In his statement, "Suicide is suicide" the author equates all suicides. All suicides are not the same. Some suicides are justified. A person may see the rest of her or his life as full of misery. If that is an accurate assessment suicide is a logical response.

There is not discordance. People understand there is a difference. Just the same as most people would say that murder is wrong, but still except that police and the armed forces kill people.

What you have presented here Paul is, I believe, an entirely irrefutable logic based case that can only be argued against by entirely errant personal opinion?

Rather than the known facts, that where euthanasia is lawful, like Belgium and Canada, it has included many initially unintended consequences, such as extending it as a universal right to comparatively young people!

There is a difference between people and dogs.

In the first instance the medical care for our pets can all too often be more expensive than that of a child, which says plenty about us as a society!

One recalls the case of a Gold Coast Grandmother who had just recovered from successful cancer surgery.

But as the postmortem revealed had some adhesions, reasonably treated by further remedial surgery and better post op rehab?

Who was assisted to commit needless suicide, because the cancer she feared, had as it turns out, been successfully removed. Incidentally the patent drama queen, was the centre of attention she craved, just as long as she bravely and inexorably moved on toward her stated objective and killed herself!

This is not the hero's way out just the craven coward's!

Euthanasia is not a suitable treatment for fear or aged depression or lost hope or the loneliness of the aged; or faced with the prospect of having to give up an addiction?

Or a morbid love affair with death?
Rhrosty.

"This is quite normal, but it is a very unsound basis for public policy. Suicide is suicide. Regardless of the method, it is a violence against oneself. It is also the ultimate expression of hopelessness, often in a fog of depression where nothing is truly as it seems. Despite what some would say and despite some portrayals in the media, it is never truly a rational act."

It can be. For example if a spy is captured and the enemy intend to torture him to find out who he's working with, suicide is a rational way of preventing them from doing so.

If we're only looking at the cases where it appears hopeless, we should distinguish between those that are genuinely hopeless and those that merely appear to be that way because of the "fog of depression". You have failed to do so. But if you want to convincingly argue that suicide prevention must include preventing ALL suicides, it's a distinction you must make.

People's identity has been destroyed by the regressives over the last 50 years. Boys are encouraged to find out if they are girls and teenagers encouraged to sleep with as many partners as their hormones dictate. Numerous top themselves when a partner is unfaithful. Spending millions of dollars on bandaids is the only answers from those who hold the idiotic secular dogmas that has led tho these issues.

The author is obsessed with doing the impossible - to "save lives".

If "life" means the breath in the body, then all bodies will cease breathing sooner or later anyway and nothing whatsoever can change that, so not even one life can be saved.
And if life is correctly understood to be our inherent quality, then killing one's body makes no difference and preventing it still would not save even a single life.

So what CAN change then, which the author must be hoping for? Well there is one such thing: his organisation could receive more tax-payer funds, both making the author wealthier and allowing him to harass more people who chose to shed away their human bodies. Perhaps with the unavailability of Nembutal they would, thanks to the author, have to endure a more painful and violent death.

Anyone who takes his or own life is either suffering physically or is in a very dark place mentally. It is their choice. Their business. We are said to be living in psychological age. Many of the wacky ideas and excuses for certain behaviors could well be the cause of problems. With few exceptions, psychiatry and medication are still the best treatments. In general, any other "therapy" is nonsense. If people decide to take their own lives, they will, and that's that, despite all the bulldust about stopping it.

The real tragedy lies in youth suicide, which most of us regard as "unnecessary", even though we rarely know the 'why' of these terrible events. It seems to me that there has never before been such a massive gap of understanding between generations. It is extremely hard, sometimes impossible, to connect with youngsters these days. There has been too much change in our society in too short a time. It is unlikely that the change will be undone even in the unlikely event that there is a will to change.

I am afraid that we are crying over spilt milk.

Suicide is an intreaguing subject . If we correlate differences between genders and suicide, and Australia compared with other countries to form a bit of a lateral view of the subject, then a good comparison is Australia and Bangladesh; two highly disparet cultures.
In 2010, 89% of suicides in Bangladesh were women. A popular theory for this is the low estate of women, and their high dependence on a male partner. When the figures are broken down further, the majority of female suicides were single unattached women.

In Australia, it's the opposite, males lead the statistics for suicide, and young males in particular. And a further breakdown of statistics reveals young males in rural areas of the country appear most vulnerable.

The commonality for suicide ultimately is a result of a sense of personal hopelessness and disempowerment.
Identifying the particular social issues that cause those events, would be the issue of most importance when dealing with the collective of suicides. Youth unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, lack of education and a lack of self worth resulting in a futureless existence, would feature as a failure of a social system, more so than a responsibility of the individual as a losing child. A remedy for this malaise would be a government intervention to address social failure!

You are right to be concerned re the higher suicide rates of young rural men in Australia Diver Dan, as it is a tragedy.

We can't blame the Government for everything, but I do believe they should be spending far more on mental health centres/staff, and drug rehab centres in rural Australia.
Too many families are bearing the brunt of these tragedies, leading to even more mental health problems in our country towns.

I think the author's being unrealistic.

The problem is that people who most deserve the opportunity to end their own lives peacefully are usually unable to do so on their own, whist the able-bodied younger people who really shouldn't be making drastic decisions in the first place are able to easily do so.

I don't have a problem with someone terminally ill choosing to end their own suffering and life.
The moral question is if they require assistance to achieve this.

It's just as much a moral question of forcing someone who no longer wishes to live and who's unable to end their own life to continue to endure needless pain and suffering.

We'd end a horses life because of a broken leg to end its suffering, but are we so morally self-righteous and inhumane at the same time that we'd not allow ourselves the same dignity?

In the case of a younger person, I think its foolish to lay blame.
He was just as capable of jumping off a cliff, standing in front of a train or hanging himself.
If this had happened we wouldn't even be reading about it.
If he'd injected Round-up into himself would you try to blame Bunnings?
-If he really intended to end his own life there's little anyone could've done.

And isn't it better he ended his life that way instead of giving someone else like the train driver for example their own reason for depression?
Maybe the author should talk to police about picking up dead body parts off highways after road accidents.

Denying him his right to knowledge (viewing that website) is just as much of a crime as anything.

Surely helping him through the reasons for his depression, and to help him have hope, tools and attitude for a better future would've been a better outcome than suicide.

But you cant go blaming terminally ill euthanasia patients for the drastic actions of a younger person.
Don't they already have enough to deal with?

The two issues of younger and older people ending their own lives need not be a dilemma.

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I already expressed my views on this subject in an article the Greens picked up and included in their "Medical Services (Dying with Dignity) Bill 2014" as "Submission 133". Here is the link to the PDF document you can download :

http://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CD8QFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aph.gov.au%2FDocumentStore.ashx%3Fid%3Dc1447c7d-6904-4d9e-a7d6-a67edd6fb115%26subId%3D300148&ei=ezmEVNynJsjKaJfigbgD&usg=AFQjCNGFEgm86rD84Z5IQxCtmCDeD0GZ6g

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I agree with the posters here who said you cannot blame the
Information on Nembital for the suicide of young people.

Would the mother have preferred her son had hung himself from a tree
Drove in front of a truck or shot his brains out.
At least he was able to find a peaceful method because he no doubt would
Have done it anyway.

The fellow that Dr Nitzske helped commit suicide recently, had murdered two women
And faced life in prison, it could be argued that he had a fairly rational reason to commit
Suicide. He at least atoned with his own life for the two innocent lives he had taken.
A pity more cold blooded murderers didn't do the same.
But people like this article writer are so irrational they tried to have Dr Nitzske struck off as a doctor for this. This murderer, did the state and victims families a favour.
It would take 100s of thousands of dollars to keep this bloke in prison for 20years.
The money could be spent on a sick child.