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She's 47, anorexic and wants help dying. Canada will soon allow it.
(www.reuters.com)
As a mental health counselor, I'm very familiar with the wealth of psychological literature that documents how suicide attempts are overwhelmingly the product of impulses that occur in very short-lived moments of utter despair, and that most survivors of SAs regret making them.
However, I am also intimately familiar with how horrendously torturous life can be, even when one's external circumstances aren't that bad, and it is my firm belief that it should be an inalienable human right to "get off the ride" so to speak. To that end, I'm for governments providing suicide assistance to people who demonstrate a prolonged desire to end their own lives that cannot be reasonably argued to be an impulse due to temporarily depressed mood. There do need to be limitations to protect people from acting rashly or on deluded beliefs that stem from psychosis or mania (e.g. a schizophrenic person wanting to kill themselves because they believe they're a host for the Devil as opposed to the much more rational reason of simply being sick of dealing with the illness itself), but overall I'm against requiring people to have a terminal illness or even just requiring them to get treatment for their depression. IMO, right to die should be universal, and restrictions on it should require strong arguments and support. You want to die because your weird religious beliefs deem it a sin to live past 30? Well...not my cup'o'tea, but that's your right.
I also just kind of think making suicide illegal is stupid. Seriously suicidal people are going to kill themselves regardless of the law; all making it illegal does is force these folks to go about it via means that may be either ineffectual and self-harming and/or risk harming others.
