Is it one’s duty to live?
During a public hearing by the German ethics committee on euthanasia, Prof. Gethmann presented two ethical questions outlining the topic:[1] First, ‘Is suicide morally permissible?’ Second, ‘Is coercion to continue to live morally permissible?’ In the exploration that followed, Prof. Gethmann provided two conceivable paths that the ethics committee, and more importantly each individual, can take in answering these difficult questions. One is straightforward: If my answer to the first question is yes, then the answer to the second must be no. If, however, my answer to the first question…
Keep readingDie Patientin, die Touristin und die rhizomatische Ebene
[Anm. d. Red.: Dieser Artikel ist nicht identisch mit dem Original, das in den Sozialpsychiatrischen Informationen veröffentlicht wurde bzw. zur Veröffentlichung vorgesehen ist. Die veröffentlichte Version von Milan Röhricht, Die Patientin, die Touristin und die rhizomatische Ebene, Sozialpsychiatrische Informationen 4/2021, ist online unter (bitte URL angeben) zu finden.] Die 20-jährige Anne Rau, die nach einem Selbstmordversuch in eine psychiatrische Klinik aufgenommen wurde, fand schließlich den richtigen Ausdruck, um zu vermitteln, was ihr fehlte: etwas kleines und einfaches, aber unermesslich Wichtiges. Sie nannte es eine natürliche Selbstverständlichkeit. Sie fühlte sich unfähig,…
Keep readingThe patient, the tourist and the rhizomatic plane
[Editors’s note: this article is not identicle to the German translation (to be) published in the Sozialpsychiatrische Informationen. The published version by Milan Röhricht, Die Patientin, die Touristin und die rhizomatische Ebene, Sozialpsychiatrische Informationen 4/2021, is available from October 2021] Anne Rau, a 20-year-old admitted to a psychiatric ward after attempting suicide, eventually found the right phrase to convey what she was missing: something small and simple yet immeasurably important. She called it natural self-evidence. She felt unable to connect with others around her, like an alien in the room,…
Keep readingBeing-towards-suicide (Sein-zum-Suizid)
[Editor’s note: an abridged version of this essay was published on Mad in America – https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/07/being-towards-suicide%5D ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.’ [1] Albert Camus’ opening sentence to his work ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, unmistakably emphasising the eminence of the topic at hand, is a fitting start to the thoughts and considerations to follow. For this sentence, concisely as it may deliver its underlying message, imbues the…
Keep readingThe Ethics of Amputation
Certain phenomena in the medical realm are kept in abeyance; concealed from the public discourse in the hope that future research may provide more clarity. As appealing as this strategy of eschewal may be, it does little to relieve those individuals currently affected by the respective phenomena, and such force of circumstance thus requires a prima facie consensus to be found. One such phenomenon is a desire for the amputation of an otherwise functional limb, or else to sever the spinal cord resulting in paralysation. Medically speaking this desire has…
Keep readingGuilt and responsibility, or: on travelling through foreign places
Four, five, six, no, seven children are crouching under that tree, jostling for a slither of shade. Do they belong to the same family, or are they friends from across the tracks, just visiting to pass the time? Or, perhaps, are they only here to elicit empathy from the many travellers — men, women and children, with their brightly coloured, overflowing suitcases — standing at the edge of the platform? Behind the children, unprotected from the glaring afternoon sun, I can see three women, all bent over a small pot…
Keep readingThe origin of morality in light of self-determination and its impact upon legislation
BY TWYLA MICHNEVICH & MILAN RÖHRICHT Underlying the thoughts and considerations that are to follow are two main emotions. For one, unease; a feeling which stems from a failure to understand how it is possible to support two contradictory ideologies, and still believe them capable of coexisting peacefully: libertarianism on the one side; socialism on the other. For another, anger; a feeling which stems from the lack of consistency with which current rules and conventions, which we are all expected to follow, are being made.
Keep readingAn introduction to the defence against neurobiological reductionism
It was whilst studying neuroanatomy during my third semester at medical school that I first came across the problem of neurobiological reductionism. We had three weeks to prepare for this fourth and final part of the cadaver dissection course, and so I delved into the realms of our brain and spinal chord, the ‘central part’ of our nervous system, learning about the various lobes, the basal ganglia, the limbic system, the brain stem and so on. It wasn’t until learning about the frontal lobe, which includes the prefrontal cortex –…
Keep readingPrecipice
BY JOE BALSON “…no more right to the information they requested than if they were being executed in the electric chair, they would have no right to know whether OG&E or PSO were providing the electricity; if they were being hanged, they would have no right to know whether it be cotton or nylon rope; or if they were being executed by firing squad, they would have no right to know whether it be by Winchester or Remington ammunition,” Justice Taylor Steven On 29th April 2014, Clayton Lockett was executed…
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