23 year old has assisted suicide in Switzerland

[Evenstar]

Here news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hereford/worcs/7676812.stm

This is terribly sad, I wonder how much help and support this family were given in the wake of their son's accident.

I don't think you can generalise about disabilities. There is no one thing called a "disability". My neice has DS and is profoundly disabled. She is also very happy. Her life is incredibly limited, but she is in no pain and quite clearly enjoys life. It would be inhumane to suggest that her life should be terminated because of her disability. She does not however lead a life that could in any way be described as normal, and never will. My mother runs a sailing club for the disabled and they have all sorts of fabulous kit to enable some very disabled people to enjoy sailing, some single handed. Many of the people she works with have very fulfilled lives and are clearly happy, but again I don't think their lives can be described as normal, with many aids they can reach different levels of independance, but they certainly aren't run of the mill people or lives (both in good and bad ways). My cousin is a similar age to this young man and has one of the nastiest degenerative diseases that will ultimately (possible not that far in the future) kill him. He appears to have a good life, and pursues his interests as he can. Life is sometimes incredibly frustrating for him, and looking at his twin sister must be incredibly tough. As far as I am aware he is not in pain, and as far as I am aware he has not had suicidal thoughts (although I am not sure it would be my perogative to know if he had). My mother has become very disabled because she has chronic arthritis. There are many many things that she loved doing that she can no longer do, and it causes her much emotional pain and sadness. She is also in constant pain (sometimes so extreme that she is literally screaming in pain). Her life would clearly be much much better if she did not have arthritis, she has maximised all sorts of other things in her life, and is incredibly determined to live through the pain, but there are times when she is very down indeed. Her life is certainly not what she had in mind. There is some hope for her that maybe things will get better, but it is a failing hope to be honest. She is religious and cound not contemplate suicide, but does have a living will, which as her children we would of course honour.

I really don't think a bereavement is the same as a catastrophic disability, although the person affected and their friends and family will grieve for the previous life lost. You can have other partners, and many people do, you can have other children, and again people do. That doesn't mean that you won't carry a fundamental sadness with you for the rest of your life, but the possibliity of being loved and of loving are there. You can't have another body, and if you have come to the understanding that recovery is highly unlikely, and that pain will be constant, then I can see that someone might decide they would rather have no body at all than the one they are locked in. I would of course hope that he and his family had had every support (who knows) but even with the best of support people can decide to kill themselves.

wow you use the word "normal" a lot....define it

I think they needed to pay for him to have therapy

I really cannot get my head round it

I am usually quite liberal but I really think this family needed some kind of emotional help and it was obviously lacking

I am also quite disturbed that switzerland perform euthanasia on young men who have recently been paralysed

I only read the OP btw

I'm not really trying to compare disabilities or life shocks in terms of 'difficulty to deal with'; there is no doubt that this man suffered a catastrophic accident. Of course his life will never be normal again and so soon after an accident of course he will feel like he has lost everything. You start from that point and rebuild. But over a period of time.

My point is simply that you don't get over any life shock- whether it's just difficult or massively life changing- in one year.

Filz has said it all really, that soon after an accident the outside help you need is therapy not assistance in killing yourself.

I don't judge him or his family. I think they were let down.

I was using normal as in common usage, ie average, unexeptional, ordinary, unremarkable.

and yes I think it is incredibly sad, and of course the possibility of this young man coming to terms with the disability has been lost. I don't think counseling is as available as it should be to people with small traumas, let alone life changing and fundamental ones, although I would suspect as this chap spent 8mths in Stoke Mandeville he had more support than many.

Yes it's an opinion - and some opinions are idiotic. You are welcome to them. I'm not stopping anyone.

nooka good thanks for defining i. so that makes dd normal then, as in our world she is all those things.

MT just because you can't understand someones veiw. There is no need to be rude.

There is plenty of rudeness on this thread. I'd say what I said was factual, nothing more. And I didn't say it to anyone in particular.

jj, I think you make very good points from a position of knowledge, and again I am interested in whether you object to the concept of assisted suicide under any circumstances, or in only this sort of case due to the issues you have outlined. If there were a some sort of regulation of how long after a trauma such as this you had to wait, if there were extensive family counselling, I dont know - contact with support groups etc, if at the end of all that some one still wanted to die, what would you say?

I do understand that some disabilities are considered normalised within a particular community, of which the deaf community would be the most obvious, I guess. But this chap probably had no experience of disabilities prior to his accident, as he was so caught up in the sports world. Perhaps if he had wider exposure to different life experiences he would have made a different decision, but I think it is fairly reasonable to say that he considered his disabled state as anything but normal. I don't now how many tetraplegics there are, but I see wikipaedia estimates about 1000 spinal cord injuries per year, so it is at least unusual.

when you used the word normal you wern't talking about him, but a child with ds.

I said her life wasn't normal. It isn't. She is non verbal, highly dependent and will never lead an independent life. Most children her age live very very different lives. That's not to say her life isn't worthwhile. But it certainly isn't the norm.

I think that of course, speaking as a parent of a young child with perhaps limited understanding, you will think it appalling to let them die. But this was not a young child. He was a fully grown man, who was in a dreadful position, and in constant pain, who found his own life intolerable, had fully demonstrated that by making several suicide attempts, regretted their failure and was making very serious plans to end it by starving himself to death. Of course lots of people will see it as a life worth living, if he wanted to live, of course it would be worth living. But the point his, he didn't think it worth living as he was. Suppose 2,5,10,20 years from now he was still in pain, still totally helpless, force fed and still wanting to die...what then?

nooka......not normal to who?
sorry but I don't get it.

Agree with mabanana. If I become any more disabled, I will want to die. That is because to ME my life would not be worth living. This is not an attack on the disabled or a view that all disabled people should die. It is my choice.

for his family to go through this, to support a very difficult decision, to have to travel to a foreign country and then face police investigation is disgusting.

If you worry about the 'message' this gives to society about disability, what possible good is being done by refusing to make it as easy as possible for adults to make informed decisions about their own lives and deaths?

I also agree with mabanana, and i think the whole thing is desperately sad for all concerned

I too think it is sad, and wish that he had wanted to live. Poor sod.

I think I'm not expressing myself very well (i've a dreadful cold, which is probably making my thinking not terribly straight).

Wannabe, I already answered the bereavement question:
"So you would all support this decision for someone recently bereaved"

Yes, I would support their right to make their own choice. the same way I would support someone's choice to have an abortion.

You say of the parents "they were most likely not in a good place to make this decision rationally". You are missing the point entirely. They did not make the decision. Daniel made it for himself. We really have no idea what he was going through, we have no idea what counselling he had, we have no idea about anything other than he found his life so intolerable he had tried 3 times to end it.

"...someone with a severe disability which limits their independence should be entitled to assisted suicide under any circumstances?"
If that is the choice they have made then yes.

I find it ironic that had he not been able to pursue assisted suicide, this man would in a way have been penalised because of his disability. As I have said before, had he had the use of one hand he could have done it himself and this story would not have been news. It would have remained a story in the local press and people would just have thought how terribly sad it was. He is being viewed differently because the severity of his disability meant he could not commit suicide in any dignified manner.

I am not saying I agree with what he did or with how his parents accompanied him. No one has been hurt bar his family who would have been hurt more had they had to watch him starve himself to death. I defend his right to make this decision for himself and for others to do the same.

I would not defend the right of someone to make that decision on behalf of someone else (the disabled child scenario you are putting forward) as the person would not be making the choice of their own free will and in full knowledge of what they were doing. Living Wills are a grey area which could potentially be misused as you could argue the person could have changed their mind.

WRT the bereavement scenario, plenty of people commit suicide over just this kind of thing. If a disabled person wishes to kill themselves for the same reason and needs help to do it, are you saying they should be denied the right that an able bodied person has?

I'm interested where the anti assisted suicide posters stand on abortion. That is ending a life full of great potential before it has had a chance and without the consent of the life being ended. I think it is very similar to the concept of assisted suicide. I would still defend a person's right to choose there too, regardless of my personal feelings.

I have no real opinion on abortion pre 12 weeks. late abortions are a different matter.
but I can't see what that has to do with this thread.

I imagine most anti-assisted suicide posters are also anti-abortion, which is absolutely a consistent position, but I think irrelevant. This is about an adult choosing to die, not about someone deciding to end a potential life.
I am not pro-suicide in any blanket way, and I think perhaps it might have been better if the clinic had maybe said they had a policy of not offering assisted suicide for even the severest disabilities for two years, then perhaps this man would have been able to cope given that there was still the possibility of being helped to die if life was so impossible for him, but he would be encouraged to stay alive at least until the two years were up.

I am pro choice, hardly bat an eyelid at termination for lifestyle reasons but I am very uncomfortable when people terminate for a disability that is compatible with life. That is my opinion though and people don't break UK law having a termination for disability.

The difference between someone ending their own life and someone having their life ended for them is I think better described in the article I linked to earlier. Another case where I think the assisted suicide wasn't necessarily wrong, but was carried out too early. And that opinion seemed to come from her rather shell shocked family who were left to pick up the pieces. Her choice, but I felt the people carrying it out were a little reckless.

If someone else committing the actual act there have to be more safeguards (for the person doing it for starters, and the families - they have to be able to live with that for the rest of their lives so the decision has to be robust even upon reflection) than if someone is able to carry out that choice by themselves. In that case it's a personal decision and more to the point there is no shared responsibility. If you're involved in helping someone end their life you have some responsibility over their death, which is huge and I would imagine difficult to deal with. That has to be robust to scrutiny for those left behind.

If this man had wanted to commit suicide 10 years after his accident I would be sad for him but feel to be honest he had made an informed choice. 10 years is enough time to experience a totally different situation and know how you feel about it for a reasonable length of time. Cathpot - I'm not one to prescribe a time limit as to how long it takes to come to terms with disability. I am utterly convinced however that one year is too short for everyone. One year post welcoming a severe disability into your life or your child's life you're still on a roller coaster. I can tell you you don;t know what you think, or even who this new person is. And if someone external is going to sanction that they should imo be utterly convinced that the person, given another year or so wouldn't change their mind. I don't think you can say that after one year; from my own experience, from friend's experiences (I have far more experience of disability - severe ones of all types- than I would have imagined 7 years ago) and from reading about the experience of someone in a similar situation to this man. Some might take 20 years and it would perhaps be daft to say 'therefore we must wait 20 years for all', but there is a balance. One year isn't it.

I am particularly uncomfortable with the able bodied being so involved with the termination of a disabled life. Because in my experience when a severely disabled chid dies, those with no experience of disability will tend to say something as crass as 'oh it was for the best' or 'it must be a relief' which is do. There is an assumption that a severely disabled life is never as good as an able bodied one. I keep saying this but given time to adjust that is not a guarantee. 10 years ago I was pregnant with ds1. ( years ago he was born and my life was wonderful 7 years ago it became clear that he was disabled and severely so. 1 year ago I realised that actually that didn't matter. He had just as many opportunities to experience life as his brothers. In totally different ways. He will never have the choices they have and he will never be at all independent. But his life experience will none the less be as valid and rich as theirs.

Like I said you don't get to that point in one year. Not possible.

The way I think it interesting/relevant is that abortion is about ending someone else's life without their consent (and it is a life, not just a potential one. Although people are arguing about Daniel's "potential" life may have been OK so maybe it's not so different after all). I'm not going to argue the rights and wrongs of abortion though, that's not my point. I would find it odd that someone could feel it OK to end a life before it had chance yet deny someone to make the choice to end their own before they'd had a chance (in this case to come to terms with major disability).

I just find it an interesting idea. It also shows how differently we all view life.

Anyway... Should they also make terminal patients wait 2 years in case they change their minds about ending their life early? In case some miracle came along? I mean some wonder drug/treatment might come along and save them. Of course not. However, there are cases where the patient has far outlived the original prognosis and lived life to the full in that time. Had they chosen assisted suicide at the diagnosis, they and their families would have missed out on that precious time. Is that so very different to the choices in this case?