You seem to be seeing only one side of the situation while there are actually costs to both sides.
As I see it suicide should only be considered when the expected average future quality of life is negative. For the sake of argument let's consider a healthy person to have a quality of life of 100. A dead person inherently has a quality of life of zero.
Health problems and disabilities lower quality of life. The fact that anyone chooses suicide implicitly is saying that their perception of quality of life (and it has to be their perception, everyone has their own yardstick) has gone negative.
It's not just whether it's *currently* negative, but what is the sum of future expected quality of life?
Let's take a patient who considers their quality of life to be -10, with an expected lifespan of a year. I'll take the unit as days, so they have a total expected quality of -3650. I'll be generous and figure a miraculous save occurs 1 in every 100,000 cases and that a save returns them to full health (very unlikely) and gives them another 20 years (again, unlikely--people typically have other processes at work that would in time kill them.) Total expected quality is 730,000.
100,000 people.
One is +730,000, for a total gain of 730,000
99,999 are -3650, for a total loss of 364,996,350
Clearly, hoping for the miraculous save increases suffering.
If that were the calculation that we had used throughout history, humanity would have gone extinct. Suffering was extremely common and widespread pre-modernity.
As I see it suicide should only be considered when the expected average future quality of life is negative. For the sake of argument let's consider a healthy person to have a quality of life of 100. A dead person inherently has a quality of life of zero.
Health problems and disabilities lower quality of life. The fact that anyone chooses suicide implicitly is saying that their perception of quality of life (and it has to be their perception, everyone has their own yardstick) has gone negative.
It's not just whether it's *currently* negative, but what is the sum of future expected quality of life?
Let's take a patient who considers their quality of life to be -10, with an expected lifespan of a year. I'll take the unit as days, so they have a total expected quality of -3650. I'll be generous and figure a miraculous save occurs 1 in every 100,000 cases and that a save returns them to full health (very unlikely) and gives them another 20 years (again, unlikely--people typically have other processes at work that would in time kill them.) Total expected quality is 730,000.
100,000 people. One is +730,000, for a total gain of 730,000 99,999 are -3650, for a total loss of 364,996,350
Clearly, hoping for the miraculous save increases suffering.