Euthanasia for incurable cancer patients is a no-brainer, but for incurable depression sufferers? Well, their bodies are healthy. What if it's just a phase they'll grow out of? Maybe they're just faking it? They should probably be more grateful for the gifts they've received from God, and they'll be happy. Maybe they're just bad people?
We don't object to euthanasia for incurable cancer because we understand that A) it's painful and B) it's terminal.
But that's not the case for depression because there are literally millions of people that have recovered or at least learned how to live with depression.
I'm just not sure that a 28 year old is really facing incurable depression.
You can be in a pretty long deep depression in your 20s and pull out of it in your 30s and 40s.
That you don’t have or see one doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Are you some kind of arbiter of bodies and lives of others? If not, what's your business with that?
This is absolutely not a universally held belief.
My point was that it is drastically easier to believe that euthanasia for cancer patients is okay, than for depression sufferers.
Nonsense - you clearly never had somebody close to you suffer from it. My daughter suffers from depression - it is not a state of mind or a funk you can snap out of.
That sentence is not a reflection of my opinion - my whole second paragraph was a mock example of how mental illness skeptics think about depression.
It really get's me in the crop when my family unfamiliar with mental illness says the same things.
The folks who think you only see a mental health professional or go to the clinic because you are mad.
These are fundamentally different situations. Incurable cancer patients are basically guaranteed to die because of their condition in the near future.
Allowing "euthanasia"/assisted suicide only normalizes suicide and encourages the state/societe/health-providers to dedicate less resources to mental health since we have a much cheaper/easier solution now. How do you determine that someone suffering from a mental health condition "terminally ill"? The patients surely can't do that themselves and the healthcare system(private or public) is only able to dedicate a certain amount of resources to a relatively limited number of approved treatment options.
I don't know what happened in this case but I'd bet that there were certainly many experimental (and probably mainstream) treatment options that she simply had no access to. Cancer and other terminal patients beyond a certain point are effectively doomed and can't be saved regardless of money/resources, they can't wait for another year or two for improved treatments, which IMHO is a huge difference because "euthanasia" shouldn't be an acceptable option unless every other option has been exhausted.