Re:How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)
by Chris2048 on Thursday September 09, 2021 @07:32AM
(#28468536)
> making sure the choice is free and informed - not being "encouraged" by other family members
How would you do this?
One way or the other, I think you would end up attempting to create a metric for QoL. Some people, for example, might want death after losing their limbs, or their sight - a difficult life, but not a painful one, some people are born without these facilities and manage to live fruitful lives. If you allow death for those cases, why not evaluate regular suicides the same way?
Re:How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)
by scotty79 on Thursday September 09, 2021 @07:30AM
(#28468521)
I think once we figure out depression, assisted suicide will become uncontroversial. If you understand what dying means (end of everything you have and will ever have) and don't have depression, but you want to die then we should let you make that decission. You must have good reasons.
It's not the same line as "Life is wretched and miserable (because of depression, bankruptcy, relationship breakdown...) and therefore I'd like to check out." Those are all at least potentially fixable with reasonable odds of success.
Something like locked-in syndrome after a bad stroke, or late-stage Alzheimer's - potentially a vegetative state that can last a decade - isn't.
The real problem is making sure the choice is free and informed - not being "encouraged" by other family members for personal gain, revenge, or some other unacceptable motivation. Possibly after a person is no longer considered legally competent, but may still be signalling a current desire to avoid death even though they left a living will stating they would welcome it.
It does indeed get messy very, very quickly.
Open legalisation complicates all of that and turns it into a much harder problem than it is already. The courts would spend a lot of time dealing with those cases.