Down the Slippery Slope We Go

 No one likes references to Nazi Germany but if the jackboot fits ... :

Should psychiatrists and other doctors assist the suicides of mentally ill patients? Not that long ago, the answer to that question would have been an unequivocal no.

The job of a mental health professional is to save the lives of suicidal patients, not help them die.

But that was before assisted suicide became an up-and-coming cultural cause. Most people think that the “right to die” movement is restricted to people with terminal illnesses. While true in this country—so far—that’s just the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent. Once people accept the lethal premise that killing/suicide are proper responses to suffering, there’s no permanent way to logically limit “death with dignity” to those who are diagnosed as dying.

There is already abundant advocacy in professional journals and among euthanasia activists to allow lethal injection or prescribed suicide as a “treatment” for the suffering caused by mental illness. Welcome to the subversive mental health concept known as “rational suicide,” a concept now deemed wholly respectable and worthy of reasoned discussion and debate in learned medical journals.

Under the theory, mental health professionals only have an absolute duty to stop suicides that are impulsive or frivolously based. If the suicidal person is deemed by the mental health professional to have a rational basis for self-destruction—that is, if the patient “is able to reason, possess sufficient information, have a realistic worldview, and act [to end their own life) according to their own essential interests”—the professional’s duty shifts to nonjudgmentally help the patient engage in proper decision-making techniques about whether to commit suicide.

Indeed, some advocates believe that the proper response to a patient’s “rational” desire to die is for the mental health professional to facilitate the suicide as if death were a palliative medical treatment.

 

What an utterly sad and heart-breaking way to write these people off.