#Assisted dying

[ayeforscotland]

I feel like if there’s one bill that shouldn’t be fast-tracked through parliament, it should be the one about assisted dying.

Source.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Quebec residents diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease will soon be able to apply for medical assistance in dying (MAID) starting Oct. 30, allowing them to make the choice before losing their decision-making capacity. However, some doctors say the healthcare system is unprepared and can’t handle the increase in requests. “I don’t think most of the doctors or nurse practitioners or health care professionals will be ready,” said palliative medicine Dr Mathieu Moreau in a recent interview. Quebec is moving forward with the change more than a year after changing provincial law knowing that the federal government has yet to alter the criminal code.

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[jameslmartello]

[pointless-letters]

Daily Express readers having a completely normal and in no way absolutely bananas reaction to the General Election result

[hogwartsthenextgeneration]

*ALL OF THE YES OPTIONS WOULD INCLUDE THE REQUIRED PSYCH AND HEALTH EVALUATION*

It would be great if you could give more of an in depth opinion in the comments and if possible include where you are from.

Thank you!

[anglocatholicboyo]

In Canada in 2015, 1 in 50 deaths were caused by assisted suicide. By 2020, that rate had doubled - *doubled*, to 1 in 25. If we accept that you can only 'know' about 150 people at once, then that would mean each person would know 6 people who died by assisted suicide.

Faced with these numbers, are we actually expected to believe that before Canada legalised assisted suicide, there were really that many people who were in such intolerable and untreatable pain that they were just itching to die early? I doubt it. I think it's more likely that where assisted suicide is legalised, attitudes towards suicide and the sanctity of life change for the worse.

This is why I object to the term 'assisted dying', which I regard as an insidious euphemism. This issue is not separable from the problem of suicide more broadly in society. The rates of suicide in the Netherlands have only increased since that country legalised assisted suicide, compare 8.3 suicides per 100,000 deaths in 2007 with 11.3 per 100,000 in 2017. The 'sanctity of life' argument is not just religionese, it's backed up by the facts.

Opponents of assisted suicide, like myself, talk about Canada and the Netherlands and Belgium so much that even I think we begin to sound like a broken record, but I think this is warranted. These countries are only the most extreme examples, but out of the 19 countries which have legalised assisted suicide, nearly all of them have expanded the eligibility criteria beyond the supposdely robust raft of safeguards originally promised.

Are we really so naïve as to think that it can't possibly happen here? This is a country which voted to leave the EU, after all. Given what's at stake, I don't for a moment trust us to get this right.

[loneberry]

"Physically-healthy Dutch woman Zoraya ter Beek dies by euthanasia aged 29 because she did not want to live with depression"

Read the article here.

Here's another article from before the procedure.

I think it was brave of Zoraya ter Beek to speak so publicly about her decision to be euthanized for depression and other mental illnesses, and it breaks my heart that she was met with so much vitriol:

Ter Beek was forced to delete all her social media profiles after an article about her case was published in April, which led to many users bombarding her inbox telling her not to go through with the procedure, which left her in distress.

“People were saying: ‘Don’t do it, your life is precious.’ I know that. Others said they had a cure, like a special diet or drugs. Some told me to find Jesus or Allah, or told me I’d burn in hell. It was a total s–tstorm. I couldn’t handle all the negativity.”

I am still ambivalent about legal euthanasia for mental illness. I was once suicidally depressed and now feel quite grateful to still be alive. But I understand this woman's desperation to find relief, having tried out every treatment modality myself.

There's something weird about the temporality of depression tho--it has a way of canceling the future. What is felt in the moment (pure suffering) is imputed to both the past and future: it will always be this way. Yet that is not always the case.

That said, I don't doubt that there are people who are, I guess you could call, incurable. They might become "curable" as humans unravel the mysteries of mental illness. But it seems impossible to really know whether someone is actually incurable or temporarily believes they're incurable--I probably would have thought I was one of the incurables when I was in it. The main difference between Zoraya ter Beek and me is: she tried everything and did not improve. I tried everything and eventually improved through a lengthy psychoanalysis.

Maybe I'm slowly coming around to Zoraya ter Beek's perspective. I think her critics probably cannot get into the mind of someone who experiences consciousness as unremitting torture.

From my journal:

She coolly says, there will be no music when they put her down. No funeral. She will exit this world sitting on her couch with her partner. Yes, she’s afraid of dying—death being the ultimate unknown. She feels guilty about leaving her loved ones behind. “But sometimes when you love someone, you have to let them go.” Her words prick me. Why couldn’t I just let you be…gone? When a deer is mortally wounded we speak of the need to put the poor creature out of its misery, but we felt no guilt about demanding you stay alive. I still hear Amelia Rosselli, from beyond the grave, whispering about “those who destroy me by making me exist.”

Is it possible that requiring someone to stay alive (against their will) is a form of torture? Do people have a "right" to die? Is the desire to keep someone alive more about the narcissism of living loved ones than altruism?

[captaindibbzy]

They're talking about assisted dying on the news and my opinion on it comes down to: it is impossible to keep people truly safe from forced euthanasia as long as the safety net for the vulnerable has holes. As long as you are relying on private money, and family, and free labour to catch and make up failings of the state there will always be people who are pushing for death of the inconvenient, and the unloved, and the undesired. It will always end up killing people who should not die because death is cheeper than living.

[etirabys]

// note: explicitly not about the Canada stuff

I don’t mean the following to be an argument against the 192347987 reasons assisted dying has bad outcomes, or is abused, etc etc. I’m going to quote discoursedrome

it’s common for people to argue that something has costs and so we shouldn’t do it, or that it has benefits and so we should do it, and act like they’ve finished presenting a cogent case for their position, and I am just astonished at the level of confusion that this requires. In a serious discussion, you don’t even have both legs in your pants at that point! It’s weighing trade-offs in the presence of uncertainty. If your argument doesn’t engage with the subject on that level, it’s not ready for competition yet.

, clarify that I’m not making a ‘this has costs and therefore we shouldn’t do it’ type argument, and move on with my point.

Dying as an old person right now sucks.

It can take anywhere from a day to several weeks for someone to die. Sometimes your family wants to wait at the bedside for a week. But a lot of the time they have work and things to do. Maybe they live thousands of miles away. You haven’t recognized them in years, you haven’t spoken a coherent word in months, and even if for some reason your brain chose this moment to recover lucidity you’re on enough morphine to be well inside the borders of la-la-land. ...

There is a national volunteer program called No One Dies Alone. Nice people from the community go into hospitals to spend time with dying people who don’t have anyone else there for them. It makes me happy that this program exists.

Nevertheless, this is the way many of my patients die. Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented, in a sterile hospital room with someone from a volunteer program who just met them sitting by their bed.

I think practically everyone, if they thought about it, would agree that it sucks, even if they have not spent any times in the places where old people slowly die.

My ideal way to die, some time after getting a “you are going to be in pain and on a lot of meds for the rest of your life” diagnosis, is to have a three day long death party. Everyone who wants can come by, chat about old times, and maybe take some of my stuff as a gift. I’ll make them read my fanfiction.

If relevant, I’ll try to be on whatever meds balance of “not being in too much pain” and “lets me be lucid enough to talk to everyone”. In the last hour, I’ll gather the 3-10 closest people, take a normal dose of heroin (I’d like to know what it’s like at the ONE time it’s safe), and after that take a lethal dose of heroin. I’ll go high on party vibes, surrounded by my loved ones, not feeling abandoned or lonely or too scared.

There is no way for me to have this in the world I live in now. There is no way for you to have this in the world you live in now. Every single person has a much higher risk of having a scary, lonely, painful, undignified death in a world where assisted dying is illegal or very hard to access.

There are a lot of cruelties in the world and this is one of the big ones to me.

[tattoos4mnd]

Autumnal barn owl

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A man who says he suffers from chronic and worsening mental health issues is among those launching a court challenge of the federal government’s assisted dying law, which excludes people suffering solely from a mental disorder. An application filed by Dying with Dignity in Ontario Superior Court on Monday argues that it is discriminatory to bar people with mental disorders from being eligible for an assisted death when it is available to people who suffer physically. The organization is asking the court to immediately quash the mental-health exclusion. Plaintiff John Scully said going to court is his last hope.

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[jameslmartello]

This Doctor Laugh About Human Suffering. It's Terrifying

[lost-carcosa]

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Working on Better Endings

Welcome to our last blog post of the year.  Before I get to it, let me say thank you for supporting us.  We appreciate it every time you read something we write and every time you listen to our podcast.  You are literally the only reason we are doing these things! 

At the same time, though, likes are very much appreciated, especially on our YouTube channel, which we’d also love for you to subscribe to (and which we’ll be putting major effort into in the new year).  We also greatly appreciate reviews of the podcast, as they help spread the word, and support via Patreon that covers some of the costs of putting the podcast together.

 Now for the post itself.

Except that I’m not quite sure where to begin. 

I wanted to write about assisted dying.  It’s not a cheerful way to end the year but it’s important to be able to have a gentle end to your own story.  But it’s mostly unavailable.  The legal right to medical assistance with dying would make the world a more humane place.  Yet it’s complicated.

If assisted dying had been available here in Germany, the horror of the last week that Spouse, MIL, and I lived through—but not my father–in–law—could have been avoided.  Except that maybe it couldn’t have been.  Because, argh... It’s not always clear what is the right or even the best thing to do. The deeper you get into a situation where assisted dying would be useful, the more you see how convoluted the maze of shades of grey the possibility of helping someone end their life can be.

FIL had Alzheimer’s.  If you’ve ever had a close relative with this disease, you know what devastation it wreaks.  Over the course of a dozen years, Alzheimer’s had withered FIL into a shadow of himself (although not without the occasional increasingly dimmer flash of his old self).  Then, in the middle of December, FIL got sick and had to be hospitalized.  This had been increasingly happening, but this time it was an infection. They tried but couldn’t deliver the antibiotics he desperately needed via an IV. He kept ripping it out of his arm.  And orally the antibiotics just weren’t effective enough.  FIL’s condition quickly degraded. 

But there were ups and downs.  Things looked grim—and Spouse and I rushed down from where we live several hours away—and then they looked better and then they looked grim again.  Meanwhile, the doctor kept threatening to discharge FIL in a day or two, even there was no way MIL, tough but small, could properly care for him at home on her own.  In the state he was in, it took two people to get him up and out of bed to get him to the bathroom or anything like that and there was no end in sight to the wait for a space in a nursing home.  

The last day that FIL was at least briefly lucid—which turned out to be two days before he died—he swerved back and forth between saying he wished it was all over and saying that he was so glad that he had more time.  In retrospect, clearly, he was dying, so swift and severe was his deterioration.  But even the doctor and nurses didn’t recognize it up until half an hour before the end. That was when the off–duty physical therapist who had come to visit (because she was a friend) was like CALL HIS WIFE AND SON NOW!  And even then, it didn’t occur to the doctor or nurses on the ward that he needed sedation posthaste so that he didn’t have to experience the horrible death his was about to have to...well, not live through, but you know what I mean.  It only occurred to them to offer sedation a minute or two after he’d died, to stop the twitching the body does as all of its biological electricity discharges (so to speak).

Given all that confusion, maybe the possibility for assisted dying wouldn’t have spared my FIL from drowning in his own lung fluid because of the lung infection that is the typical way for people with Alzheimer’s to go because eventually their coordination degrades to the point where they can no longer successfully swallow or properly cough.  And maybe it wouldn’t have spared the three of us—MIL, Spouse, and I—from having to watch him die that way.  (The off–duty PT fled in tears the moment we arrived, thereby missing FIL’s death by about 120 seconds.  Which is to say, I think FIL fought hard to stay alive until his wife and son were able to get there and then let go.)

Oh, the number of times this last week that MIL muttered, we would have put an animal out of this misery a while ago already.  And the number of times that Spouse agreed!  Still, the deeper you get into a situation like Alzheimer’s, the more you see that maze of shades of grey.  You can say, well, the person they were before they developed Alzheimer’s would have never wanted to see themselves live this way.  And they would have wanted not to suffer the horrible death that is about to befall them.  You know you are horrified by seeing them live this way.  And you’ll never get the sight of that horrible death out of your head, especially nights, when you are trying to sleep. But what do you do when the person there in front of you now, thick in the midst of their advanced case of Alzheimer’s, has different feelings about it?  Can you just say they don’t know what they’re talking about? Plus, they aren’t just miserable.  Even when they’re in the hospital dying, they appear to experience moments of joy.  Sure, you are certain they don’t grasp the future they’re facing or the horrible death that awaits them.  But even if they don’t understand what is happening, how could you ever have the moral right to say fetch the poison for someone who has moments of consciousness but can’t decide that they’re ready to go?

All of this is not to say that assisted dying is wrong.  As muddled as this week was, after experiencing it, I am now all the more certain that assisted dying is important. We have that moral right to decide the where and the when of dying for ourselves when the time comes, for whatever reason, to die. We ought to fight for the legal right to it, too.  But the fight for people to have the legal right for medical assistance with dying with dignity and without undo suffering will take facing the fact that assisted dying can be a thorny issue. There are times when it’s wrong and should be withheld. And there are times when it isn’t clear if it’s right or if it’s wrong and that can be true even when the person in question is suffering and has no hope for recovery from whatever is destroying them. We need to be brave enough and clear headed enough as communities or societies to address these issues.

I guess, in the end, then, assisted dying is what I’ve ended up writing about.  I guess I’ll also say hug your loved ones!  And go do something out of the ordinary with them.  It doesn’t have to be anything major, just something different enough for you to always remember.  Because as long as life is, the years do go by and eventually come to an end that sneaks up on you, leaving you to think about all the time you didn’t spend with someone before it was too late.

[northern-punk-lad]

assisted dying campaigns across the world are saying they don’t want what the Canadian government is doing like Canada has done so much damage to the movement

[jacekwojnarowski]

Life and Death: Trusting God's Hands

In a world wrestling with the morality of assisted dying, we are reminded of one eternal truth: life is a sacred gift from God. From the moment of creation, He has been the author of our existence, the only one with the authority to give and take life.

Yes, suffering is a heavy burden, and our hearts ache for those in pain. But as Christians, we are called to trust in the redemptive power of trials and lean on His strength. Assisted dying may seem like an act of mercy, but it denies God’s sovereignty and risks diminishing the inherent dignity of life.

Instead of hastening death, let us walk alongside the suffering with compassion, offer hope through care, and proclaim the worth of every life. God is with us in every moment—He is our healer, our comforter, and the source of eternal peace.

"There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal." (Deuteronomy 32:39)

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