Is It Ever Okay To Help Someone Die Because They Have Unbearable Depression?
On an interesting article about psychiatric medical assistance in dying
There’s an interesting recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics titled “Externalist argument against medical assistance in dying for psychiatric illness.” It’s interesting both because this debate over MAiD, which is now legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada, is inherently interesting (not to mention fraught), but also because it prompts some provocative questions about how philosophy, and ideas more broadly, shapes real-world opinions and policies.
The author, Hane Htut Maung, is a professor at Lancaster University. Maung argues that medical assistance in dying, or MAiD, is generally considered more controversial in cases in which the patient wants to end their life due to psychiatric distress rather than a physical illness, as we’ve seen in the response to Canada’s recent decision to expand its MAiD eligibility guidelines to include “individuals whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable.”
Regulated MAiD systems are supposed to be reserved for the most hopeless of cases, and if death isn’t reasonably foreseeable, it’s harder to make this judgment. If someone seeks out MAiD because they are severely depressed, for example — and these stories have started popping up, and always garner controversy — telling them “Well, you could still get better” might be condescending, from their point of view, but it’s significantly less ridiculous and more potentially reality-based than telling the same thing to a terminal cancer patient.
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