Thanks! I share this concern to some extent. Anecdotally I’ve heard of a whole lot of stories of people who attempted or came near attempting to take their life and then are glad they didn’t later on. I think the opposite happens a lot too but doesn’t get shared as much because of the stigma around suicide. “Local suicidal man says he’d attempt again” just doesn’t make for a great news story.
This also rests on an assumption (that I haven’t decided that I agree with) that it’s worse for people to potentially miss out on a future possibility of a good life than it is for them to certainly suffer with whatever is so bad they think it makes life not worth living, if that makes sense. It feels somewhat paternalistic to me, but I can see the merits of it also.
Thanks for the comment!
I agree with this strongly—I initially put at the end of this post that I think most of this work should be done outside of EA spaces for the sake of the movement’s reputation but deleted that part for reasons I can’t fully remember.
I also agree with this—I think if I were to pursue this as a project it would be a matter of going after low(er)-hanging fruits in the more liberal countries of Europe to normalize it a bit and then bringing it to bigger/more difficult countries. Similar to the approach that is currently being taken for approval voting, drug legalization, etc. I’m not sure if it would ever pass in the US, at least not in my lifetime, though if it were available to non-citizens elsewhere (also a big lift) that could be a way around that.
I think more research is needed on this, absolutely. One thing I also didn’t mention is that we discussed this in an ethics class I took for my master’s degree and I believe some author had speculated that the added bureaucracy of going through this sort of approval process might actually force people to reflect on their life in a way that they wouldn’t if they resorted to more accessible means. And there may be other psychological impacts of it that we don’t fully understand, e.g. it could also be opening up the conversation/gateway to more intensive treatment methods that people might otherwise be afraid to access for fear of being locked up in a psych ward.