Europe’s sinister expansion of euthanasia

[Valin]

Washington Post:

Charles Lane Opinion

August 19 2015

 

If you were a psychiatrist and a chronically depressed patient told you he wanted to die, what would you do? In Belgium, you might prescribe this vulnerable, desperate person a fatal dose of sodium thiopental.

 

Between October 2007 and December 2011, 100 people went to a clinic in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking region with depression, or schizophrenia, or, in several cases, Asperger’s syndrome, seeking euthanasia. The doctors, satisfied that 48 of the patients were in earnest, and that their conditions were “untreatable” and “unbearable,” offered them lethal injection; 35 went through with it.

 

These facts come not from a police report but an article by one of the clinic’s psychiatrists, Lieve Thienpont, in the British journal BMJ Open. All was perfectly legal under Belgium’s 2002 euthanasia statute, which applies not only to terminal physical illness, still the vast majority of cases, but also to an apparently growing minority of psychological ones. Official figures show nine cases of euthanasia due to “neuropsychiatric” disorders in the two-year period 2004-2005; in 2012-2013, the number had risen to 120, or 4 percent of the total.

 

Next door in the Netherlands, which decriminalized euthanasia in 2002, right-to-die activists opened a clinic in March 2012 to “help” people turned down for lethal injections by their regular physicians. In the next 12 months, the clinic approved euthanasia for six psychiatric patients, plus 11 people whose only recorded complaint was being “tired of living,” according to a report in the Aug. 10 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.

 

If you find this sinister, I agree. Bioethicists Barron H. Lerner and Arthur L. Caplan, who reviewed the data from the Low Countries in JAMA Internal Medicine, observe that the reports “seem to validate concerns about where these practices might lead.” That’s putting it mildly. Thienpont acknowledges that “the concept of ‘unbearable suffering’ has not yet been defined adequately” and that “there are no guidelines for the management of euthanasia requests on grounds of mental suffering in Belgium.”

 

(Snip)

 

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Christopher Kidwell

8/19/2015 7:56 PM CST

Why is it 'sinister'? The reality in the world today is that EVERYONE has the right to decide when their life has become too f'ed up and end it if they wish to.

 

 

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Well if you can kill someone before they are born, what's to stop the killing of someone at any other point of life?

 

You know you've had a very long life, and now your medical bills are starting to pile up, so we on the board think you should take this pill. Of course its all up to you, but we're going to stop your medical treatment.