Euthanizing the mentally ill

Euthanizing the mentally ill November 15, 2016

Assisted Suicide laws usually have a provision specifying that a person must be “mentally competent” in order to make the decision to die.  But California’s new euthanasia law allows for the assisted suicide of patients who are so mentally ill that they have been institutionalized.

From Wesley J. Smith,  A Right to Assisted Suicide for the Institutionalized Mentally Ill | Wesley J. Smith | First Things:

Assisted suicide proponents always promise that facilitated death will be offered solely and strictly to the mentally competent. But once a society accepts the premise of euthanasia—that it is acceptable to eliminate suffering by eliminating the sufferer—there is no way to restrict the putative “right to die” to the mentally healthy.

Mental illness often causes greater anguish than any physical disease and, indeed, for a far longer time. Thus, no one should be surprised that euthanasia of the mentally ill is a growing phenomenon in the Netherlands, where the practice has even been boosted by psychiatric journals, and in Belgium. In the latter country, doctors now condone the medicalized killing of mentally ill people with consensual organ harvesting!

Whenever I warn that the same progression will eventually happen here if assisted suicide becomes normalized, supporters of doctor-facilitated death sniff that America is different. But that assurance has already proved empty. California’s End of Life Option Act, which went into effect earlier this year, legalized assisted suicide for the terminally ill who have the “capacity to make medical decisions.” (Please note that having this capacity is not the same as being mentally “competent.” That implied conflation is a ruse often deployed in assisted-suicide legalization schemes.) If the death-prescribing doctor suspects a mental illness, he or she “shall refer the individual for a mental health specialist assessment.” Thereafter, a lethal prescription should be written only “if the patient is not suffering from impaired judgment due to a mental disorder.”

Those provisions would seem to preclude access to assisted suicide for patients who are involuntarily hospitalized in state psychiatric institutions. After all, these are people with severe psychosis or emotional disturbance. But apparently state bureaucrats don’t see it that way. Soon after the California law went into effect, a regulation was quietly promulgated guaranteeing institutionalized mentally ill patients access to assisted suicide if they have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Not only that, but the rule permits such people to receive a court-ordered release from institutionalization—not because their underlying condition has been successfully treated, but for the specific purpose of killing themselves with drugs prescribed by a doctor.

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