I've thought a lot about suicide and near death experiences

This is responding to the wrong thing. The above comment concerns one of the reasons why there is an important moral difference between killing someone without their knowledge and euthanasia/assisted suicide at a person's request. In the case of suicide, someone has to come across the dead body in any case. And if it were perfectly easy to die without any risk or discomfort at all, then there'd be no point in assisted suicide even for the terminally ill.



If the loved ones would wish to have someone forced to remain alive agains that person's wishes, then they don't deserve to have their grievances paid any attention and should be condemned for their callousness. If the 'vulnerable' people went through the entire process up until death wishing for that service, then in no way can they be said to be victims. Human societies are in serious need of a paradigm change concerning death.

If you had a DNR and would have died without medical intervention, then you would have a right to sue the hospital that ignored your directive. If you try to kill yourself and are somehow intercepted before completion of the suicide (perhaps you did everything in the most rational way possible, but just got extremely unlucky), then your DNR would be ignored on the presumption of insanity. Without anyone having interviewed you so as to assess your mental state.

Almost any method of suicide is fraught with a margin of error, which is indiscriminate between the mentally ill and rational. You have to go to the extreme of claiming or implying that in the history of the entire human race, no rational person has ever failed at suicide in order to support your reactionary primitivism.

A person's perspective changes based on whether they are mentally ill; but then if you're saying that because someone wants to die that means that they can't consent to what they want, then that is a catch-22. A person with a mental illness is usually suffering, and their reports should be taken seriously. When living with a chronic mental illness for years, it is perfectly rational to want to die, given that this would have the desired outcome of ending the suffering, but without any lasting negative consequences. To say that even a patient who presents this line of reasoning should not be helped to die (or should be forcefully prevented from committing suicide) is mere discrimination.



The concerns of the loved ones are no more to be taken seriously than those who would be devastated if someone in their family came out as homosexual, wanted to leave the family religion, or wanted to marry interracially. The liberties of the individual should never be constrained by the benighted illiberalism of the collective. There is no rational argument that a person can regret being dead, and therefore any measure which seeks to prevent the right to assistance in dying can only ever be based in an atavistic religious mindset that should be accorded no place in shaping the discourse or laws in a civilised society.

The DNR would be a grey area at best. And oftentimes DNRs are even ignored for people who come in with a heart attack, or as a victim of a car crash. If it were "trivially easy" to die, then people would not spend hundreds of $s on obtaining Nembutal from abroad at the risk of having their homes raided by the police. And a failed suicide attempt is not an indication of insanity. Even if it were, society should still be more humane than to condemn people to disability and severe physical harm because they have a mental illness.



"Why should I fear death?

If I am, then death is not.

If Death is, then I am not.

Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?"

---Epicurus

That is a rational philosophy no matter who espouses it. Whereas your tyrannical policy basically states that human life has an intrinsic meaning which transcends suffering, and nobody must be allowed to act in defiance of that decree. It's an apostasy law.

The arguments that I use is that for some people, life is nothing more than suffering. They didn't consent to the risks, and the risks themselves are indiscriminate. People (and other animals) aren't harmed because they 'deserved' it; and forced exposure to further harm when they've asked for a guaranteed end to the harm is barbaric.

It very much is discrimination, because you're saying that their desires are automatically invalid, based on a medical diagnosis (and you're even extending it to people without such a diagnosis, such as myself). Not all people with mental illness are experiencing a break from reality. Depression is not a form of psychosis wherein the patient has lost touch with reality. Someone's medical condition ought not to lead to prejudice against that individual if they are expressing a coherent and rational argument, such as "I want to die so that I can escape from present and future suffering, knowing that it is unlikely that when I'm dead I will be able to feel deprivation of the joys". So you're addressing the person's reasoning and not discriminating against the patient without giving them a chance to explain themselves. Of course, as has been demonstrated many times, you do like your ad hominem attacks, so naturally you want people to be disqualified from assistance to die based on an ad hominem prejudice.

Sentient existence is unnecessary and fraught with risk. Non-existent people of course cannot consent. Therefore, considering the risks involved, coupled with the fact that non-existent people cannot feel deprived of life, there ought to be the presumption of non-consent.



I never stated that I would want to tell people of my intentions. I simply should be permitted to have access to the means to die, and if someone else happens to find out about my plans (whether from myself, or by other means), they should have no legal right of intervention. The taboo around assisted dying is very much the same as the taboo around apostasy, homosexuality, or interracial marriage. In the past, and in the present in certain societies, the collective has the right to prevent homosexuality or interracial marriage because they would cause an outrage. In our own society, we're still at the stage where assisted dying is not allowed because it flies in the face of the narrative of 'human life is special and transcends the pain of suffering' from which so many people (including yourself) still derive comfort.