I read that the police were extinguishing the guy who set himself on fire yesterday only two minutes after it began. Obviously, the guy did not want to live. Putting out the fire so quickly does not ease his suffering and would only increase it if he were to live. As long as nothing else is at risk of catching fire perhaps it would be best to stay away. What do you think?
In the moment, you’re not 100% certain the guy wanted to be on fire. The only thing you can do in this case at least is attempt to extinguish.
I mean, if someone pours gasoline over his head and lights himself on fire, you can somewhat reasonably infer an intentionality.
But we can say that with any suicide, if a guy stands on a bridge holding a rock tied to his leg then we will still try to save them because we understand they’re going through something.
That’s not the question here. It’s about intention, not your reaction.
Anyway, the equivalent here would be rather jumping after the guy to rescue him 2min after he jumped. You may endanger yourself and you might rescue a half-braindead shell of a person.
Don’t kid yourself, besides talking him out of jumping, nobody would do anything.
It’s not intention. It’s the expected quality of life afterwards. I work with kids who had no desire to die when they fell into a pool, choked on something, etc. Sometimes…
There’s thousands of cases of people putting themselves in danger to try to save suicidal people, including jumping into deep bodies of water.
However, my point was on intention, someone committing suicide isn’t right in the head so to say “well they did it on purpose so we shouldn’t help” is silly.
Also many suicide failures have reportedly had second thought even right after they attempted, such as on the way off the bridge. All we can do is help them if possible, so that if there was regret they might be able to recover their life. The self immolation is a tough example because it’s true that survival means a long road of pain, but I don’t think we should try and draw lines to determine who should and shouldn’t be saved (again, if possible). I’d also rather be hated by them for trying to help than to think that I could have done something but chose an easier route of inaction by mental justification.
Again, that’s not my point.
But again anyway, it’s also silly to assume they’re not right in the head. You don’t know their situation. And it’s even sillier to assume that I implied helping them would be wrong. Helping them while endangering yourself and making the situation for the other guy even worse is just stupid.
Sane people don’t try to kill themselves
The exact definition of sanity is a cultural choice.
Not true
You can be sane and depressed. People also opt for assisted suicide if in a lot of pain or with a low quality of life.
Depression is by definition a mental illness.
Think again: Your own action is all that you can decide upon.
Later you can try to judge and to grumble and to smartass, but then you cannot change things anymore with that.
They might have heavy regret once ignited, though.
I mean we make an attempt to stop most suicides on the basis that they’re pursued from a kind of irrational train of thought. This isn’t to say that that’s always actually the case, but we can’t be sure of that, so most people wouldn’t look at a guy jumping of a bridge and then say “hey do a flip on the way down”, you know? We can kind of assume it’s more of a last resort, than like a casual pastime or decision that you might just kinda make cause you kinda felt like it. That’s just talking about the psychology of people who try to kill themselves mostly, though, for the vast majority it’s as a last resort rather than due to a more “rational” reason, or, a more philosophically motivated reason.
It’s a much safer assumption to assume they’re irrational, anyways, for the same reason that capital punishment is not really a great idea. If you take the opposite as a blanket decision, it’s irreversible. If you put out someone who’s on fire, or otherwise save someone who’s suicidal. you could always just kill them later.
I read an article many years ago about people who attempted to kill themselves and how almost all were happy they survived. There was also someone who set himself on fire and survived, extremely badly burned, his urine was black for a while, really bad. But even he was glad he was still alive. So I guess you should always help. If someone really wants to die they can always try again.
I’m guessing there’s a bit of survivorship bias here. People who really want to die will probably choose surer methods, and/or try again and again.
Of course there is. You cannot ask dead people if they regretted the attempt but it was too late. But just going from a very high regret rate among survivors I think it’s quite safe to assume many of those who were successful would also been happy to have survived.