As medicine developed, we got a chance to live, to the point that we sort of lost our chance to die. I'm too young to really worry about prolonged terminal illnesses, but I sometimes think about this nowadays, as my father passed away very recently, from lung cancer, discovered very very late, at terminal stage. He was a strong, dynamic man in his fifties, and in two months he passed away. I recall my grandfather's terminal stage which dured some five, six years, until 2010. He had many illnesses, and he was too weak to walk in his last two-three years. Comparing the two, I do not really know what to think, but in this context, after lightly reading the article linked too, I guess everybody should have the right to renounce their lives, with assistance from someone who'll guarantee a peaceful and certain death: an ignorant, solo attempt might result in getting into a state where suicide is physically impossible and pain is greater. And I sometimes think the state is way too much intertwined into people's lifes, but that's another topic.
It is insane that we make people huddle into dark alleys and underground societies, simply to have agency over their own lives.
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.
Where I live people can, and do, get euthanasia for psychological suffering. Now, research has shown that a rather large percentage of the elderly are suffering from depression. Part of the reason is, of course, that getting old can be very painful. But another part of the reason is that in today's society many old people are almost criminally neglected.
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.
> The only right solution to this problem is that society begins to take better care of old people.
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.
Aging is the real problem, and suicide by suffering elderly is unlikely to make young researchers turn their backs on the search for the fountain of youth.
Minimum wage is a little more complicated in a welfare state. We outlaw people paying their workers too little money because otherwise the welfare system becomes a free grant towards what should be their payroll expenses. (It even this way under our current minimum wage system because minimum wages are far too low).
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.
Why "should" someone's cost of living be included in payroll expenses? Is Wal-Mart obligated to pay someone more when they have a child? Are they obligated to pay a teenager from a rich home less than a poor senior for the same job?
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.
Because when you let the market set rates for unskilled labor, those rates will inevitably decline to near 0. This will result in deflation, which then hurts the entire economy, even skilled labor.
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.
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.
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.
You're forgetting the price floor imposed by cost of living, which is already higher than minimum wage. For your claim to hold, it would have to be the case that workers could survive on less than minimum wage.
Central banks are discussing outlawing cash, so that when the time comes and they want to impose negative rates, they won't be limited by a lower bound - they can be as financially repressive as they like.
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.
Consider that suicide removes the limit on how awful a society can be by allowing it to kill off anyone who doesn't fit in instead of helping to find a way to improve their situation. Our communities should focus on healing mental suffering so that the despairing are allowed to see that the lens of depression is not the only way to see their situation.
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...
Should we really be relying on the medical system for loving support? That's the direction where depressed people will be drugged up and plugged into the matrix.
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.
I don't think it's the place of doctors to decide what level of suffering is needed before someone's allowed to kill themselves. That call should be up to the individual in question. If the depressed 35 year old wants to die, she should by all means die.
I'm in favour of assisted dying. (Please don't call it assisted suicide - we want to prevent suicide. It's useful to keep the word suicide for something we want to stop).
> 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.
That person doesn't mind being labled a suicide, but people campaigning for assisted dying have to spend time and money talking about the difference between suicide (generally something we want to avoid) and assisted dying (something we want to provide).
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.
It may be that you dislike the word suicide because you have a distaste for it but not for any rational reason—by what recourse could you separate the legitimacy of an assisted dying person from a suicide? They both want to die and then do it—the difference is usually of aesthetics or location. Euthanasia cocktails derive from veterinary medicine where animals are killed in a way where they do not struggle or spasm, the animal dies in a way less disturbing to viewers, but we cannot be sure that there is more or less subjective suffering than with someone jumping from a height. Brain activity continues much longer than movement and breathing with the administering of these cocktails. It could be that the jumping that the author of the article has an aversion to is as good a way to die as any. As for the suicide methods that fail due to discomfort, I am forever grateful that my two attempts failed.
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.
> t may be that you dislike the word suicide because you have a distaste for it but not for any rational reason—by what recourse could you separate the legitimacy of an assisted dying person from a suicide? They both want to die and then do it—the difference is usually of aesthetics or location.
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 very act of calling a suicide prevention hotline is solid evidence that the caller does not truly want to die.
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.
> The very act of calling a suicide prevention hotline is solid evidence that the caller does not truly want to die.
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:
Taking steps to avoid death is trivially a signal that in some way a person wishes to avoid death; whether that side of their internal conflict will prevail is another matter and, of course, not at all certain. But it is 100% within the bounds of respecting their agency (and, I'd argue, a duty) to help someone who is fighting to stay alive do so. The argument is that suicide hotlines don't imply a paternalistic "all citizens must keep breathing at all costs" ideology because they require the voluntary step of asking for help, and someone who asks for help can be meaningfully said to want it.
>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.
There's a big difference between emotional teenagers doing something impulsive, people with mental illness (treatable) doing something out of desperation and people with terminal illnesses or dementia choosing to avoid unpreventable suffering or losing everything they are.
The biggest problem is most of the conditions which wipe people out take your rational agency as their first action.
Many people think that abortion is a bad choice, but one that women should be allowed to make. Saying you shouldn't do something is not the same as saying you shouldn't be allowed to do it.
The point is that people have always had, and will always have the ability to take their own lives. The prohibition under consideration here is that of taking someone else's life. Stated differently, assisted suicide is simply killing another person who has expressed a desire to die. I think it's reasonable to say someone shouldn't kill another person.
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.
It's interesting how they can do assisted suicide, yet many states have trouble carrying out executions. Strange, is the stuff doctors use any better or are they're botched assisted suicides also? Do they get to use somthing better than the prisons have?
The suppliers take a moral view that execution is wrong and decline to do business with the executioners. Executioners thus have to find alternative suppliers of the various drugs they need, which gets harder and harder in well regulated places like the US.
If you've seen a family member suffer from terminal cancer for years, rotting away while still being alive and suffering from such horrible pain that no amount of medication can reduce it, there is just no way you are against assisted suicide, trust me on that. We treat our dogs better than that. We kill them to spare them from such a fate.
No cryonics company has yet claimed that it "works".
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.
Why not delete it altogether then? Given that it's also out of context now. For the rest, I'm not convinced my comment is insulting, for I do not consider to not be worthy of something a pejorative quality in itself. And I think that my original post is neither personal in scope nor an attack, on this basis.
I do not consider my post an attack. The elderly raise the youth, and the youth has to help the elderly to gracefully pass away. And who says I don't bother, is unworthy of being raised, which is a work of incredible effort, and of lenghty years. Saying that someone does not merit sth. is not an attack, or an insult.
I think the original comment was talking about elderly that didn't raise their own youth well. Because the ones who did it successfully do not depend on whole society that much, and can rely on their own children.
The whole of the youth depend on the whole of the elderly, and vice versa. That's society. If we only rely on our parents and our offspring, than that's a tribal system, there's no society.
The comment was trollish and inhumane, but yours was still a personal attack, and those are not allowed here, regardless of what you're responding to. Please don't do it again.
Because you made an insulting claim about the author and his or her parents. It's not your place to say such a thing, nor could it ever be justified by a mere internet comment, however obnoxious. More importantly, HN isn't a place where people are allowed to treat one another that way.
I appreciate that your intent was to defend the people the commenter disparaged, but you did it in the wrong way, by disparaging back.
How? AFAIK people get to be paid for the time they work, and they raise the youth in the remaining time. Yes this is a generalisation, but most often nobody gets paid in order to merely procreate and raise their kids.
When I was 20 I wanted to kill myself. Thank whomever that assisted suicide isn't a socially acceptable practice because I could have easily gone into some clinic and had someone kill me without my family knowing.
That's just patently untrue. There's an enormous gap between the situations in which the author advocates for (and laws in various states and countries permit) assisted suicide and a society that allows you to walk into a clinic and kill yourself for any reason. The laws in California [0], Washington, Oregon, and Vermont [1], for example, require that the patient is mentally competent and is terminally ill with less than six months to live as certified by two doctors. A suicidal person won't meet the first requirement, much less the second.
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.
I own a car. I can trivially turn it around on the highway, turn of the light and floor the gas (going against traffic). It would almost certainly kill everybody else in the car I hit, but it would also kill me - and my family wouldn't know.
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?
You may want to actually read the article. The options aren't "no euthanasia at all" or "anyone can request euthanasia at any time and get it immediately". If some line of reasoning leads you to conclude that the Swiss are insane, well, then maybe you should consider the option that you're the problem, not the majority of Swiss that support their legislation.
I believe that you were facing the reality of living the 6 months of an agonising slow death in a cancer hospice, you might change your narrow minded opinion.
Which he would be denied, of course, because the best painkillers are "narcotics" and so tightly regulated that it's hard to get them even if you really, really need them.
That's a whole another story, to be sure, but relevant in practice.
I believe it happens, but do you have any sourcing for how often it happens that cancer patients in hospices are denied opiates?
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)
I hope you never get to know, or experience such thing, but for some illnesses like cancer, at later stages, even the strongest painkillers don't help with the pain. There are many illnesses which turn you into an immotile person, and if you lack a loving family ready to put up with anything, life becomes a pain no painkiller can relief. Death is a part of our lifes, and our bodies are ours, so I believe we should get to choose what to do with them. If I were to spend the rest of my life in bed, immotile, in need of the service of my loved ones, for years to come, I'd rather put an end, relieve my loved ones from the burden and responsibilities, and my body and soul from the various pain that the situation causes.
I consider myself very lucky that no one tried to kill me when I was suicidal. It's going to get a lot more dangerous now that able-bodied young people are getting social and medical "support" that kills them for their possibly temporary depression or nihilism.
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."
Every legit news source is reporting doctors will have the right to NOT participate.
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."
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.
