I don’t think assisted suicide is dystopian, I think it’s incredibly progressive and I wish it was more widely available. We give our pets more dignity in death than our loved ones and it sucks. The fact that we’ll keep a corpse animated for years just because we can’t let go is pretty fucking dystopian though.
I don’t like it because, as a person with chronic mental illness, it’s legitimizing me committing suicide rather than learning to cope with my symptoms. I already think too much about how nice it’ll be to be dead and not having to worry about dealing with my symptoms. If one day I decided that my life was no longer bearable, what’s the practical difference between me making an attempt on my own life that allegedly needs to be urgently stopped, and me going through months of paperwork and evaluations to do the same thing? If suicide is wrong, if we shouldn’t use a permanent solution for a temporary problem, then why should we turn it into a medical procedure? It feels dystopian because the medical industry, in my case, would be throwing up its hands and saying “you know what, you’re right, you’re completely broken and there’s no possible way to fix you. Let’s just kill you instead.”
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