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Comment by manholio | Hacker News Reader

Sounds about like what I would expect. Old age with an incurable degenerative disease is living in hell, so it's no surprise people take the option if it's available.

But safeguards must be put in place to prevent people with a history of depression or mental diseases to be approved, it's simply an impossible decision for the state to make even if it would legitimately benefit some of them.

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"we don't want to let people end their life humanely because I think I know better than them about their life. Instead they can end their life inhumanely anyways." - I rewrote what you were saying to make its intent clearer.

"I think 18 year olds should be able to end their lives because they got a bad grade in a class and who knows their life better than them" — I rewrote what you were saying. This strawmanning stuff sure is easy!

Patients aren't always rational actors. In the US at least, doctors have < 25 minutes per person. There are well documented biases in medicine (try getting your tubes tied as a single woman) and my concern is that it very easily veers into eugenics territory. If we can't treat something why not screen for it in utero and terminate pregnancies with appreciable odds of developing terminal or chronic diseases with no known cures?

If they're 18, and can fight to die in foreign sands over oil. They can choose to end their life too. At some point people have rights, and you will respect that.

It is easy to put people in situations that make them contemplate suicide, deprive them of enough sleep they will become depressed and eventually get in horrible mental states that they want to end and that is the problem, people don't want to die, they want to avoid bad mental states, they want to be healthy. By just euthanizing everyone willy nilly you are depriving them of their option to be healthy and eventually we will continue justifying toxic environments by saying that you can always "leave" if you don't like it.

> Instead they can end their life inhumanely anyways

That's an option that always exists. I simply have a (much) higher threshold than you in regards to a state killing its own citizens.

It's not the state that kills, it's the patients that request to have their life ended to avoid interminable suffering.

This sort of framing is not helping the discussion at all.

Do people with history of depression and mental diseases suffer? Do they have a right to end their suffering?

Yeah. Major depressive disorder is absolutely suffering. You should not force people to live with it, especially if they have sought professional help without success.

What if they've sought "professional help" and been turned away / denied due to lack of cash on hand? What if they also have physical medical issues that could get solved except for that whole pesky "cash on hand" thing? What if they've suffered for many years and now just want to give up and end the suffering?

I believe it should be their choice to make. The case in which I'd be skeptical is if someone were just beginning to experience mental illness. The onset of mental illness can be very difficult, confusing and disturbing. People often don't know what's happening to them and they don't know what treatment may be able to do for them. To allow them to choose suicide in an dark early moment of their disease which may stabilize seems callus to me.

I'm not sure how you structure this limitation but bottom line is anyone with significant experience of their own mental illness who doesn't want to live with it anymore shouldn't have to.

The whole point is that they are unable to make that choice. A substantial decision made in sound mind implies rationality, which mental disease, by definition, diminishes.

If you equate a person's rational choices with everything that comes out of their mouth, then you will euthanize a whole lot of mentally troubled or people.

Just because someone is experiencing mental illness doesn't mean they are irrational.

I'm not even sure it's possible to divide the world between "mentally ill" and "mentally well". And if you could, I'd be inclined to say almost anyone who has been in serious chronic pain for years cannot possibly be considered "mentally well". Pain takes its own toll.

Depression absolutely makes people irrational. It changes your risk calculus. Are we going to act like other disorders such as bipolar are rational and should be listened to whenever at face value?

It can make you irrational. It doesn't necessarily. You are acting as if all mental illness is experienced uniformly the same across all people. It is not. And as if the severity does not vary over time. It does.

And dependimg the disease condition of the bipolar suferrer yes. Depending upon their stability which varies heavily from case to case and individual to individual. Would you want to do so at the peak of mania or the trough of depression, probably not.

I don’t think it should be a decision for the state to make at all, and certainly not one where a history of depression or mental disease would be permanently barring.

As an old guy with an incurable disease, nothing is more frightening than people who want me to die before I'm ready to go.

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