It’s often considered as a “treatment” by the “patients” precisely you will NOT be anhedonic and hypothymic when you’re dead, i.e. unable to experience these states! The rest of his/her point is correct as well, though.
Anhedonic means NOT feeling joy. You will feel no joy when you are dead. Hypothymic means not having much emotion. You will have even less when you are dead.
If the OP had claimed pain from depression, then yes, I would have to agree. Death would be a way to eliminate pain.
It seems I have met a lot of people who have attempted suicide but whose lives were saved. I can’t help thinking that if their desire to be gone were rational, they would have learned from their mistake and gotten it right in a 2nd or 3rd attempt. The fact that there are so many people who attempt suicide but fail, and then stay alive for years afterwards, seems to me strong evidence that suicide is a choice that is often made irrationally. And so more good than harm is done by setting the difficulty level of suicide high enough that you actually have to be thinking somewhat rationally to succeed.
I know you are sincere, but you are understimating that getting rid of the unpleasantness is half the game for us depressives. Being dead objectively removes the unpleasantness, by destroying the parts of the brain that instantiate unpleasantness.
You deny this so strongly because you are offended by it, which is simply a mix of cultural programming and psychological death aversion on your part.
What you have to realize is that you are harming people by it, because this is the political foundation for the reduction in our suicide options. I would be objectively far better off if I could buy a deadly dose of barbiturates, drink it, fall asleep and then die. Society as a whole would also be objectively better off (an improved version would be one that allows me to donate my organs).
Facts don’t go away because you don’t like them; LessWrong is the one place where I would have expected people to understand that.
You will be even more anhedonic and hypothymic after you are dead. That is NOT a cure, not even unreliably!
It’s often considered as a “treatment” by the “patients” precisely you will NOT be anhedonic and hypothymic when you’re dead, i.e. unable to experience these states! The rest of his/her point is correct as well, though.
Anhedonic means NOT feeling joy. You will feel no joy when you are dead. Hypothymic means not having much emotion. You will have even less when you are dead.
If the OP had claimed pain from depression, then yes, I would have to agree. Death would be a way to eliminate pain.
It seems I have met a lot of people who have attempted suicide but whose lives were saved. I can’t help thinking that if their desire to be gone were rational, they would have learned from their mistake and gotten it right in a 2nd or 3rd attempt. The fact that there are so many people who attempt suicide but fail, and then stay alive for years afterwards, seems to me strong evidence that suicide is a choice that is often made irrationally. And so more good than harm is done by setting the difficulty level of suicide high enough that you actually have to be thinking somewhat rationally to succeed.
I know you are sincere, but you are understimating that getting rid of the unpleasantness is half the game for us depressives. Being dead objectively removes the unpleasantness, by destroying the parts of the brain that instantiate unpleasantness.
You deny this so strongly because you are offended by it, which is simply a mix of cultural programming and psychological death aversion on your part.
What you have to realize is that you are harming people by it, because this is the political foundation for the reduction in our suicide options. I would be objectively far better off if I could buy a deadly dose of barbiturates, drink it, fall asleep and then die. Society as a whole would also be objectively better off (an improved version would be one that allows me to donate my organs).
Facts don’t go away because you don’t like them; LessWrong is the one place where I would have expected people to understand that.