Hacker News Reader

Comment by UI_at_80x24 | Hacker News Reader

Here's the real depressing part of Assisted Suicide; It is being approved for patients that cannot afford to live because Government Disability payments are too low.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/woman-with-chemical-sensitivit...

The profound shame of this isn't shared by elected officials.

View on HN

Most media outlets have policies on not publicizing suicides, so there are countless suicides that were committed for economic reasons that we'll never know about.

I knew of someone through someone else that ended up committing suicide in a public place. Couldn't afford to live in a dignified way, and left countless notes explaining why they did what they did. All of them were scrubbed from the internet, and if you didn't know of them you would have never known it happened at all.

This happens more often than most people know.

The women linked to has a disorder, and couldn't get the money to live in a place without "chemicals" that would resolve her symptoms. One of the problems with getting the government to pay for you to live in a nicer place due to this disorder is that there is very little evidence this disorder is caused by the chemicals and a good amount of evidence the disorder is a psychiatric one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_chemical_sensitivity

> the disorder is a psychiatric one

That doesn't make the symptoms any less real for a person suffering from the condition.

I never said it made the symptoms or suffering less real. But it does explain why insurance (governmental or private) might be reluctant to pay for non-psychiatric interventions.

For instance if you believed that some people could read your thoughts unless you wore a lead helmet you might expect insurance to pay for anti-psychotics, but not necessarily a lead helmet.

Is this the right approach the right one I'm not sure, but I understand why large organizations are reluctant to treat psychiatric diseases that way.

For a counter example search for hair dryer incident on this blog post.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

The inevitable bonus in treating people badly to save money is they are now pushed to suicide so the government gets to save even more money. Plus there is no-one left to complain about it once they are gone.

I worry that it’ll become an easy solution to many difficult problems. Take the psychologizing of ME/CFS and Long Covid for example, how many of those people are going to be corralled into this.

This is just euthanasia of the poor, right? It seems Canada is regressing away from some of its liberal ideals.

Canada is following liberal ideals to their natural conclusions.

This is horrid. Thank you for sharing this info.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com