Psychiatry and Assisted Suicide
“The Dutch have discovered a cure for autism: murder. Dutch law first was changed to accommodate ‘physician-assisted suicide’?i.e., medical euthanasia?for patients with severe conditions some years ago, and, as it turns out, some slopes are slippery: The Dutch soon decided that those suffering from psychiatric problems could be put down like unwanted pets, too, and now are eliminating those who have no diagnosed medical condition whatsoever save autism. Dutch law requires that patients seeking to be put to death do so after sober and careful consideration?a condition that people suffering serious mental problems cannot reasonably be said to have met. Now unhappy people from abroad are traveling to the Netherlands to be killed. Canada is on the same decline, its supreme court having ‘discovered’ a new right, as our own so often does, this time to physician-inflicted death. When a mentally ill person says that he wants to die, the proper response is treatment, not “Does your insurance cover hemlock?”
Not that we have any particular wish to debate the pros and cons of assisted suicide?we wish only to highlight the psychiatric involvement here. Assisted suicide of psychiatric patients is increasing in the Netherlands. The data indicates that euthanasia is often granted despite disagreement by the treating psychiatrists over whether cases meet the legal criteria for assisted suicide.
The Washington Post chimes in: “Once the Netherlands authorized euthanasia for physical illnesses in 2002, demands to extend this ‘right’ to the suffering mentally ill were inevitable … Canadians are debating how to implement last year’s ruling by their Supreme Court establishing a right to ‘physician-assisted dying’ in cases of a ‘grievous and irremediable medical condition.’ A panel of experts advising Ontario and 10 other provinces and territories has urged that the ruling be construed to include mental illness.”
For decades after World War II, leading psychiatrists in Germany and around the world consistently denied or greatly minimized their profession’s main role in Nazi Germany’s euthanasia atrocities. The Nazis murdered well over 5,000 physically and mentally disabled children in over 30 psychiatric and pediatric hospitals. Doctors in German psychiatric facilities seeking to free up beds and save money killed patients—possibly as many as 10,000—by administering overdoses or providing them with so little food that they starved to death.
German psychiatrists created the ‘racial hygiene’ movement, which began with the work of eugenicist Alfred Ploetz in 1895. Almost forty years later this gained supremacy with the passage of the 1933 Sterilization Act in Nazi Germany and the concept of ‘lives unworthy of living’. This led to psychiatrists in Germany murdering hundreds of thousands of people that were ‘racially or mentally unfit’, long before the Holocaust began, and these same psychiatrists were then placed in killing centers during the Holocaust. Millions of people were killed during the Holocaust in Germany led by psychiatrists, which admission was finally made in an international broadcast apology by the President of the Germany Psychiatric Association in November 2010.
The Netherlands and Canada seem now to be following in those footsteps, urged on by the same psychiatric community of greed and misanthropy. Only now instead of calling it euthanasia they are calling it “assisted suicide,” or “death with dignity”, as if that removes the guilt.
Physician-assisted suicide in the United States is legal in the states of California, Oregon, Vermont, Montana, and Washington; a number of other states have considered it. There are alternatives to psychiatric treatment; however, these need to be applied before psychiatry-assisted suicide.
The treatment was successful; unfortunately, the patient died. Contact your state legislators and tell them what you think about this.