Fuck no, I didn’t. Plenty of people who suffer from mental illness which culminates in severe suicidal ideation/suicide are perfectly capable of reason. Mental illness =/= insane.
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Teenage Dutch Rape Victim Not Euthanized, Contrary to Reports
This has to be a record for strangest, most awful headline in the history of the Internet.
Sure, mental illness is fairly commonplace. If you don’t have it and haven’t had it, probably someone in your family does or has. And you probably got better, like most people do from most physical illnesses.
But somebody brought up “Stage IV.” I’m guessing that’s a comparison to the stages of cancer.
At some point mental illness reaches the point where a person is said to be not of sound mind (and hence incapable of consent). Is that Stage IV? Is a person with Stage IV mental illness of sound mind?
Is there a whole other category of things that we can’t call “mental illness,” which are the things that make a person non compos mentis and incapable of consent?
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Sure, any dementia-inducing mental illness.
Different parts of the brain are affected by different illnesses, different parts of the brain have different functions, not all of which are related to the capacity to reason
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Is it really unfair to say that if a person’s reasoning lead them to the conclusion that, though they are otherwise healthy, they have to kill themselves, that their capacity to reason must be impaired?
We let people do plenty of other stuff that rationally would be completely stupid.
The legal tests for mental capacity these days tend to be along the lines of “Does the person know what they are contemplating doing?” “Do they have an understanding of the consequences?” “Have they weighed up the pros and cons?”
Whether they’ve come to the same conclusion about the pro’s and con’s ‘most people’ would is not really relevant.
In practice it does tend to boil down to the more extreme your decision is considered to be, the more hurdles will get thrown up.
So: decide that you don’t like cornflakes and will never eat them again? No one will bother you.
Decide that you want to take up smoking? If you’re not already under some sort of supervision, no one will care. Even though that’s essentially saying “Hello, I want to kill myself slowly and painfully”
Decide that you want to leave all your money to the cat’s home because the King of the Cats told you to? Your relatives will whinge and say you’re crazy. A court may well agree.
Decide you want to leave all your money to the cat’s home because your cats gave you great pleasure through life and your kids are all complete arseholes who have repeatedly publicly expressed that they want nothing to do with you and are multi-millionaires?
A court will probably agree with you. Pro-tip though - don’t leave your money to the local cat’s home in those circumstances. Leave it to one of the big animal charities. Those people play hardball with charity bequests. The locals are unlikely to have the money or will to fight your spoiled offspring
In your hypothetical, someone completely healthy who decides they want to kill themselves might well be considered to lack capacity as regards that decision. That happens quite a lot. It’s what tends to get people sectioned or whatever your local term for sending someone to a mental health unit for their own good is.
In a situation like the one in this poor girl’s? Far less likely. Her situation was essentially the same as a cancer patient deciding not to have the 23rd round of chemo.
Each case has to be handled on its own facts.
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Spoilers for suicide triggers.
I have PTSD and moderate to severe depression. Right now I am not suicidal and I think I am thinking rationally.
I can’t say with any certainty that my decisions to not kill myself was the right one. I have set things up in my life so that it is harder for me to succeed (When I tell people I am suicidal it is not selfish attention seeking, it is a medical emergency and I am asking my friends to watch out for me and section me if necessary. It is not something I do lightly.) I question if that is the right decision, I am an athiest and the thought of dying and feeling nothing is comforting to me. I fight on anyway.
I’m going to drop out of the discussion now, because it is bad for my mental health.
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Ping @orenwolf about it. There’s a process to highlight this shitvertising, but I forgot because I started to use a browser which blocks this. I’m sorry not to support BB by advertising, but there it is.
I’d rather see ads for Facebook, Cisco routers and Huawei phones under articles ranting about something something tech than the horrible ads that network delivers… sighs
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Sorry, I don’t have anything to do with advertising content. you’ll want ads@boingboing.net for that.
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Sorry to have bothered you - as I said, I forgot. 
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Not all all, just not in my wheelhouse. 
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