Let numbers speak, in life and in death!

"In Germany, more than 9,000 people take their own lives every year," says the cross-party motion "Strengthening suicide prevention and enabling self-determined living", which was presented to the German Bundestag yesterday, along with three draft laws in the first reading after the Federal Constitutional Court two years ago ban on commercial euthanasia had been overturned.

The Karlsruhe decision also includes the message: "According to the assessment of the expert third party, mental illnesses pose a significant risk to a free decision to commit suicide." Around 90 percent of fatal suicidal acts are therefore mental disorders, particularly in the form of depression, which occurs in 40 to 60 percent of those affected play a role.

Is not clinging to life itself pathological?

Not at all, but according to the view mentioned, mental illnesses limit the exquisite criterion that the Karlsruhe judges set up to make the possibility of assisted suicide mandatory: personal responsibility.

Now this may actually be 90 percent fiction if one perceives the coincidences of feeling alive or empty, of fulfillment or of being lost.

Fooled by self-misunderstandings

Fooled by self-misunderstandings, free will, if one wants to insist on it, would be a sequence of often contradictory phases, whose compact form would remain difficult and could at best be described occasionally according to the motto "Sorry, I'm so free then".

In any case, personal responsibility is not just a flimsy criterion in a mentally ill state, and certainly not one that would result in unchallenged decisions to live or die.

For the sake of the few who are deemed capable of ending life "autonomously," the many must put up with strict regimentation on assisted suicide.

Otherwise the state would run the risk of letting the wrong people die.

But how to determine those who are the right ones to die?

A seal of approval for the freedom of the respective concrete will cannot be represented anthropologically.

After all, the person who is considered autonomous from the outside remains unfathomable in relation to himself.