What you say rings true for euthanasia in response to certain terminal medical conditions. Everyone including the patient and the doctor knows that only a miracle will result in a cure, and there is little chance for any reasonable quality of life in the short time left. As you say, cost can be brought into the picture, too, though I don't like the idea of putting a price on life.Greta wrote: ↑October 22nd, 2019, 5:52 am People want to die gently, if possible.
Families don't want to blow all of their savings on keeping relatives alive in pain against their will.
Yet people keep on dying horribly without need and family finances continue to be strained by what is effectively the cost of torture. The art of ancient torturers was the ability to keep their victims alive and conscious. Today, treatment provided in kindness becomes an unwitting instrument of torture.
Many hope that legal systems around the world adjust to this reality.
But, this topic is about euthanasia as a response to psychiatric problems. These too can be painful. Yet, there is unlikely to be broad agreement that there is no hope of recovery for the patient. And, a symptom of mental problems is the desire to commit suicide. There is a great risk of blurring the line between suicide and euthanasia, if we can even justify euthanasia in any case of mental problems. The very desire for death is perhaps a sign that the patient is not fully competent to make such a decision. This process would seem to rubber stamp suicide in the mind of the patient. Having tried cure, A, B, C and D, they would become a 'candidate' for euthanasia.
I believe few mental health issues can not be resolved with the right therapy to help the patient change their opinions of the world and the resulting perceptions that they are suffering or that there is no hope. People can tolerate just about anything if they have the right opinion about it, if it has meaning for them. Finding meaning is often difficult, and perhaps a unique approach is needed for every patient. But, should we really be ready to say there is no hope for someone, because we have yet to find it?
In the case of someone with terminal, inoperable cancer, we may say there is effectively no hope. Can we say the same about someone who is severely depressed? Aren't there many cases of people with similar symptoms who did recover, and are happy to be alive? Certainly this is true of many people who tried to commit suicide.
https://www.health.com/condition/depres ... -survivorsBauman was overwhelmed with stress. During his suicide attempt, he remembers feeling at peace for the first time in a year. “I didn’t have to worry about the stress of what I was going through, the stress of what was going on at work, the stress of my family trying to figure out what was going on with me that I couldn’t tell them.”
“My experience wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to die, I just didn’t want to continue living with the amount of pain I was living with, especially because it was pain nobody could see,” Gay says. “You start feeling … like there’s no other options.”
“I didn’t want to die, I actually wanted to live, but not with the same pain I was going through,” Cortez Yanez says. “That made suicide an option for me.”