WTF Stories of the Week

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Betty

What if he was normally a great guy - but stopped taking his medication - and this was the result?

Doesn't change my view. Just because you can be medicated out of a choice doesn't make the choice unacceptable. But if the state is willing to say pre-emptively (not just because of the choice made) that you're so incapable of making personal decisions that we will deprive you of personhood and dictate your life to you then opens a different can of worms.

Though it would be nice if there was a place people could go and say "I'm ready to die" and they're asked if they'd like to talk to someone about it, encouraged to fill out some forms that will make things easier afterward, and then given a pill and a quiet room. But all of that requires getting rid of the notion that deciding on suicide is prima facie evidence that one is crazy, or that even if one is crazy, one is not allowed to be so.

What was the point of them even being there anyway if they weren't going to do anything? Isn't that a waste of resources?

If nothing else to make sure nobody else got themselves killed doing something stupid in response.