A desire to kill oneself is a diagnosis of mental instability.
From his perspective it was a rational decision because he didn't see any better one. There is absolutely not mental instability in play here.
My feeling is that most people who commit suicide do it because they decided it on a rational basis. Some people commit suicide because they want to stop a pain they feel and in their view will apparently last forever or will get worse. I.e cancer, someone has to spend the rest of his life in a bed after an accident ... People can also commit suicide as a sacrifice to save others. But I guess you were not talking of these types of suicide.
Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide.
Your claim is typical from someone who didn't took the time and made the effort to understand what can lead someone fully rational to suicide. A rational thinking compares the cost and benefit of dying or living. According to some context a perfectly sain person may rationnaly conclude that commiting suicide is the best choice.
The rational thinking they had from their perspective and knowledge may have been wrong, but this is not to be confused with mental instability.
You think that more people commit suicide for others than for themselves? Care to explain why or cite anything?
>Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide.
Cite?
Cite? Just found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide.
From the graphic shown on the page, not all suicide are caused by mental illness. That was my main point.
I have some doubts about the mental illness importance shown in this graph. Anyway, the mental illness could be the source of pain leading to the rational decision to end it by suicide.
I think we should only invoke "mental instability" when someone's projection of their future level of suffering is clearly mistaken.
Regardless, the vast majority of suicides are the result of a combination of depression and loss of inhibition, both of which are psychiatric symptoms that can be brought on or exacerbated by severe stress. The assumption can and should be that this is the case, not that an individual who was self-admittedly under huge amounts of personal stress performed a rational evaluation of their own future prospects in life and determined that it wasn't worth living.
You say that there are some situations where suicide is a rational choice. But even in these cases it's not that clear.
While I respect the right to chose death, and support changing of law to allow people to seek medically assisted suicide, I am worried that people with undiagnosed depression who would respond to treatment are allowed to die.
user: mentalhealth
created: 17 minutes ago
Then don't comment if you're so afraid of your rep. I mean, what's the point of this site? To me, it's to exchange various thoughts/ideas related to tech and otherwise.
Creating a new account to comment cause your afraid of being down-voted is cowardly. And insulting, frankly.
Regarding the "unsubstantiated claim", I don't feel the need to substantiate every assertion I make on HN. People here are generally smart and motivated enough to do their own research (when they're not busily dismissing everything they can with "citation needed"), and suicidal ideation as mental illness is universally accepted by the professional community qualified to discuss the phenomenon.