Toronto woman applies for euthanasia after nearly a 10 year search for housing

> When you die, you include many people in the aftermath whether you want to or not.

I mean one can similarly cause them pain by just leaving them. There’s no obligation to stay in relationships with people because the counterfactual would be painful, I don’t see why there should be an obligation to live simply because it would be painful for others.

"Keep dancing, otherwise you'll let everyone down" is not an exactly an encouragement.

Is that an argument against voluntary euthanasia though?

My parents have both told me they would sooner die than go to a nursing home. Knowing them, I believe both that they mean it and that they would be utterly miserable in a nursing home. Obviously I would be distraught if it came to that, but how selfish would I have to be to tell them "no, you must go to this place that you'll hate because of the impact it will have on me if you die"?

I certainly think there should be controls. A waiting period, mandatory psych checkup to validate rationality and sound mind. If those (quite low) bars are cleared though, I don't see any reason that people shouldn't be able to choose to die.

To your second point, doctors don't necessarily need to be the vendors of legalised euthanasia.

A rheumatologist friend of mine once expressed that he is generally supportive of the idea of voluntary euthanasia, but believes this should involve creating some kind of "assisted dying professional" role. Asking doctors to euthanize people creates (as he put it) a kind of conflict of interest; the person who is there to help you live should not be the same person who can, if you choose, help you die.

This is why they aren't forced in any euthanasia cases I've heard of. Has this ever actually happened outside of totalitarian regimes? Genuine question.

Status quo bias. You affect people while you're living too.

What other ways are those?

I don't think the OP disagrees that a psychiatric condition is a real condition.

I think they're just asserting that they should be properly assessed for that psychiatric condition before euthanasia. That goes for any condition: they want to have at least tried courses of treatment that might fix the problem.

This is complicated by the fact that some psychiatric conditions make themselves difficult to treat. They compel the patient to avoid treatment. This is a thorny ethical issue under ordinary circumstances, and even more so when the outcome is terminal.

If the patient believes that their condition is debilitating enough to merit ending their life, it is a matter of law that they should at least have to have a doctor's affirmation that it it has not responded to the standard of care. That means treating a psychiatric condition on a par with physiological ones.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? We've already asked you this and you've continued to do it repeatedly. We end up having to ban such accounts.

I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

I lived in a car for years and upgraded to an abandoned rotting trailer with no running water.

I know what poor is like, and it is still no reason to end your life. Took me 10 years to build marketable skills but I eventually became a bay area home owner.

Can everyone do that? Probably not. You can still win from a bad starting hand in life if you are simply more stubborn than everyone else.

Also dead cockroaches is still better conditions than a lot of people in third world countries get.

I live in NB and access to healthcare in New Brunswick (Fredericton included) is not better than in Toronto, far from it. In rural areas it's even worse, and we're constantly seeing hospital shutdowns due to lack of staffing. We (and NS as well) have had a massive influx of people from Ontario since the start of covid and the explosion of real estate pricing, but we don't have the infrastructure to support it.

"decent access to healthcare from rural areas with a car." It's the car part... She's wheelchair bound and probably can't afford a car let alone one she could drive.