I deal with chronic suicidality and tbh it's my out for when I reach the point where things get too hard for me. When you've lived with it for as long as I have, you rack up enough exit strategies that you have a list ordered by preferences based on certainty, ease, and accessibility under different circumstances.
The thing is though, it's a very conflicting topic for me because I'm obviously personally invested in one side of the debate however on the other side there are very troubling reports coming out of Canada where MAID is being recommended for people living in dire poverty (i.e. it's being used as a government eugenics program to clear out the poors) and then there was that study that came out of... Sweden, I think? Where they studied a cohort of people who were at the final stage of being eligible for medically-assisted suicide for severe, chronic mental illness. Turns out that an astonishing percentage of the group (in the vicinity of 20%, if memory serves) were undiagnosed autistic and it was only the study that identified this but at no stage during the long, arduous process of seeking medically-assisted suicide and seeing multiple professionals etc. did anyone catch this.
Being late-diagnosed autistic myself this fact sits particularly uneasily with me.
There's matters of ethics in this discussion which I think go completely unaddressed - is it better to obscure suicide methods from people with the intent that they will seek help and things will improve for them? Or will obscuring suicide methods simply mean that people will opt for less certain methods which often leads to incomplete attempts, thus potentially causing significant impacts on wellbeing due to things like brain injury and organ damage? When people opt for less than ideal suicide methods, does the likelihood of secondary harm increase? (I'd argue that this is the case - there are certain methods that run the risk of causing secondary harm to the people who discover a suicide from the method itself, and then there's the overlooked matter where this group is also at a significantly higher risk of suicide themselves after the discovery event.)
Idk. I don't think that there are easy answers with this and so much of suicide prevention seems to be based on really absurd compliance-enforcement and empty platitudes. It really sucks.
I deal with chronic suicidality and tbh it's my out for when I reach the point where things get too hard for me. When you've lived with it for as long as I have, you rack up enough exit strategies that you have a list ordered by preferences based on certainty, ease, and accessibility under different circumstances.
The thing is though, it's a very conflicting topic for me because I'm obviously personally invested in one side of the debate however on the other side there are very troubling reports coming out of Canada where MAID is being recommended for people living in dire poverty (i.e. it's being used as a government eugenics program to clear out the poors) and then there was that study that came out of... Sweden, I think? Where they studied a cohort of people who were at the final stage of being eligible for medically-assisted suicide for severe, chronic mental illness. Turns out that an astonishing percentage of the group (in the vicinity of 20%, if memory serves) were undiagnosed autistic and it was only the study that identified this but at no stage during the long, arduous process of seeking medically-assisted suicide and seeing multiple professionals etc. did anyone catch this.
Being late-diagnosed autistic myself this fact sits particularly uneasily with me.
There's matters of ethics in this discussion which I think go completely unaddressed - is it better to obscure suicide methods from people with the intent that they will seek help and things will improve for them? Or will obscuring suicide methods simply mean that people will opt for less certain methods which often leads to incomplete attempts, thus potentially causing significant impacts on wellbeing due to things like brain injury and organ damage? When people opt for less than ideal suicide methods, does the likelihood of secondary harm increase? (I'd argue that this is the case - there are certain methods that run the risk of causing secondary harm to the people who discover a suicide from the method itself, and then there's the overlooked matter where this group is also at a significantly higher risk of suicide themselves after the discovery event.)
Idk. I don't think that there are easy answers with this and so much of suicide prevention seems to be based on really absurd compliance-enforcement and empty platitudes. It really sucks.