“I Helped 8 People Die”
torontolife.com
torontolife.com
I know and understand the main arguments against assisted suicide. The idea that it would pressure people into taking their own lives, in order to please others. With respect, such arguments are nonsensical. People feel external pressures every day to do things that they may not want to do. Pursue careers they may not enjoy. Get married when they may not want to. Have kids even if they don't want to. Should the government step in every time and ban the activity entirely, simply to ensure that no one ever gives in to peer pressure? Of course not.
We recognize that freedom, liberty and individual agency, trumps any concerns about peer pressure. We recognize that our life decisions should be in our own hands, and not in the hands of big brother. It's time we allowed people full control to end their lives on their own terms, and not on the terms forced upon them.
The biggest problem is most of the conditions which wipe people out take your rational agency as their first action.
The crux of the issue is the desire to die. Traditionally, the desire to die has been considered always to be a disordered desire, that is, a desire which though authentically felt, is best not acted upon. The cultural change that the assisted suicide movement is trying to make is that sometimes the desire to die is not disordered, that in fact for a class of people life literally is not worth living.
The point isn't that people should die, it's that they should choose. Compelling someone else's continued consciousness is absurd and, depending on the subjective experiencing of being inside that person's head, can be among the cruelest forms of torture. Just as it would be to fail to help someone who wants to stay alive.
This sentence is proof that you do not understand suicide and have not read modern information about suicide.
Since your misinformation is dangerous I urge you to do some reading before talking about something that you clearly know little about.
Suicidality is complex, but "calling a hotline is solid evidence someone doesn't want to truly die" falls into several of the myths people spread about suicide:
http://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help-you/myths-about-su...
Myth: People who talk about suicide aren’t serious and won’t go through with it.
Myth: People who threaten suicide are just attention seeking and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Myth: People who are suicidal want to die.
Myth: If a person is serious about killing themselves then there is nothing you can do.
>Myth: People who are suicidal want to die.
I agree that this is not true in general, but to say that it is never true is more of a philosophical position (the topic of this thread) than the measurable science fact you're making it out to be.
> something that you clearly know little about.
I can find many responses to this, but none of them civil.
On the scale of things, that's probably one of the least intrusive ways that big brother helps.
I mean, we outlaw people working for too little money, and a hundred other things before we get to something as self-detrimental as death itself.
I appreciate the libertarianism; I just wanted to point out that this is very, very far from the most egregious big-brother-helping policy.
Outlawing suicide is the same - if the state is overly oppressive, people would rather suicide than to live under the oppression, and when they suicide they are no longer productive. Removing the possibility of suicide removes the lower bound of how oppressive the state can be.
See force feeding in Guantanamo bay for example. By stopping deaths from hunger strikes, the state can treat it's prisoners as badly as it wants.
In one Netherlands case in 2014, a 35 year old woman was killed by a Dutch doctor for her depression symptoms. The first two doctors she approached referred her to treatment options, but she kept shopping around until she found a doctor who evaluated her for only two weeks, then killed her two days later. As someone who had terrible depression for years, and has been depression free for years, I know how cruelly murderous this is. It is no better than when cries for help on the internet are met with bullying and end in suicide. Actually, it is worse because the doctors are administering the coup de grace. cite for this woman's story: http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-netherlands-...
Another example of a medical system not supplying a human person with the community and loving support he needed: "In one highly publicized example last year, the clinic helped a 63-year-old man with severe psychiatric problems to end his life. After a very active career working for government, the patient in question could not face his upcoming retirement. In an interview with the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad the clinic’s psychiatrist, Gerty Casteelen said the man 'managed to convince me that it was impossible for him to go on. He was all alone in the world. He’d never had a partner. He did have family but he was not in touch with them. It was almost like he’d never developed as a person. He felt like he didn’t have the right to live. His self-hatred was all consuming.'" http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/03/the-dutch-d...
If a person has to rely on the medical system for affection, I'd say there's a bigger problem in society.
Suicide is the symptom and focusing on artificially preventing without looking at the way government, debt, taking away religion and throwing the good parts out along with the bad, expectations of conformity intrudes in our lives, it is burying our heads in the sand.
Just look at the way society values lonely fifty year old man compared to a twenty year old attractive women - the latter can go on tinder and receive a firehose of affection, while the former would merely be seen as a creep.
When a person with a mental illness turns to the medical system for support they should be offered a range of psycho-social interventions as well as purely medical stuff.
We know how debt or problem drinking or vulnerable housing or lack of a job or social isolation or etc etc can make mental health problems much worse.
In that situation it's pointless just giving people the medication because they've still got the other stuff going on.
Modern English treatment for mental health problems should be including this range of support. It's not all provided by the NHS. A lot of it is provided by social interest companies (charities) (although it's often paid for by the NHS).
> If a person has to rely on the medical system for affection, I'd say there's a bigger problem in society.
Yes!
Social isolation is a pretty widespread problem. Here the person has become isolated, and needs a bit of help and support to become unisolated. And they need that before they can make use of the other stuff that society provides. Joining a 5-a-side soccer team would help reduce a person's social isolation, but they may need help and support to access that 5 a side soccer. This might only be a bit of sign-posting, or it might be a bit more intensive like shaddowing or buddying.
If the costs of keeping low-wage workers alive weren't socialized (people paid too little simply died), you might have a point. But wages would also be much higher, or Wal-Mart would quickly run out of warm bodies to hire.
This argument is trotted out a lot, and I've never heard a thorough argument for it. In contrast, the argument for wages to be set by the market (including, of course, whatever contribution the government makes through welfare) is straightforward.
Redistribution is a serious thing. We are taking people's money by force; we had better be putting it to good use. I take the classic liberal position that the creation of a safety net to smooth out the quality of life for those subject to economic cycles, and to ensure a decent quality of life for those more permanently unable to find work, is a just use of force. We have a moral duty to keep our fellow humans from starvation and homelessness, particularly those who cannot be expected to fend for themselves (i.e. children). It is reasonable to mandate participation in this system through taxation. Public sacrifice for public benefit.
The desperate are entitled to a cut of our paychecks. Wal-Mart's owners are not. Compulsory subsidy through taxation of Wal-Mart's OPEX is not a just use of force, because the power of the state ought to be used for equitably distributed public benefit, not to the disproportionate benefit of a few wealthy people (i.e. Wal-Mart's owners).
I claim that paying its workers a living wage is part of minimum wage employers' OPEX on the basis that, if we withdrew the welfare system, Wal-Mart could not retain workers at its current wages and would have to pay them a great deal more. The welfare system (combined with a too-low minimum wage) is effectively a subsidy of that OPEX.
The correct minimum wage, under this line of thinking, is the one which disqualifies the worker from other redistribution systems.
This taxpayer subsidy of business expenses is a significant perversion of the market by making labor more cheaply available than it would be otherwise. So it is not really correct to say that, absent minimum wage, prices are being set by the market. Unless we also let people who are paid too little starve.
You're saying that welfare produces downward pressure on wages. But I believe it's the opposite: If someone paid you $1,000,000/year whether you were working or not, if you're rational you'd never take a job that paid less than the marginal value of your leisure time. The latter is substantially improved by having $1,000,000/year of unconditional income, of course!
Welfare dollars (at least the unconditional sort, unlike, say, EITC, which is deliberately a wage subsidy) are in competition with employers for their potential employees' time and effort, not a subsidy.
> With respect, such arguments are nonsensical.
Elder abuse is rampant. It's easy to imagine that the victim of such abuse may be more willing to die. But assisted death may help this - there would (should) be considerable professional involvement to make sure there's no coersion or abuse.
When we look at places that have assisted dying we find some cases of people who probably died for the wrong reasons. Those cases are always waved around - but people against assisted dying need to come up with some numbers.
By continuing to use the word suicide for people who chose assisted death you make it harder for people to get assisted death legalised.
Assissted dying is when you ask a doctor to kill you, or to help you kill yourself.
It's useful to seperate out people who want to control their death when they have an incurable illness from people who want to die when they have a treatable mental illness.
It's especially useful if you want assisted death to become legal. It makes it a bit clearer that you're not trying to make it easier for people with mental illness to die.
I believe that suffering is not the great evil to be avoided, but the means to joy—even a moment of joy can redeem decades of suffering.
Therefore, the number is ONE. Saving even ONE life is worth our societies enshrining complete prohibition of medical murder in our law codes.
Even rare instances in which new evidence exonerates prisoners decades after murder convictions shows that the death penalty ought to be outlawed. Likewise, rare instances in which patients, believed to be terminally ill, live much longer than thought possible negate the validity of the whole medical death enterprise. Furthermore, the experience of millions... perhaps billions on this planet who have, like me, undergone years of despairing thoughts and suicidal desires to develop more well-adjusted cognitive behavior undergird the ever-beautiful opportunity to stop the suicidal from self-murder in the hope that day will break once more.
I invite all who read this to come together in a culture of life that seeks to make use of and redeem all suffering, to engage in strenuous effort to overcome hardship, to take up "the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph." (Theodore Roosevelt)
We ought to reject the idea that death is a proper cure for suffering, recognizing the ubiquity of suffering among all lifeforms, recognizing that there are no experiences so painful that no one has endured them without ultimately desiring death, and that, if we truly think that death is an appropriate cure for suffering, we run the risk agreeing with Silenus that "it is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live", and, even worse, we run the risk of agreeing with him and losing the virtue of his hypocrisy!
People can make mistakes. The choice to kill a child or to kill one's self isn't always right just because it is chosen. In other words, people are not gods. You seem to agree and think it possible that something could go wrong here. But, have you considered that, if someone could be wrongfully "euthanized", that someone could be wrongfully left living? Out of the many faces you have seen in your life, are you willing to follow your moral logic through its full path and conclude that many of them should have killed themselves earlier, perhaps much earlier? How many people do you think go on making themselves live out of ignorant religious fear or compunctions that ought to be deprecated? If you really ponder these questions and those beyond, you may begin to feel the murky outline of the rough beast slowly, and sometimes blindly being conjured by the refashioners of moral taste.
The difference is in capacity to make the decision, which many people who die by suicide lack because of mental ill health.
Bob who has bi-polar may not have capacity to make the choice to die.
Other Bob who has a degenerative illness, but who's had recent good quality treatment for any possible mental health problem probably does have the capacity to make the choice.
The rest of your post is semi-coherent and contradicts itself.
The only right solution to this problem is that society begins to take better care of old people. But now we begin to offer an alternative "solution" which consist of helping these people to kill themselves. And look, now there's extra budget to take care of the old people that remain.
Did you see what just happened? Assisted suicide has, sneakily, become a means to control the cost of elderly care and to avoid addressing the real problem -- while thinking ourselves very enlightened and progressive as a bonus.
What about another issue of incurable, terminally ill patients who descend into a years-long hell of losing themselves to the pain, to the illness; who day by day see their brains becoming less and less capable? Are you sure we're even qualified to really "take care" of such people?
It's not about elderly; it's about suffering. If you can't cure or ease someone's pain, step aside. You're in no position to tell such person what to do because you failed them already. If a suffering person decides it's enough, you have no right to tell them - to make them! - to suffer anymore.
Assisted suicide is a way out of hell you can't picture fully without going there yourself. It's easy to say that "we need to take better care of someone", but this makes those who don't want to be taken care of left with nothing. And to repeat, there are people that we don't know how to help and the only thing we can offer them is to prolong their suffering.
They're quite up front about the fact that they have no idea how to bring anyone back. People choose to get cryo-preserved despite that because, as far as some people see it, it beats being buried underground or burned to ash.
Marvin Minsky who passed away recently was on the board of Alcor (one of the main cryonics companies in the US). Does he seem like a scammer to you?
Please research your claims before accusing people of "scams" left and right.
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/10/05/44610780... [1] https://www.deathwithdignity.org/learn/access/
No, not easily. And if you want to die there are very many ways that are as easy or easier.
Assisted dying has should have some safeguards built in - "does this person have mental ill health?", "has this person had access to a variety of good quality MH treatment?"
If anything the delays built in (waiting for an appointment) are somewhat protective.
If I didn't own a car I could just rent one.
Or I could throw myself in front of a train or truck.
In short there are lots of ways to die right now, but they nearly always fuck up somebody else too - why not accept reality and make it so that people who wants to die can go do that safely?
Note: I do not right now want to kill myself.
All lives are worth living.
That's a whole another story, to be sure, but relevant in practice.
In England opiates used to be under-prescribed for this kind of end of life care. National guidelines were changed to make it easier for doctors to prescribe strong pain relief. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18169840
(But note: "The NICE guidance is not specifically about end-of-life care but rather patients living day-to-day with chronic pain" generally trying other things before opiates is a good idea for people with long term pain. Exercise and diet and pain clinics are useful.)
And, in this situation: Shouldn't the main focus be on changing hospice care to provide adequate pain relief, rather than changing the law to allow people in pain to be killed by doctors?
(Again, I'm in favour of changing the law to allow assisted death)
Just like people are allowed to choose or deny any religion or any other preference in life.
Suffering can always be made meaningful and abolition of pain is not a goal for society but a enervation unto death.
Just now in Canada, doctors and nurses are being forced to choose between their professions and holding to a religion that forbids murder. These are their options:
"They can keep their heads down and pray they are never asked to kill a patient. They can surrender and become part of the death machine—at the risk of the eternal consequences that their faith beliefs portend. They can give up their careers and hand the keys of what are now religious medical institutions to secular ownership (or, move to the United States where, at least for now, doctors and nurses enjoy conscience protections). Finally, the difficult but most righteous course would be to engage in a policy of total non-cooperation with the culture of death, forcing the national and provincial governments and medical colleges either to turn a blind eye or to inflict unjust punishments on doctors for refusing to kill. Perhaps such draconian measures would bring the country to its senses."
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/03/canada-de...
In this survey, a small proportion of terminally ill patients seriously considered euthanasia or PAS for themselves. Over a few months, half the patients changed their minds. Patients with depressive symptoms were more likely to change their minds about desiring euthanasia or PAS.... contrary to general perceptions, depression and hopelessness, rather than pain, seem to be the primary factors motivating patients' interest in euthanasia or PAS.... because euthanasia and PAS are irreversible actions, longitudinal assessments of patients' attitudes and preferences are important.
Everything else is opinionated propaganda. Right now the community is debating if they should require that doctors provide information on where/whom they can go to in order to get the assistance/advice patients need; In the end even that is unlikely.
"It's expected that no doctors will be forced to help a patient die."
http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/canadian-doctors-express-mixed-...