Well thinking
Oh honestly. Not good enough.
Ten years ago, the BBC was always telling us how bloody marvellous the euro was. Now – for reasons I can’t quite fathom – it’s assisted suicide.
Really? Can’t fathom? Well try harder.
It’s really not that difficult. Something is going to kill us – you, me, all of us. We don’t know what it will be. We do know it could be slow and horrible. We’re afraid of that. Some of us would like to know we (and others who want it) have the option of cutting it short; knowing that would relieve one of the fears.
Now can you fathom it? I’ll tell you what I can’t fathom: I can’t fathom why that’s so difficult to fathom. I also can’t fathom being flippant about it. This isn’t some joke or some bit of trivia; it’s something that threatens everyone.
When the Beeb is really keen on something, it enlists the support of a soft-Left celebrity to make its case – the most popular candidates being Stephen Fry and Eddie Izzard, neither of whom can resist hauling themselves on to a bien pensant hobby horse.
What is bien pensant about it? What a ridiculous, callous, frivolous thing to say. I don’t see anything remotely bien pensant about it. Assisted suicide, trendy? I don’t think so. That’s about as convincing as Terry Eagleton (of all people!) calling Anthony Grayling “identikit Islington man.”
Damian Thompson ought to try thinking a bit more bien, if you ask me.
I just watched it. It made me cry.
Thompson is an idiot. Why do so many commentators blah on about side issues and not deal with the central question? Sort of rhetorical, I know the answers really.
hmmm. For a bit I thought he meant the *euro* meant assisted suicide.
Which, because of it’s obvious absurdity, might have made a better article.
I don’t get it. A simple opt-in system (when still having full mental capacity) to assisted suicide would rule out all those fears of “pressuring old and weak and mentally ill” into it.
I mean, there are countries who do just such an opt-in for availability as an organ donor.
The comments over there are just asinine and sickening.
Ophelia,
You posts are just so spot on sometimes. I’d love to hear you speak at an atheist/skeptic/humanist conference or three.
Invite yourself! : )
The quality of the comments is abysmal, but then, so is the article. What part of assisted suicide do these people not get?
Someone amongst the comments mentioned the middle ages, and how people valued life. But the critically ill died promptly then–they died naturally–and I suspect that there were more acts of assisted suicide at the time (and involuntary assisted suicide) than there are now. The Inuit used to leave there elderly on the ice for the polar bears–who knows what went on in the middle ages. And the Catholic Church buried children in the back forty, and erased all records of their existence. And we are supposed to believe that Swiss clinics are worse?
It is human nature to play God. We have only the choice to play it well. My mother willed herself to death by starving herself, my father pleaded for the last two months of his life for God to take him, and this could have gone on for years if his body had not failed. While visiting him, I could hear other people in the ward screaming, over and over again. We now have to power to extend life beyond all reason, benefit, mercy, and use. Perhaps Thompson will become one of these, and reap what he has sown.
Mark,
No way did someone do that. The Middle Ages as a time of respect for life? Seriously?
I’m going to crawl into a corner…
In the Middle Ages, they showed great respect for corpses. Living people, not so much.
Ten years ago, the BBC was always telling us how bloody marvellous the euro was. Now – for reasons I can’t quite fathom – it’s assisted suicide.
Embarassing moment. I had read the entire article, in a fog of early morning confusion, before I realised that this wasn’t about the BBC changing its stance on the euro….
Is the real target the Beeb or assisted suicide? Someone should point out to Thompson that assisted suicide is not compulsory. I can’t understand why some people object, in principle, to other (sane)people killing themselves, what right do they have to interfere in others lives(or deaths)? Presumably this attitude is a legacy of Christianity which teaches that our lives belong to some sky god and are not our own.
Against assisted suicide, a compelling argument is that the BBC once supported the euro? Well, that makes sense.
Incidentally, when considering the Middle Ages’ great respect for life, one should think about the fact that they had a special kind of knife called a ‘Mercy killer’ for finishing off the wounded:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misericorde_%28weapon%29
[…] H/T: Ophelia Benson […]
The Telegraph is owned by a pair of very rich catholics (how’s that ‘eye of the needle’ thing working ?) They are extreme in their kneejerk holding to the official party line of RCC Inc. They rather remind me of the old “Daily Worker” and should be taken no more seriously than was that. Thompson seems to have a protected status in the organization where he is free to lash out at anybody and everybody, indulging his irrational hates. He frequently rips into his own hierarchy there in Westminster diocese for not being far enough to the right – now there’s a laugh, Vince Nicholls as a leftwing progressive!
Please folks Thompson is only there to implement the principle of maximum irritation – to piss off the most people possible. I doubt he believes anything he writes for Teleblog
The odd thing about Damian Thompson is that he isn’t stupid, and he isn’t a total crackpot. There are essentially two Damian Thompsons, one a lucid critic of creationism, quack medicine and other forms of Counterknowledge, and the other a deranged Catholic reactionary. (And before you ask, they definitely are the same person.)
As for the comments on his blog, many of the people seem to be socially dysfunctional. I get the impression that for some, their bizarre meandering rants are the closest thing to human interaction they get. In real life, most people would just walk away.
I know; I was sent Counterknowledge for possible review or other mention and I liked it; I was astonished to discover that other Damian Thompson.
The Middle Ages had respect for life……..oh lordy.
Off topic – Chris Stedman links to one of your articles in a new piece he’s written for Huffpo (I think its the same article that is on his blog).
Oh yes that article. Funny, I vaguely thought it had already appeared at Huffpo, and then at his blog. I guess it was Religion Dispatches first, then blog, now Huffpo.
Oh and also State of Formation, where I did a reply, only to get entangled with some goofy guy who must have swallowed that dopy article by Jeff Sparrow whole: he took me for a reactionary libertarian hyper-capitalist imperialist right-wing stooge. Train wreck.
As a practising journalist, I must say – what an awful first paragraph. It gave me the impression the BBC thought adoption of the Euro was a form of assisted suicide. Took a while to get my semantic brain-cells into gear.
Perhaps you should have quoted the first two pars.
Oh lord. I just read that thread. Someone actually said American atheism is a “tool of empire” and they weren’t being tongue-in-cheek. Zoooooom back 12 years to my time as an undergrad during the last gasps of “theory” and postcolonial studies (which, of course, laid claim to every subject matter from literature to genetics).
I’ll probably piss everyone off by saying this, BUT… Why always this careful caveat for the “sane” or “mentally competent”? I can think of two diseases off the top of my head, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s, that will rob one of said advantage, and therefore a way out. Do we really want to say that someone who is so afflicted must avail themselves of assisted suicide NOW, while they still have their faculties, rather than risk going down the slippery slope toward mental incapacity, and losing their chance? Do we want to talk about drawing a line, and, if so, where?
What I’m getting at is not just the rights of sufferers of degenerative diseases that may want to escape the prospect of turning into a vegetable. I’m talking about the paternalistic attitude of “allowing” someone assisted suicide only under specific conditions, and deciding what those should be. If life is a right, not an obligation, then death is equally a right. If life is so painful, for whatever reason (yes, including insanity, including depression, because these are often as unbearably painful as cancer, and often not even treatable, let alone curable), that someone wants to die, why should someone else be able to decide for them that they shouldn’t be able to? Yes, they often have the option of trying on their own, assuming they are physically able. But, aside even from considerations like pain, one truly frightening prospect is failure, and the concurrent loss of capacity to try again (you would be hospitalized, placed on suicide watch, kept alive no matter how damaged you now are). What boggles my mind is not just how people can dispute the virtues of assisted suicide for the terminally ill, but why anybody, at all, thinks they have the right to forbid assisted suicide to anyone who wants it…
Josh – I know – it all seemed so hilariously vieux jeu – so recycled, so familiar, so yes, hon, do you really think I’ve never heard any of this before?
Anna…hmm. It’s hard to see how one could avoid that proviso. Informed consent is kind of a bedrock commitment. Mind you – I think people with Alzheimer’s could for instance make a living will to that effect. What is Pratchett’s plan, do you know? (For a fictional example: Denny Crain on Boston Legal got Alan Shore to promise to shoot him when the time was right. I don’t think they lingered over the legal issues.)
Actually I’m not so sure about that. I’d like to know Eric’s view on this.
The thing about assisted suicide is that someone has to do the assisting. I think for the people who do the assisting there’s a big difference between doing it for someone who has made an informed choice and doing it for someone who hasn’t. (If it’s someone who has made such a choice in advance, that might deal with that. But without that…I’d think it would be difficult.)
Anna, it’s about informed consent. In the case of Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s one usually (if not almost always) gets the diagnosis well before suffering from dementia, i.e. one would still be able to legally consent to assisted suicide oneself. I think it’s very reasonable to opt-in to assisted suicide during such a stage, while defining in what stage of the disease you’d like your life to end.
I believe the proper term I’m looking for is advance directive? I think requiring an advance directive makes sense because if one waits too long, one might already be suffering from dementia so badly as to no longer being able to give consent.
I think such a regulation would avoid the possibility of being coerced into it (one of the irrational points raised against it), provide a standardized legal document which the patient & the assisting doctor can rely on without having to worry about legal consequences. Such a standardized document could also be held in a central registry / database which could assure that your wishes are followed in any hospital you might end up in.
Ah, I think the proper term is advance health care directive. I think a great approach would be to allow for directions for assisted suicide within such a document.
In my country the only way to get a binding advance directive involves strict formal rules, advisory by a doctor and a notary and is only valid for 5 years; i.e. periodic costs. (Afaik, currently you can only opt out of certain life-prolonging measures but assisted suicide is definitely not possible.)
I’d like to have a permanent solution where I only have to do this once (and only have to amend it in case I change my mind on details later on) which would cover accidents, terminal diseases, etc.
You raised the issue of mentally ill persons. Well, I guess there will be tough grey areas for a law. I’m loosely acquainted with a paranoid schizophrenic. I highly doubt he can make reasonable decisions during the times when he’s convinced that witches follow him and rule his life.
Myself, I “live” with recurrent major depressive disorder – during certain stages of an episode I most probably am not able to give informed consent which would be legally acceptable due to fucked up thought processes. I’d be willing to go through an additional psychiatric assessment when filing an advance directive to make sure I’m not in an episode.
I hope that makes some sense?
As an aside: personally, I wouldn’t mind being called crazy, I’m weird enough (given that I score quite high for 3 additional personality disorders; 1 just slightly missing qualification for diagnosis). Other mentally ill persons most probably would, though. But insanity really is wrong, it’s no longer used medically. It’s now considered colloquial and sadly remains used in legal contexts.
Lost Control – yes, I’m aware that “insanity” is not a medical term, though still used in a legal context. But it’s a legal context we are talking about. Mental illness of any brand is often used in various legal contexts to deprive people of their rights “for their own good”. I’m not entirely sure this is bad in all cases, as you point out, there are a lot of gray areas.
But here’s my point regarding suicide. It’s not as if mentally ill people don’t already commit suicide. In fact, attempted suicide, or suicidal ideation is often part of the diagnosis of mental illness. Worse yet, in many jurisdictions, suicide is actually a crime, so you could potentially face jail time if you fail (though, to be fair, I don’t believe it’s enforced often). My point is that wanting to die, really wanting to, with all your being, is as valid a desire as wanting to live. No one asks for your informed consent to live. Shouldn’t you be able to legally obtain the means to end your life in a safe (yes, I’m aware of the irony here, but safe as in certain to work) and painless fashion? If living is miserable, should someone be able to take away your ability to end it (or force you to try other, more painful, more risky avenues of DIY death)?
Also, the big question with advance suicide directives in degenerative illnesses is “when”? Yes, you could consent to it while in command of your faculties, but what if you want to only “pull the trigger” when you are far less so? Or, what if you want it when you are no longer you, only a husk, and it may actually require someone to bodily hold you down as you struggle and push the plunger (although, at that point, it would no longer be you, just an unreasoning animal inhabiting your body)?
Ophelia – you know, that’s a very good point, about how assisting in your suicide will affect the person doing the assisting, I really haven’t given it a lot of thought. I wouldn’t imagine that to be an easy job. And, this particular job, I wouldn’t want anyone forced to do (unlike the idiotic debate about filling birth control prescriptions, this does involve unambiguous killing). But we are talking about the other side of it right now – right now you would be tried for murder if you assist a suicide. Plus, there are degrees of assisting, sometimes all that’s needed is to provide the means, not perform an act…
Even if wanting to die is as valid as wanting to live, it’s radically different in one important way, which is that it’s final. Living of course is not. Living is inherently reversable and dying is the opposite. In that way it does make sense to be cautious. You don’t want people killing themselves just because they’re having a bad day.
And the thing about wanting to die because of, for instance, major depression, is that it’s potentially curable. The thinking (as Lost Control said) is disordered and it may be fixable. The three taken together seem to me to be good reasons to treat mental illness very differently.
(Another consideration is that depressed people don’t actually need assistance with suicide, so there’s not really much need to make new law for them.)
Anna, yeah – the grey areas won’t be easy to put in a sensible law, I guess that for some cases involving an ethical mediating committee might be a solution, but that’s just a non-lawyer’s speculation.
While I’m fully supporting the right to assisted suicide as such, there will have to be considerations based upon the type of disease or condition. A law won’t be simple to create.
Regarding your point about deprivation of rights: it sadly happens, but as you point out, there are valid cases where persons cannot be granted full legal rights of an adult. I’m reminded of my former neighbours’ son. He can get himself through the day mostly by himself, but he’s just not fit to enter legal contracts. Accident during pregnancy, he’s got a pump in his head as a result and is physically handicapped.
You’re correct that we’re talking about a legal context here, but I think it would still be in regards to mental illnesses and not an insanity defense, which is the only legal use of the term I’m aware of. As I mentioned, I’m not from the US so I might be missing something here.
I’m aware of that fact about the US, and it’s appalling. If an attempt fails, jail is not even wrong – psychiatric care is needed. Iirc, pregnant women might actually get charged for murder in some jurisdictions. Wasn’t there recently another case in the news?
I should have been clearer. I think that’s one of the reason for an advance directive: it should allow you to define the conditions which would trigger the assist when they’re met (e.g. certain stage of the terminal illness reached / level of cognitive response to stimulation). Depending on the disease and its symptoms, these conditions should be defined with the help of a physician. Let’s take falling into a coma as a result of an accident as an example: I’d imagine a condition could be to wait for let’s say one month; if consciousness isn’t regained by then, the assisted suicide should be performed. If the disease results in, say, dementia one could say failure to obviously recognize and react to family members three consecutive times would meet the conditions. I’m aware that this is still tricky, but I’d imagine this to be a way to handle it.
Yup, important point: I’m leaning towards having doctors volunteer for assisting, but that might cause problems with availability of willing doctors. A law would have to consider that, too. A system should at least allow for a mechanism that assisting doctors can travel to the patient, but I’d hope that enough doctors would volunteer, anyway.
Ha, one of the first reasons I decided not to have children. Genetic predisposition for depression just piles on. And it’s highly unlikely that I’d be a fit parent due to my recurrent depression, anyway.
Suicidal ideation: Nice, I learned a new English term. Frankly, I’d love to be less familiar with it, I started dealing with it at around age 11 or 12. So far, I managed to refrain from attempts, though.
Now, speaking from my own experience with major depression: It would be very tempting to have the option of assisted suicide, but that’s counterproductive if not utterly wrong. Actually, it’s just plain wrong.
I don’t want to die, I want a better – at least manageable – life. And judging from the talks with inmates ;-) in psychiatric care, I feel that was the general consensus among us depressives. At least after the failing circular thinking had been broken up. They’ve got awesome heavy-duty meds to achieve that. Sure, it might then take quite long to find the correct meds for you, some even have to undergo ECT. Still, it didn’t matter if you were self-admitted or taken in after a failed attempt; (slowly) regaining the ability to think straight again led to a wish for improving your condition. It’s a bumpy, lengthy process, but usually achievable.
So, I think depressives like myself should in no way have access to assisted suicide during circular thinking and other borked phases in an episode. Definitely not first-timers. But, given my jackpot prognosis of being most probably stuck with it for the rest of my life, I’m pretty confident that I could reasonably define conditions which should make me eligible for assisted suicide, if a legal option were available. I’d have to file such conditions during a remission, of course.
I don’t know if this has been mentioned on this site, but Emmerdale, a teatime soap in the UK, featured an assisted suicide last week – and the world didn’t end.
It was rather sensitively done and the story developed over six months so it wasn’t done for quick shock value.
Obviously not as moving as the Pratchett doc but I suspect it reached more people.