To: Brumar89 who wrote (75561 ) 11/27/2009 4:35:30 PM From: Brumar89 Read Replies (1) | Respond to Drive Starts to Make Dutch Psychiatrists Justify Not Killing Suicidal Patients!a Dutch Supreme Court ruling that assisting the suicide of the depressed is in keeping with euthanasia law. Since then, Dutch doctors have been allowed to kill their mentally ill patients, but according to Sutorious and others, not enough are being put into the grave. It’s time for change! From the story:Of the 2,331 cases reviewed by the regional euthanasia review committees in 2008 only two involved psychiatric patients. All doctors are obligated to report assisted suicides to the committees, who then investigate if all the legal requirements were met. [Me: Studies show that about half are not reported. ] “Psychiatrists have a holier-than-thou attitude,” Hans van Dam, a nurse and a teacher, said at a symposium organised by the Right to Die-NL foundation in the Dutch town of Ede on Monday. The taboo on assisted suicide for mental patients needs to be broken, Van Dam argued. “To put it bluntly: cancer will kill you in a matter of years, but schizophrenia is forever. The suffering of psychiatric patients can be just as intolerable as many forms of physical suffering,” said Eugène Sutorius, a professor of criminal law and a former president of the foundation. He suggests making it obligatory for psychiatrists to report and motivate why they declined a patient’s request for assisted suicide.”I don’t want to see psychiatrists dragged into court,” he said, “but I do want them to make their case.” The Netherlands has fallen off a vertical moral cliff.Anyone who believes that institutionalized medical killing can be kept under strict control is delusional. Moreover, once the culture of death sinks deeply into the culture, eventually efforts will be made to force health care professionals to engage or be complicit in killing. For more on this last point, see my most recent piece in First Things.firstthings.com
