What a bizarre time in which to live.
On one hand, assisted suicide promotion is ubiquitous, in which prescribing a lethal overdose is pushed as “death with dignity.”
On the other, suicide prevention is beginning to focus on restricting the means of suicide as a preventative method. From the New York Times story:
While mental health and substance abuse treatment must always be important components in treating suicidality, researchers like Ms. Barber are stressing another avenue: “means restriction.”
Instead of treating individual risk, means restriction entails modifying the environment by removing the means by which people usually die by suicide. The world cannot be made suicideproof, of course. But, these researchers argue, if the walkway over a bridge is fenced off, a struggling college freshman cannot throw herself over the side. If parents leave guns in a locked safe, a son cannot shoot himself if he suddenly decides life is hopeless.
With the focus on who dies by suicide, these experts say, not enough attention has been paid to restricting the means to do it — particularly access to guns
Unless one has cancer, then we are all for suicide: Brittany Maynard!
Actually, there is some method to this madness. Euthanasia advocates and some in the mental health professions want us to distinguish between impulsive suicides of the young and fit–the subject of much of this story–and so-called “rational suicides,” seen by the “enlightened” as a splendid method to end suffering, and indeed, not properly called “suicide” at all. Hence, the “aid in dying” subterfuge.
Seen in this regard, the story’s context furthers a meme that is at best, only anti some suicides (in addition to furthering other policy agendas).