What Is the Principle Issue?

Question by CrystalL: what is the principle issue?
In the following viewpoint, Thomas Szasz argues that individuals should not be prevented from committing suicide if they do not voluntarily seek protection from their suicidal urges. He contends that suicide is an individual choice and should not be medicalized and treated as a disease. Preventing suicide through medical or state coercion infringes upon the individual freedom to kill oneself, according to Szasz. Szasz is the author of numerous books exploring psychology, medicine, human behavior, and individual rights, including The Myth of Mental Illness and Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide, from which the following excerpt is taken.
As you read, consider the following questions:
1.What analogy does Szasz use to explain his view that suicide prevention is an act of totalitarianism?
2.How does linking the terms “suicide” and “prevention” manipulate language, as stated by the author?
3.According to the author, how often do physicians and psychiatrists commit suicide?
Disapproved behaviors of all sorts are defined as diseases, and approved behaviors of all sorts are defined as treatments. The concepts of disease and treatment are now thoroughly politicized. Doctors, judges, journalists, civil libertarians, everyone accepts, or pretends to accept, that killing oneself without physician approval is a disease justifying State coercion, and that killing oneself with physician approval is a treatment justifying State exemption from the strictures of drug prohibition. Not surprisingly, these novel concepts of disease and treatment conflict with the traditional meaning of “helping” as aiding a person to attain his self-chosen goal or persuading him to change it. Helping a person against his will—that is, forcing him to pursue a goal he does not want to pursue—is a contradiction of terms. Joining suicide prevention and coercion as if they were indissolubly united makes us neglect the possibilities of noncoercive suicide prevention, an option we cannot consider so long as we view suicide as the consequence of untreated (mental-brain) disease.

Best answer:

Answer by Charles
The principal issue is ownership and freedom.

One can view one’s life as ones own possession, and as many people agree, people in America are supposed to have the freedom to do whatever they want with their own possession, so long as it does not impact another person in any way. The key issue is whether or not one owns one life, and if so, what freedoms do they have with it.

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