civil right even though,
at
present, the right to die has been upheld only in cases
involving
physically ill or disabled people who are conscious enough to
express their desire to die or who when healthy enough to
express
an opinion indicated death is what he or she would want in
the
circumstances. In fact, this justification is probably in
many
cases a mere excuse or rationalization to cover up the real
reason.
If the sole reason for permitting death was the desire of the
ill
or disabled person, involuntary psychiatric commitment of
suicidal
people would not take place. A bona-fide but unacknowledged
reason
ill or disabled people are allowed to deliberately end their
lives
is they have become a burden to other people. In other
words, just
as able-bodied suicidal people are incarcerated for their own
supposed benefit (to prevent them from committing suicide) when
the
real reason is selfish concerns of others, people with
severe,
permanent disability or incurable disease are allowed to die
for
their own supposed benefit when a real but unacknowledged
purpose
is to relieve others ("society") of the burden of
caring for them.
However, the reasoning of judicial opinions upholding the
right to die emphasize personal autonomy and self-determination
as
the basis for the decision and therefore support my opinion
that
each person is the sole owner of himself or herself, of his or
her
own body, and of his or her own life. They support my
opinion that
the right to commit suicide is a civil right.
If you are a legislator who supports the right of self-
ownership you should introduce legislation to delete references
to
"dangerousness to oneself" in your state's psychiatric
commitment
laws. If you are a judge deciding questions of
constitutional law,
you should strike down as unconstitutional laws that imprison
("hospitalize") people only for supposed dangerousness
or harm to
oneself. Whoever you are, you should respect the autonomy
of all
of your fellow men and women whose conduct does not unlawfully
harm
others.
THE AUTHOR, Lawrence Stevens, is a lawyer whose practice has
included representing psychiatric "patients". His
pamphlets are
not copyrighted. Feel free to make copies.