28-Year-Old Dutch Woman to Legally End Her Life in May.
A Dutch woman has decided to legally end her life citing her struggles with crippling depression and autism, according to a report. Zoraya ter Beek, a 28-year-old physically healthy, who lives in a small village in the Netherlands near the German border, is slated to be euthanised in May, according to the New York Post (NYP).
The Dutch woman said she decided to be euthanised after her doctors told her nothing more could be done to improve her condition.
Didn’t we use to try to prevent people who were depressed from committing suicide?
The World has turned into a Monty Python skit.
Why attempt to treat/cure any disease at all, then? It’s clear she wanted to get better, but once the doctors told her there’s nothing they can do, they suggested they kill her.
“Pass on peacefully” as opposed to what? Assisted suicide is there to help her family and loved ones cope, she’ll be dead. She could blow her brains out or jump off a building, but that’s messy. What this does is help her die without making a mess, much like the suicide pods they introduced in Switzerland.
As opposed to being forced to continue to suffer for no reason other than to make others feel good. Other diseases can be cured. Depression (especially when caused by life factors as opposed to physical factors as life factors cannot be properly treated with meds) cannot be cured. Its not a fixable thing. Its not a broken leg, its a broken life and no amount of creative reframing can unfuck someone’s life.
(Material) conditions can be changed. Most problems with “life factors” have their roots in capitalism and how capitalist society is organised. It sounds to me like that person is perfect for radicalisation and agitation, they should fight to change things so that others aren’t affected by the same problems.
Suicide means giving up, as revolutionaries we should actively discourage it.
Revolutionary vs. reactionary suicide
Look, forcing someone to suffer off the blind hope they become your little soldier is an actually psychopathic position to take. People are not your playthings, especially those who are suffering. I’m not arguing that capitalism wasn’t the cause of their suffering, it probably was however socialism is not just gonna be built overnight. You’re not just asking, but proposing to force a person to suffer every moment of every day for likely the rest of their life (or at least a greater portion of it) to try and push your political agenda and that is frankly a disgusting notion.
Now it’s just insults… Don’t take disagreement personally. Read the sidebar.
The psychopaths are the psychiatrists who propose suicide as a cure for depression. That’s par for the course for a discipline that started off as caretakers of zoos for the “insane”, graduated to torture and then performed lobotomies into the 70s and 80s, among other sick and twisted “treatments” (like the removal of teeth).
The worst part of it is that they pretend to care and say it is all for the good of the patient. Now that’s true psychopathy!
Living is the default, nobody is forcing anybody to do anything. Besides, if she was so sure in her decision to die, why doesn’t she go off into the woods and hang herself? She needs psychiatrists to encourage her and convince her it is the right thing to do. It’s fucked up.
Ah yes, the political agenda of telling people they have the power to change material conditions instead of just killing themselves. How evil and manipulative!
Everyone suffers under capitalism, that’s why we’re communists, to end or greatly reduce that suffering. The easy way to end that suffering would be for everyone to just die. Isn’t that silly though? You don’t fix a broken clock by smashing it, you don’t improve a meal by throwing it in the trash.
No one is arguing that her doctors made the right call in this instance or that modern mental health treatment isn’t fucked thanks to capitalism. I’m just arguing that in general, suicide is a valid treatment for those who wish for it. Your entire argument was to try and force them to be a soldier for the revolution as if that somehow invalidates their suffering.
You want to restrict her access to suicide yes? Congratulations, you’re forcing her to stay alive by restricting her ability to do the contrary.
It is manipulative to prey on the mentally ill (one of the most vulnerable groups in society) for political reasons regardless of how noble or great you think such political positions are. If you cannot reconize that simple fact you are equally as monstrous as a military recruiter who preys on the poor.
Also that little blurb at the end is just silly. Especially when your food analogy doesn’t even make sense as fucked up food is often fucked in ways that cannot be fixed. You can’t unburn a steak. Ofcourse I’m not saying that life or whatever is unfixable (though that seems to be how you’ll take it). I’m just saying your choice of analogy is poor.
No. If she wants to kill herself she can jump off a building. I want to restrict doctors from suggesting and encouraging suicide as a “treatment”.
That’s basically saying that thoughts of suicide are valid and healthy and that people should act on them if they so wish. Now that’s fucked up.
Saying it is “preying” on the mentally ill for political reasons is like saying it is “preying” on the poor for political reasons. Like wtf? Should poor people also not be radicalised and agitated because they have other things to worry about?
That’s really fucking disingenuous, because by that logic communists also “prey” on the poor for political reasons, yet you used the example of military recruiters.
Do you think communists should only “recruit” among those who have all their mental health in order? Who the hell would that leave?
Everyone in capitalism is “mentally ill”, be it from anxiety, depression, stress, and so on. Capitalism makes people mentally ill, that’s an effect it has on people. That’s why “the mentally ill”, much like poor people and other marginalised groups have a vested interest in abolishing it and establishing something better.
While I don’t believe doctors should encourage it, it should be an option on the table. That is what I’m saying.
Everyone gets dark thoughts from time to time. Be it hurting someone, hurting themselves, engaging in reckless behavior. These are normal thoughts. Yet anytime someone brings up suicide suddenly its a whole production. I’m not saying constant suicidal thoughts are healthy exactly, but they are often quite reasonable given an individual’s condition so they shouldn’t be shamed either. Shaming will only make it worse.
You’re right, you shouldn’t prey on anyone. There is a big difference between preying on someone and simply talking with them and giving them the information they need to make their own decision. Your wording made it seem as though you wanted to target such people to try and trick them into joining. Now, approaching people with problems and discussing our solutions is perfectly normal. The difference comes in how the decision to join comes about. You read as if you wanted to pressure such people in with promises of pie in the sky like a cult leader. Instead of simple approaching them as an equal. Its worse with mentally Ill people because our minds are already a bit fucked and another manipulator trying to use that to try and get us to do something for them is not going to help matters.
Having those thoughts is understandable, what’s not is acting on them. The goal is to remove the conditions and factors that make the person have those thoughts, rather than having the person stop living altogether.
People have different reasons for becoming communists and socialists because their material conditions vary. So if we are to develop class consciousnesses, we have to change our tactics. If we want a bourgeoise person to become a class traitor, it wouldn’t make sense to appeal to their sense of financial struggle because they’ve never experienced it.
The only promise is change, a different world. We can’t promise it will be different, the “promise” of communism has always been the overthrow of capitalism, of the current order of things, and the power to build something else. Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised “peace, land and bread” because that’s what the people wanted.
The point is to empower people so they think they can do something for themselves. Committing suicide is the opposite of that. Suicide is the resolution of contradictions in capitalism’s favour.