This isn't the only reason people want to kill themselves. My dad had cancer, and basically got locked into a ruined and barely usable body (in that he wasn't fully bed ridden but couldn't take care of himself or speak).
If he lived in a place with compassion he could have ended it cleanly. He didn't. Where he lived killing himself would be illegal, and would have been much harder dealing with the legality than otherwise. He had life insurance that swapped when he ended his job, he had to die naturally so it would pay out for us because there's no law protecting it.
So instead he suffered for around a year. He was kind, he didn't tell us (the family) what was going on, but about a month after he had the surgery which really f*cked him up to get rid of a tumor, the tumor was back. He just told the doctors no when they tried to help further, and died after 8 months of suffering. One might consider it suicide by inaction, but for some reason that's condoned and seen as strong.
My mom didn't understand this until a few years back when her memory started going and she was losing herself, and talked about how unpleasant life was and there being some alternative. when I mentioned that dad had wanted to as well (he didn't tell her, she couldn't handle it at the time). She expressed regret she didn't live somewhere else. Then she forgot about the discussion the next day. She spends her days with about 3 minutes of memory at a time and will till she passes.
End of life isn't just about suicide. They both wanted to live, but not in the irreversible physical form they were in. Neither legally had the option. Neither actually did it though. I bet my dad would have and I don't blame him if it was socially acceptable and legal.
I'm sorry about your parents, there is nothing that makes me more uncontrollably sad and incapable of holding my tears than the slow decline of aging and disease, even more so when the decline happens to those who raised you, the ones that have been your earliest memory of what healthy and adult humans look like.
You appear to have a very different mental model of assisted suicide than the comment you're replying to. I might be biased by my experience, but the mental model I parsed from the comment is the one most commonly associated with suicidal young(ish)/physically healthy people, suicide appears attractive because there is some mental roadblock the suicidal person faces, their mind can't process some aspect of their enviroment/history no matter how much they try, they can't understand it, they can't ignore it, they can't make piece with it in any way. It torments them like an itch they can't scratch. They can live their life perfectly well if they only knew how to deal with this issue, but they can't, not alone. This is the type that can be helped by more (honest) publicity and attention.
Another way of phrasing this is that assisted suicide for mental issues need not be the same as assisted suicide for physical issues, so both you and the comment you're replying to can have your way, the 2 problems are orthogonal(ish).
There are people whose brain chemistry is so screwed up that no amount of treatment is going to fix their depression. Treatment-resistant severe depression is a big issue. Is it society's role to prevent that person from doing what they want to do to when that thing would also avoid the constant pain that they're currently undergoing? Why isn't it up to that person to make the choice to end their own suffering? I'm not proposing this as the best path for all or even 98% of cases...but I'd claim for those 2%, it's akin to torture to force those people to stay alive when they don't want to consistently and for a long period of time.
On top of which, we now live in a society where insulting, ridiculing, and just generally harassing or terrorizing anyone "different" (but especially those with depression or other "mental issues") is the normal behavior of most humans, making any attempts to live a "normal" life pretty much an impossible to tolerate waking nightmare hell-scape for many who suffer with "major depressive disorder" (or whatever it's being called this week.)
Agreed totally with what you are saying, if they're allowed to be orthogonal. But right now they are not, it's all one thing, in most places and in how people think about it. The GP was very absolutist on how they were approaching ending one's life.
If he lived in a place with compassion he could have ended it cleanly. He didn't. Where he lived killing himself would be illegal, and would have been much harder dealing with the legality than otherwise. He had life insurance that swapped when he ended his job, he had to die naturally so it would pay out for us because there's no law protecting it.
So instead he suffered for around a year. He was kind, he didn't tell us (the family) what was going on, but about a month after he had the surgery which really f*cked him up to get rid of a tumor, the tumor was back. He just told the doctors no when they tried to help further, and died after 8 months of suffering. One might consider it suicide by inaction, but for some reason that's condoned and seen as strong.
My mom didn't understand this until a few years back when her memory started going and she was losing herself, and talked about how unpleasant life was and there being some alternative. when I mentioned that dad had wanted to as well (he didn't tell her, she couldn't handle it at the time). She expressed regret she didn't live somewhere else. Then she forgot about the discussion the next day. She spends her days with about 3 minutes of memory at a time and will till she passes.
End of life isn't just about suicide. They both wanted to live, but not in the irreversible physical form they were in. Neither legally had the option. Neither actually did it though. I bet my dad would have and I don't blame him if it was socially acceptable and legal.