I've been thinking about the concept of suicide recently. I am not suicidal myself, although I have had tendencies in the past which I use now as first-hand evidence.

A suicidal person typically is said to be suffering from a "psychache", or a kind of psychological, inner turmoil that dominates phenomenological life, acting as a burden to the person. Edwin Shneidman coined the term and theorized that it is caused by an unfulfilled or distorted psychological need that varies by person. Energy usually used to pursue other, more natural, tendencies is now being stretched to its limit to compensate for a lack elsewhere. It's unnatural and doesn't usually solve the issue. Unfortunately, this results in stress and a degrade of overall health.

Suicidal thoughts are often in the form of "escapism", or "redemption". The horrors of life are compared to a blissful, relaxing, and calm "afterlife" of "nothingness". We can see this kind of thinking going on when people voluntarily walk into the ocean, never to return. It's kind of poetic, walking into the bowels of the sea, laying down on the sand, filling your lungs with water and falling into a deep, peaceful slumber.

However this cannot actually be what happens. Depending on overall health, fitness and body weight, your lungs will quickly begin to burn as oxygen becomes depleted. Soon after, panic ensues as you fight the need for air. Willpower gives way to instinct as you are forced to inhale. You become tired quickly and are unable to get back to land. Finally you are unable to surface again, and you slowly go into a catatonic state within the next three minutes as you body begins to shut down. Whatever the final moments of your life are like, they likely are not the least bit enjoyable or relaxing. Likely, the only emotion you experience is fear as you realize what is actually happening and face the reality of death.

Perhaps this is why many people commit suicide in a quicker fashion, whether that be by gunshot, autodefenestration, high-speed impacts, or more peaceful methods, like carbon monoxide poisoning, or drug overdose. Quick suicides seem to be the choice of males, and typically are spur-of-the-moment, like they just want to get it over with already. Drawn-out suicides seem to be choice of females, and typically happen when a person is unable to perform a quicker suicide out of fear.

I don't think it can be argued that suicide is not a tragic occurrence. The choice to end your own existence typically means that, for whatever reason, your life is not good enough for you; i.e. the universe was incapable of sustaining your needs.

So that is a rough sketch of suicide. My questions are:

1.) Is suicide ever rational? and

2.) Is suicide ever ethical?

Is suicide ever rational? By rational, I mean in the best-interests of the individual, as most philosophers tend to agree on. But this is ambiguous - what are the best-interests of a person? Surely it can't just be the preferences of a person, or the heroin addict would be acting in their own best-interests. It seem to me that the most basic definition of best-interests would be the maximization of personal good, like pleasure, happiness, eudaimonia.

But sometimes we don't have an option for pleasure. Sometimes all courses of action result in some degree of bad. You have shitty, bad, really bad, torturous, etc. Any rational person is going to choose the course of action that results in the least bad - the action is good, and the state of affairs that results is comparatively better than the other courses of action.

However, despite being classified as rational persons, humans are rather irrational. We have so many biases and illogical heuristics, or "habitual thinking patterns". We apply some set of reasoning to a scenario that is not rationally applicable.

A good example of a bias in action is the Pollyanna principle. This is the psychological phenomenon of forgetting the bad and remembering the good. Survivors of a natural disaster may come together in a church congregation or similar, and cherish the good company and bright future, while forgetting all those who died. An injured veteran from a war may look back and believe it to be all worth it - yet this requires him to forget what it was actually like to lose an arm. To restart one's life, then, would require a systematic deletion of one's memory and wisdom.

This is also similar to another psychological phenomenon, which is colloquially called "grass-is-always-greener" thinking. A family immigrating from Mexico might celebrate a successful migration - yet the future might look dim and the present not great either. But the transition from a bad state to a better state, even if this state is not good in itself, is enough for people to poorly judge the current state by means of equivocating comparative value with actual value. This is also why we typically find it wrong to rain on someone's parade, or steal their thunder, even if we ourselves think they're somewhat deluded in their celebration. They may be "happy", but only because they've constrained the contents of their thought.

Both can be seen as coping mechanisms, and they are quite common.

If we apply these two concepts to suicide, I think what emerges is a strikingly irrational thought process, typically speaking.

Our actions are almost always driven by some concept of the future. Like Heidegger said, the essence of action is accomplishment. We envision a future in our minds, and we act to see this future instantiated.

This is where my own personal experiences come into play. When I was contemplating suicide in the past, I would almost always conceive of how great non-existence seemed to be. No stress, no burdens, no deadlines, no concerns, no pain, no boredom, tediousness, shame, or horror. Non-existence seemed calm and peaceful, like an infinitely long relaxing vacation.

To be more precise, I characterized non-existence as similar to the feeling you have when falling asleep. The deep, engulfing comfort as you slowly dissolve.

I have had to counsel a few friends as well who were struggling with suicidal thoughts in the past, and who characterized non-existence in similar ways, so I'm not alone with this conception and I suspect it is wide-spread as well.

But this conception is merely a fiction. Unfortunately, in the case of suicide, there is no future in which a suicidal person exists. They are no more. Gone. No experiences, nothing. No peace, no relaxation, no calm. That is the reality of death, assuming no afterlife of any sorts. It is impossible to conceive without applying intra-worldly values inappropriately.

Because of this, it seems that "fantasizing" suicides are irrational. Fantasizing about non-existence acts as a means of "escape" and "redemption". It is a combination of the Pollyanna principle and grass-greener thinking: first, fantasizing suicidal people tend to ignore the fallout from their own death (Pollyanna), and they also inherently believe a state in which they don't exist is actually good for them (grass-greener).

Perhaps some people, myself included, might feel compelled still to believe that someone escaping or preventing their own suffering is good for them. We might believe that it is a good thing that Hank no longer feels his suffering, or a good thing that potential-person Patricia escaped a lifetime of unbearable suffering. But although being intuitive, this reasoning is invalid. It is the result of a misappropriated cognitive heuristic, of applying intra-worldy value to a world without value, and of expecting values to be inherently symmetrical (a lack of bad is always good, a lack of good is always bad,...).

So fantasizing suicides seem to be irrational. But there are other forms of suicide, albeit more rare. There's the Stoic or Samurai codes that advocate suicide when one cannot live virtuously anymore - a benevolent suicide for the benefit of others. Then there's suicide caused from extreme pain - done without contemplation of a better world-after, but rather out of sheer desperation. You feel horrible pain, and you want it to stop, by any means necessary. The pain is forcing your hand, all-consuming. The future is not what matters, the present is what matters. This, I think, can be compared to what happens when you put your hand on a hot iron. It hurts really bad, and you instinctively pull your hand away without any long, deliberative thinking.

The aforementioned benevolent suicide is not in the best-interests of the self, but in the best-interests of the community which is conceived to exist after one exits the world. And the desperate suicide is one that does not utilize future states of affairs - rather, it is focused on what is happening at the present, which neglects any potential future states of affairs that may be good.

Thus, the only rational suicide is the one that is done after careful deliberation of one's future and the conclusion that there is no good state of affairs for the individual, only varying levels of bad. Once goodness is no longer an option, it becomes irrational (though perhaps not unethical) to continue to live. The difference between the desperate suicide, whether instinctual or thought-out, and the fantasizing suicide is in intent - do you intend to stop feeling bad, or do you also intend to feel good afterwards? What is rational may not actually result in us in a good state.

Because of this, it is unethical to prevent a person from killing themselves if they perceive that their future is not bright and if there is no apparent obvious miscalculation going on. This, of course, is ambiguous - but we have to remember that the reality of death is that of what Epicurus taught, and that although pleasure is good and pain is bad, neither absence of them results in any value. It may be in a person's best-interests to continue to live, but their death is ultimately not a harm nor a benefit to them.

I understand that this kind of thinking is difficult to come to terms with. We do mourn the death of a teenager who died in a DUI, because they may have had a bright future, and it was taken away. And we feel reassured that someone was euthanized, because they may have had a very dark future. But this is not rational - a good state of affairs need not have an inverse bad to be good, and a bad state of affairs need not have an inverse good to be bad. What is good ought to be cultivated, what is bad ought to be exterminated, not because what results in case of failure or success is bad or good (respectively) but because of the actual value in-itself. If the good cannot be cultivated, then the bad still ought to be exterminated, and not because it leads to a good state of affairs.

Additionally, there does seem to be unethical suicides. Examples of these are of parents who kill themselves while leaving their children behind to wipe up the mess, or those who are in incredible debt and kill themselves to escape the responsibility of dealing with it. Deal with your shit, then exit if you still feel the need to.