The use of pharmacological agents in capital punishment and assisted suicide has evolved significantly over the last century, reflecting changes in legal, ethical, and medical landscapes. Capital punishment, once carried out through methods like hanging and electrocution, increasingly relies on lethal injection, typically using drugs such as sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. This shift raised issues of drug availability, execution botches, and legal challenges, exemplified by cases like Baze v. Rees (2008), which upheld lethal injection in the U.S. In contrast, assisted suicide, which involves the use of drugs to end the life of a terminally ill patient, has become legal in select regions, including the Netherlands, Switzerland, and parts of the U.S. Barbiturates like pentobarbital are commonly used to ensure a peaceful death. Legal milestones such as Washington v. Glucksberg (1997) and Canada's 2015 legalization of assisted suicide illustrate the growing role of pharmacology in end-of-life decisions. Both practices raise complex ethical and medical questions, with ongoing debates about the safety, efficacy, and moral implications of drug use in state-sanctioned and physician assisted death.

Uncertainty is a factor widely but implicitly acknowledged to contribute to suicidality, but is not often studied as a suicidogenic factor in its own right. This presentation details the role of uncertainty in generating suicidal thoughts and actions. It is proposed that suicidality is a set of cognitive and behavioural strategies for reducing uncertainty and its consequential disruptions to homeostasis, i.e., psychological and/or physiological stability.
The presentation argues that there are three dimensions of uncertainty that specifically contribute to suicidality: uncertainty about 1) whether currently experienced adversity will continue into the future, 2) about whether present conditions will improve and 3) about when they will change. Persisting through life entails continued experience of such high-uncertainty states that may prove detrimental to homeostasis. In contrast, death is a high-certainty state, wherein distress, pain, or suffering—manifestations of disrupted homeostasis—are reliably predicted to end. Suicidal ideation thus emerges as a mental model that allows the agent to imagine death as a state wherein homeostasis is restored. When the agent’s distress becomes severe enough, escalation to suicidal action can occur as a behavioural strategy to precipitate restoration of homeostasis (in the form of an end to suffering) through death.
The presentation will then explore the implications of the proposed uncertainty model for issues about the extent to which suicidality is a free action or a manifestation of psychiatric symptoms.

The quest for immortality is a recurring theme across geographically as well as historically distant cultures. The search for the Philosopher’s Stone which could bring immortality preoccupied for millennia alchemists in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Egyptian mummies are a testament to the precautions ancient Egyptians took to ensure the eternal life of their pharaohs. Numerous other cultures have cultivated various rituals and practices surrounding death and dying with the goal to ensure proper transition of the dead into a transcendent state of eternal afterlife. Typically, these practices are associated with spirituality and mysticism. It is by virtue of some supernatural power or by the will of a supernatural being that immortality has been thought achievable. However, contemporary Western culture has enabled the dissociation of immortality from spirituality. It is now through science that many believe that immortality can be achieved. Cryonics and mind uploading now promise defying death through technological innovation. This paper examines the quest for immortality based on such secular worldview and questions the legitimacy of its scientific foundations.