Euthasia in cases of severe mental health

[Devon01]

Woman who survived Brussels airport bombing is 'euthanised' in Belgium mol.im/a/11291995 via dailym.ai/android

Yes or no?

psychiatry is an abysmal profession.

i had terrible issues due to childhood trauma and - as a professional in another field - was very trusting of psychiatry. It was a disaster. I got lots of different diagnoses - all incorrect - any cycled on a number of different drugS which has a terrible impact one me. There was a time I could well have sought this option. And now I am much better 🤷‍♀️

it’s not like other medical fields where an agreed prognosis can be definitively diagnosed

so for me a key issue is there is no real way to safeguard

It's a dreadful idea. People's mental health could improve at any time. I have bipolar so I've had some rough times or even times I thought my anxiety would be for life. But I love my life now and can do great for years at a time.

How do you differentiate between euthanasia and suicide? They both result in death. How do you legislate?

What would all of you who are against euthanasia have said if she would have jumped off a building? Because that's a legal form of suicide in the UK. Or do you feel that all types of suicide should be illegal? If not, what's the difference?

This is one of the saddest things I have ever read, and so so wrong in my opinion. I suffer with depression and have felt suicidal in the past, and would have chosen this route if available to me because when you’re depressed you are not in your right mind, so how psychiatrists deemed this poor girl capable of making such a decision I just can’t fathom.

@Notimetothink ?? The difference is that euthanasia is someone else helping??

in @monkeyupsidedown example the difference is that someone pushes the person off the building

the issue is not distinguishing between the two

You sent me down a three hour rabbit hole. I've been looking at (trying to) how many young women in their 20s and 30s choose euthanasia / assisted suicide in Belgium and the Netherlands over other demographic groups, and why; but the statistics are hard to access.

Well quite. Everyone does have the right to end their own life, for any reason. That's been UK law for a long time now. The question is whether anyone has the right to end it for them at their request! There's a great deal of trouble around the abuse of power, influence, expediency and the slippery slope arguments mentioned upthread. But you know, for me there's actually a difference (and to some people this might seem like splitting hairs, but to me it does not) between supplying the means and administering it. I saw a documentary on Dignitas once where after confirming consent, understanding, etc, a final time, the nurse supplied an elderly gentleman with the solution which he drank himself. To me, that's not quite euthanasia. Euthanasia would be injecting the solution. If I were a nurse or doctor, I could do the first if it were called upon me to do it, but I would have difficulty with the second.

I also think this is desperately sad. I don’t think we can view the desire to die due to a physical terminal illness with a desire to die due to a mental illness in quite the same way. Similar to others, I have survived a period of my life where I was suffering from severe PTSD and suicide attempts. These were not cry for help suicide attempts, these were you should really be dead suicide attempts. I meant it. I wanted it. I still suffer from PTSD daily, but therapy has given me coping tools to help although to be fair I have limited my life through avoidance of triggers as well.

But, having survived this and looking back, I know I was not myself then. I wasn’t capable of consent (hence being sectioned). It was like a compulsion that along with hallucinations drove me to suicidal behaviour. During therapy and in hospital, I met other survivors of suicide attempts and not one of us lamented about being rescued or found in time or stopped. Not one. We weren’t grateful for a second chance at life, nothing so pedestrian or easy. Most of us felt numb and like we had died and were ghosts just drifting along until “it” our illness would win and eventually kill us. We were shell shocked and afraid to hope that the medical professionals could stop it. It was a bleak period of my life and I still think Dante says it best:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;

But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.

Of course, we were also what was called “complex cases” parlance for not easy to treat or help. And I do remember one psychiatrist actually saying if I were serious about dying, why wasn’t I dead yet? It was a shocking thing to say and he’s just the sort of doctor that would have, I think, signed off on euthanising me because it’s easier that way for him. Doesn’t need to think how to help a “complex case” who isn’t responding to a one size fits all course of chin up CBT, so just give her her “wish” and euthanise her. I would have said do it too. Do it. End it. I can’t bear this anymore. But it wasn’t the real me cowering inside. It was the mental illness making me think and say and do things.

It’s the kind of thing that looks good on paper, but in practice I can only think of the abuse it would be open too.