Thanks to Burke J. Balch, J.D., and Randall K. O’Bannon, M.A. You may find these thoughts of theirs helpful.

Proponents of physician-assisted suicide frequently begin by advocating its legalization for those who are terminally ill, although they have moved far beyond that category. But, as this article will demonstrate, 1) treatable depression, rather than the terminal illness itself, usually accounts for such a patient’s expression of a wish to die; 2) after a diagnosis of terminal illness, a person normally goes through a series of stages of coming to terms with impending death and resolving unfinished business in his or her life, a valuable process that is cut short by acceding to a depression-induced request for assistance in suicide; and 3) given growing pressures to contain medical costs and prevailing social attitudes, if assisting suicide is legalized, many terminally ill patients will be led to feel they are burdens and have a duty to die.

Most terminal patients seek suicide not because they are ill, but because they are depressed.

A study of terminally ill patients published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 1986 concluded:

The striking feature of [our] results is that all of the patients who had either desired premature death or contemplated suicide were judged to be suffering from clinical depressive illness; that is, none of those patients who did not have clinical depression had thoughts of suicide or wished that death would come early.

USA Today has reported that among older people suffering from terminal illnesses who attempt suicide, the number suffering from depression reaches almost 90%.

This fact is not really in dispute. Even Jack Kevorkian, the notorious “suicide doctor,” said at a court appearance that he considers anyone with a disabling disease who is not depressed “abnormal.” But what Kevorkian and others who argue in favor of physician-assisted suicide ignore is that even though the disease itself may be untreatable, the depression is treatable, and it is the depression, not the disease, which makes such persons suicidal.

Especially for those who are terminally ill, it is not good to circumvent the dying process.

In 1969. psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross outlined the 5 stages of the dying process – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Since that time, Dr. Kubler-Ross has worked with thousands of dying patients and their families to help them deal with the dying process. In a recent interview, she indicated that her experience over the past 20 years tells her that suicide is wrong for patients with terminal illness.

Many consider suicide primarily because they are pressured into seeing themselves as burdens on their families or society.

The principal reason people in a 1991 Boston Globe survey said they would consider some option to end their lives if they had “an incurable illness with a great deal of physical pain” was not the pain, not the “restricted lifestyle,” and not the fear of being “dependent of machines,” but rather that they “don’t want to be a burden” to their families. Family members who support the suicide of a terminally ill patient often unwittingly reinforce the notion that the ill family member’s life has lost all meaning and value and is nothing but a “burden.”

In an era of concern over escalating medical costs, “unproductive” consumers of medical services are increasingly made to see themselves as drains on society and the economy. When suicide is promoted as a socially acceptable “option,” the pressure to avail oneself of it is immense.

Thus, if assisting suicide for those with terminal illness is legalized, the so-called “right to die” is very likely in practice to become a “duty to die.”

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