No no, I’ve got that headline wrong. It’s all about “dignity” when you tell a mentally-ill person, “Why yes, we would all be better off without you, thanks for asking.” Nothing confers more dignity on a suffering person than affirming for them that in fact you’d rather get rid of them, too.
But no one’s making anyone kill their neighbor with this kindness, are they? On the contrary: If you’re a doctor in Quebec, you’ll be expected to kill patients regardless of your personal (or medical) opinion on the matter. In the Netherlands, you can be sued for failing to carry out the suicide your patient has requested from you.
These are civilized, western, democratic countries, and physicians are being required by law to kill their depressed patients.
The case in the Netherlands is revealing: When the doctor changed her mind and withdrew her opinion that her young patient should be euthanized rather than treated for depression and physical pain, the patient killed herself. It is a case, here, not of an ethic of life and death, but of pleasantness. The parents are suing because they were thus forced to discover the hard reality of a child with a death wish in all its ugliness, rather than getting a nice, tidy, no-fuss-no-muss quiet passing at the death bed. In other words: They got exactly what they were requesting, but it wasn’t done in a way that let them ignore the truth about their daughter’s suicidal depression.
One has to wonder what it’s like to suffer from a debilitating illness when your parents are primarily concerned not with your life or well-being, but with the assurance that you’ll off yourself without ruining their garden.
Mental illness is difficult. The person who suffers from it feels alone, disoriented, useless, and worthless. It is difficult for the friends and family standing by, because the mentally ill don’t make life easy. At best, it’s emotionally draining. Often the sufferer lives from disaster to disaster, with no neat fix that makes everything all better by the end of the after-school special.
None of this changes the inherent dignity and worth of the person so afflicted. None of this turns the patient into a disposable human, unworthy of life. Our mission towards our unavoidably suffering neighbor isn’t to eliminate the neighbor, but to share in his suffering.
Physicians who don’t give up on their patients, who continue to look for ways to alleviate their patients’ suffering even when things seem most bleak, these are not criminals, they are heroes.
Way back before all this came to full fruit, Douglas Adams had a gag in the US edition of Life, the Universe, and Everything about the use of the word “Belgium.”:
The book is the only one in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series to have been censored in its US edition.[4] The word “asshole” is replaced with the word “kneebiter”, and the word “shit” is replaced with “swut”. Possibly the most famous example of censorship is in Chapter 22, in which the UK edition mentions that the “Rory” is an award for “The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word ‘Fuck‘ in a Serious Screenplay.” In the US edition, this was changed to “Belgium” and the text from the original radio series described “Belgium” as the most offensive word used in the galaxy.
The censored version was, as a result, quite a bit funnier than the original. Now that Belgium is a world leader in the art of killing its own citizens, one finds the novel disturbingly prophetic.
Artwork: Edouard Manet, The Suicide, [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.
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