I can’t remember the title or author, but there’s an sf story, New Wave era, I think, about a race that has for millennia implanted a suicide capsule in each member. All they have to do is make a straightforward sequence of unusual movements, and the capsule will rupture and they will die an instant and painless death.
The argument of the race’s spokesman is that generation by generation, it’s improved their kind, and they are almost ready to dispense with the practice.
That’s the problem I have with this. Not so much the right-to-die part, but that mental illness tends to make informed consent and decision making problematic. For one thing, suicidal thoughts are symptoms of some mental illnesses, and as such, aren’t really representative of clearheaded decision making, like you might find in a terminally ill non-mentally ill patient. Beyond that, mental illness by definition, means one isn’t thinking correctly in some capacity, so it seems that unless there’s some kind of ironclad way of saying that their desire to die isn’t the disease talking, assisted suicide might ought to be avoided.
In the case discussed in the article, the impression I got is that the woman suffered from ups and downs, not from a long continual streak of depression. She was killed during one of her down episodes because the doctors didn’t investigate her background thoroughly enough.
Sorry if I’m repeating what others have said: but for me the right to die is absolute, and can’t be taken away. All you need is a handful of the right kinds of pills and a plastic bag. (Or, if you want to be messy about it, there’s a thousand other ways.)
As a legal/medical matter, I’d say that if someone is a competent adult (not currently under the control of a temporary or treatable mental illness) and they can find a doctor willing to do it, it should be legal; meaning it should be legal for the doctor. (Making it illegal for the patient is obviously pointless: one of the privileges of being dead is you can’t be prosecuted.)
Well that, plus her being in her 20s, are both questionable to me. I was talking about people who are older and have had decades of unrelieved suffering.
I honestly don’t care much if someone wants to die because of a hangnail. I’d try to talk to them to make sure they know their treatment options, prognosis and the success rate of treatment for hangnails, but if they don’t want to treat it and would rather die…okay. Someone else’s suffering is not for me to quantify or judge.
I strongly oppose “death panels” or any other system by which we would have people passing judgement to force an innocent person to die against their will…but conversely, I strongly oppose “life panels”, or any other system by which we would have people pass judgement to force an innocent person to live against their will. I think this is the most personal decision that can possibly be made, and there’s a grand total of one born person on the entire planet for which I will allow myself to make the decision whether to live or die: me.
Should there be any safeguards? What if the doctor believes that you are mentally ill and not capable of making that decision on you own? Or if he thinks that your son in law is pressuring you because he wants to cash in on his inheritance a few years early?
I generally, if not tepidly, support a person’s choice to end their own life, but the devil is in the details. I imagine a kindly old grandmother who might have a few good years of enjoyment left wanting to be euthanized so that she doesn’t become a burden on her family. I don’t think that society should encourage or play a part in that sort of thing.
I support the right of suicide for everyone old enough to sign a contract and younger if they are in a state of physical distress.
I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in an afterlife. Therefore, to the person who commits suicide, there is NO NEGATIVE REPERCUSSIONS. None at all. You can’t suffer regret if you’re dead. You don’t worry about what you have missed when you’re dead. There is no buyer’s remorse once you’re dead. Its not a hard concept to grasp people.
Dying is bad but death is absolutely not bad for the victim.
Only religion, or worries about a societal breakdown have a claim to some actual, tangible harm, and I’m sure that religion should not have a hand in determining policy.
That leaves societal harm, which I think is overblown. There are weird, niche groups everywhere trying to undo society or causing any numerous types of chaos. But civilization is big enough to absorb them and still march forward. There will be support groups, there will be organizations, and there will be people who are most affected by being a survivor, but we have that for people who die in the military, people who survive alcoholism, mental illness, alzheimers’, you name it, there’s a support group. I don’t think this will be any different, we as a civilization will create another sub-group for survivors of legal suicide and move on, as callous as that sounds.
I think the right to your own body, to do as you will or have others do to it as you will, should be the most immutable act of liberty and freedom we can have. And that means ending it when you feel like it, not when someone else tells you to.
I don’t think so, no. Because for every hypothetical you can give, my response is the same…what’s stopping them from jumping in front of a train and ruining a whole lot of people’s lives? (I live in Chicago. Train suicides are not a hypothetical in my world. They happen, several times a year, and they’re messy and expensive and inconvenient and traumatizing to the driver and riders and people who have to clean up the tracks and traincars, as well as the family of the jumper.)
Again, we already *have *the right to die. What we need is the right to die in the least painful and messy way possible, that adversely affects other people in the least amount possible, including loss of medical and nursing licenses and jail time for assistance. I don’t think doctors or nurses should be *forced *to participate…until we create a new specialty for Ending Life Medicine. But if you can talk a doctor into writing the scrip, go for it…and don’t throw her in jail afterwards.
My wife, who had what was believed to be an untreatable neurological condition, died in a hospital in 1994. The staff treating her were of two “kinds” - normal compassionate human beings and those “running a cost cutting regime”. Her death was “suspicious”. Ten years later the Consultant responsible for her care and treatment was summarily sacked after being found unfit to be a doctor. After her death an autopsy determined the true nature of her condition - she could have been treated and returned to a “good quality of life”. With mental illnesses the potential for incorrect diagnosis is much greater than with physical illnesses. There is really no such thing as a clinically certain mental illness diagnosis. Lots of people have recovered from “terrible” depression as a consequence of receiving help appropriate to their problem.
Although ambiguous (how do you distinguish the woman’s mind from her disturbed mind?) it is a key point.
I’ve never become suicidal due to depression, but have engaged in irrational, but fortunately less irrevocable, self-destructive behavior.
[QUOTE=Jean-Paul Sartre]
The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions … and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man.
[/QUOTE]
Obviously nothing will stop people from killing themselves if they really want to. I agree. But now we are going into the realm of having another person assist them in doing what, at least in my hypothetical, is a choice made while not in their full mental capacity.
You position is absolutely NO safeguards, right? So we have to consider someone who is obviously mentally unfit. Five doctors have said that this person is not currently in his/her right mind and cannot rationally make this decision. Don’t fight the hypo; add whatever evidence you want to ensure that this particular individual is not making this decision based upon what she or he wants, but the mental illness is causing the patient to believe that dying is the proper response.
That person couldn’t execute a will, sign a contract, have sex, or several other things under current law. They have many constitutionally protected rights in those regards, but we don’t allow them to exercise those rights because of their mental unfitness.
So, given all of this, a physician, who knows that this person can get better and is not saying that she wants to die from a rational state of mind, should indulge the delusion and give her lethal medication? I can’t see how any caring person would do that or why society should tolerate it.
As I said, I am a tepid supporter of the “right to die” when safeguards have been met, but no safeguards at all? I can’t go that far, nor do I think a decent and just society should go that far.
What I was responding to:
"That person couldn’t execute a will, sign a contract, have sex, or several other things under current law. They have many constitutionally protected rights in those regards, but we don’t allow them to exercise those rights because of their mental unfitness.
So, given all of this, a physician, who knows that this person can get better and is not saying that she wants to die from a rational state of mind, should indulge the delusion and give her lethal medication? I can’t see how any caring person would do that or why society should tolerate it."
It is not up to anybody to “allow” or “tolerate” a person, who wishes to die, to do so.
Sorry, I know you don’t want me to fight the hypo, but that’s not how mental illness works, nor judgement of incompetence. You don’t lose *all *your legal rights simply because you’re mentally ill, not even when a judge declares you incompetent. I think the right to die in a peaceful manner should be one right you never lose.
Before my grandmother died, she was talking to people who had died 30 years prior. She thought her husband was her son, and that her “real” husband had run off with another woman. (Even though he was sitting there explaining to her that he had never been with another woman.)
She had worked in a bakery prior to WWII and had heard the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor while working and had cried with her co-workers. She sat in her living room and reenacted the same thing thinking my mother was a co-worker.
She was in no position to be competent to give the pizza delivery guy money. No way should a doctor have helped her end her life if “she” chose. It wouldn’t be “her” choosing.