Encourage Life, Support Removal

If need be, society should not encourage, but support people whose health has become so degraded that their quality of life mitigates against continuance, in their opinion. They, after all, have to live with the pain, the uncertainty, the anguish and the misery. And if, as thinking adults, they decide of their own volition that there is no longer any wish to continue living an existence that offers them nothing but pain and anger, their wishes should be respected.

People living with chronic depression are in another category altogether. Mental instability and the insecurities that accompany the bleak emptiness of depression, the black depths to which peoples' souls sink cry out for some kind of medical mediation, some kind of successful therapy that might persuade these lost people that there is a way they can manage their depression and in so doing appreciate new opportunities to live a reasonable life.

Elderly people suffering health conditions for which there is no protocol to improve a poor prognosis for longevity, those who live with rapidly receding faculties, both physical and mental and who have no wish to prolong their deterioration to the final moment of death, might choose their own time and place of dying. People living with the devastation of losing a life-long partner and seeing no future without them, as well.

In the face of intractable debilitation and oncoming death there is no reason why society must adhere to the notion that laws should prohibit assisted suicide. Those who abhor the practise of gently guiding sufferers to the end of their misery, need not have anything to do with the process. Health professions who dedicate their life-practise to ameliorating the pain and devastation of impending death by managing pain and helping to lead sufferers can learn to accept that people have the right to select other means if that is their wish.

If, in responding to an end-of-life condition that causes unbearable pain, an attending physician administers opiate dosages that, while helping to cope with the pain will also bring the patient closer to death, they will have done a service to the patient whose choice that is. People who feel morally or religiously offended by the very idea of helping people to leave their lives of pain, need not be involved.

Palliative care works for some, but not all. There are some issues that palliative care cannot address. If a man or a woman sees no value in a life bereft of a loved one that choice should be respected. This is not a happy thought, that life loses all meaning for people because of their sole investment in happiness with one other person, but it is a reality for some. It is not those people with whom thoughts of insecurity in position should linger.

It is, in fact, the young, afflicted with mental illness, severe depressions, for whom the right combination of chemical protocols or life remedies remain elusive, leading them to take their lives. The young, living lives of no appreciable value to themselves, in degraded social and economic conditions that offer them no insights into the value of life - such as aboriginal children - requires us as a society to make a greater effort to give meaning to their lives through improved conditions.

It is estimated that four thousand people die every year in Canada, as suicides. That represents a greater number than those who succumb to death through traffic fatalities. Suicide remains the leading cause of death for young men. And those are the attempts that succeed, representing a far smaller proportion than those of unsuccessful attempts.