Euthanasia in Canada, Supreme Court Ruled this Morning

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Lastpointe said:
Many people agree with you. Though i expect it will be one of the few times you agree with Conrad Black

It will be a complicated law to draft i expect. With all e provinces weighing in and quebec already doing its own thing.

I am looking for nuance, protection, compassion, in whatever law arrives

Interestingly, it could go the way of abortion. When the abortion law was struck down, a new one was never enacted. No one really wanted to touch it. The docs already had strict guidelines and so here we sit. No law, just medical ethics

I wonder if the same could happen here?

All the parties have aspects of relilgious people, disability rights people, elderly voters. No one may want to open this
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Conrad Black? Lol. I don't remember agreeing with him before. Could be a first.

Stockwell Day is not someone I've agreed with before either, but I do on this issue. Perhaps stranger things have happened.

Don't mistake the reasons, though and then lump people with disabilities in with 'social conservatism' because they/ we want to protect our human rights as outlined, and ratified by this country, in international law.
 
Northwind said:
Fair enough. A person with early stage Alzheimers who wanted to choose suicide would presumably still have the physical and mental capacity to just commit suicide. Once they are further along in the illness, I highly doubt anyone would consider them mentally competent to make such a decision. My grandmother had advanced dementia when she died. She had very few moments of lucidity. Perhaps someone in her condition could be seen as briefly mentally competent.....I'm stretching my imagination here. Having said that, someone in my grandmother's condition would have been physically able to kill themselves without assistance. This is about assisted suicide, not euthanasia.
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Well there's a fine line between a doctor doing it or handing over the poison, and supervising a person while they do it.
 
Lastpointe said:
Interestingly, it could go the way of abortion. When the abortion law was struck down, a new one was never enacted. No one really wanted to touch it. The docs already had strict guidelines and so here we sit. No law, just medical ethics
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A person in Canada can get an abortion any time during their pregnancy as a result of this I believe. I imagine you know more about this lastpointe than I do. People can be alarmist about this, yet in reality I doubt late stage abortions are performed often, if at all. Medical ethics do have an important part to play.

It is interesting that this thread is named "Euthanasia in Canada". The court addressed assisted suicide, not euthanasia. Two different things.
 
Kimmio said:
Well there's a fine line between a doctor doing it or handing over the poison, and supervising a person while they do it.
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Why would a doctor supervise a suicide if the person is fully capable of carrying it out?

I work in health care, and have had suicide prevention training. If someone came to me saying they wanted to end their life, and wanted me to help them find someone who could help them do this, I would have a conversation with them first. I would just say "oh, okay, here is Dr So-and-so who can help you". I imagine most health professionals would act in a similar manner. We have to operate under a code of ethics. A person who is in a position to NEED assistance to end their life likely has a working relationship with a physician and would have had some discussion about this.
 
It is actually a lot more difficult to commit suicide than people think. Overdosing is actually really complicated - way less than 10 percent of people who try are actually "successful" in dying (I think it is actually less than 5 - it's been a while since I did the research). I guess if someone is on morphine, one could fill them up with enough to kill them. My understanding is that even with benzos it's hard to take enough to just drift off to sleep permanently.

Hanging is also more difficult than many think and easy to screw up - people are left brain dead or damaged from attempts. And it is messy for the people who find "you". Guns slip and you can become disfigured or hurt. Drowning is a bit difficult because your body fights so hard to keep you alive even if you really want to die. Jumping off structures is messy and harms others (I witnessed someone who died this way and it was horrible and I still have nightmares to this day).

My understanding is that the idea that doctors or nurses slip medication to people to help them pass is actually a big myth too.
 
Northwind said:
Why would a doctor supervise a suicide if the person is fully capable of carrying it out?

I work in health care, and have had suicide prevention training. If someone came to me saying they wanted to end their life, and wanted me to help them find someone who could help them do this, I would have a conversation with them first. I would just say "oh, okay, here is Dr So-and-so who can help you". I imagine most health professionals would act in a similar manner. We have to operate under a code of ethics. A person who is in a position to NEED assistance to end their life likely has a working relationship with a physician and would have had some discussion about this.
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What is of concern is that they don't rush this through and end up mimicking the other countries with similar laws - I posted somewhere around pg. 20, a PBS segment about a Belgian woman with chronic depression, otherwise healthy, who successfully went through with assisted suicide (actually the doctor injected her with her consent) and all she had to do was get a form signed by two doctors - GPs, agreeing with her request. That's appalling to me.
 
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Justme said:
It is actually a lot more difficult to commit suicide than people think. Overdosing is actually really complicated - way less than 10 percent of people who try are actually "successful" in dying (I think it is actually less than 5 - it's been a while since I did the research). I guess if someone is on morphine, one could fill them up with enough to kill them. My understanding is that even with benzos it's hard to take enough to just drift off to sleep permanently.

Hanging is also more difficult than many think and easy to screw up - people are left brain dead or damaged from attempts. And it is messy for the people who find "you". Guns slip and you can become disfigured or hurt. Drowning is a bit difficult because your body fights so hard to keep you alive even if you really want to die. Jumping off structures is messy and harms others (I witnessed someone who died this way and it was horrible and I still have nightmares to this day).

My understanding is that the idea that doctors or nurses slip medication to people to help them pass is actually a big myth too.
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That is just depressing. I am sorry your experiences have been so awful. I still hope that after a year from now that suicides will be something our society cares to prevent in all but a very few situations.
 
Kimmio said:
What is of concern is that they don't rush this through and end up mimicking the other countries with similar laws - I posted somewhere around pg. 20, a PBS segment about a woman with chronic depression, otherwise healthy, who successfully went through with assisted suicide (actually the doctor injected her with her consent) and all she had to do was get a form signed by two doctors - GPs, agreeing with her request. That's appalling to me.
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I disagree - she has a right to say that her suffering is intolerable if she has exhausted virtually all other avenues. She doesn't want to live. Mental suffering is no less painful than physical suffering and as I have said before - it really bugs me that mental illness suffering is considered to be ok because it can be "corrected". Sometimes it can't be. I agree that she should be offered other options but if she has tried those I don't think her suffering is any different and I don't think this is a "competence" matter.
 
Kimmio said:
That is just depressing. I am sorry your experiences have been so awful. I still hope that after a year from now that suicides will be something our society cares to prevent in all but a very few situations.
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I don't know about "society". I do know that many if not most health professionals do want to prevent suicide whenever possible. I imagine most doctors and nurses want to ease the suffering of their patients. That is why we need to improve services such as mental health treatment, palliative care and supports for independent living.
 
Justme said:
I disagree - she has a right to say that her suffering is intolerable if she has exhausted virtually all other avenues. She doesn't want to live. Mental suffering is no less painful than physical suffering and as I have said before - it really bugs me that mental illness suffering is considered to be ok because it can be "corrected". Sometimes it can't be. I agree that she should be offered other options but if she has tried those I don't think her suffering is any different and I don't think this is a "competence" matter.
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I don't believe that it can't be or that in a few years from now if the medical establishment were open to looking at more non-conventional treatments and social contributing factors that it couldn't be. It's true that they may not have the perfect drugs for all cases - but that should not be the determining factor. A doctor does not hold the right to say it can't be done, IMO and should never leave a patient with that outlook. Mental illness is not a purely biological problem. That bugs me.
 
Kimmio said:
I don't believe that it can't be or that in a few years from now if the medical establishment were open to looking at more non-conventional treatments and social contributing factors that it couldn't be. It's true that they may not have the perfect drugs for all cases - but that should not be the determining factor. A doctor does not hold the right to say it can't be done, IMO.
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There are health professionals looking at less conventional forms of treatment. That is why we have the treatments we do have. People coloured outside the lines and found other ways to help people.
 
Sadly, disagree or not, some people with depression are never able to find relief, just as some addicts die on the Downtown East Side. It is a very small number. It is a reality. It also sucks.
 
Northwind said:
Sadly, disagree or not, some people with depression are never able to find relief, just as some addicts die on the Downtown East Side. It is a very small number. It is a reality.
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Well, that is not to say they never could. If they were ro legalize MDMA for psychiatric use (they did up until the 80s sometime then it was classified - but there have been recent trials again) in difficult to treat cases there would be no depressed people! The danger there would be that they might be too trusting because everything and everybody is rosey. But they wouldn't be depressed.
 
Wow.......just like using LSD for schizophrenia? I need to learn more about that.

You said that it is the professionals' job to give people hope. Do you think they don't do that? People with mental illness are not being supervised 24 hours a day, and can make their own decisions about how to live their lives. Sadly, there is no magic wand.

The fact is no matter how much treatment and help people get, some don't get better. It truly sucks.

We do need more and better mental health resources.

For the record, is usually the individual with the condition who decides they have no more hope left.
 
Northwind said:
There are health professionals looking at less conventional forms of treatment. That is why we have the treatments we do have. People coloured outside the lines and found other ways to help people.
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i know; lots of different ways

like findings that magic mushrooms may help help with severe depression

Stanislav Grof & his Transpersonal Psychology

Even Buddhism *looks toward Arminius*

Northwind said:
Sadly, disagree or not, some people with depression are never able to find relief, just as some addicts die on the Downtown East Side. It is a very small number. It is a reality. It also sucks.
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Yuppers, you can't save everyone (if one could even try -- that would be a totalitarian gov't). Everyone doesn't survive or have the same experiences.

Human life, our philosophies, our policies, our economies, etc are really more of a bell curve distribution.

All we can hope for, for any policy, is that it applies to most...

And sometimes all one can do is bear witness...

*laughing at the image of Kimmio dancing around the East End hooped up on scooby snacks*
 
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