Guest post: It is the failure to treat which is immensely cruel
Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on What the future implications might be.
It sounds bloody awful, to be honest. It’s the ‘no co-morbidities part which has hitherto kept people alive long enough to survive the waiting list, get appropriate treatment, and go on to have a healthy life.
If you are suicidally miserable because you are in severe, intractable, possibly increasing pain from a condition which will imminently kill you, and want to die because facing further pain is pointless, then euthanasia is obviously a lot less cruel than making you wait for natural death.
However, if you are suicidally miserable solely due to a treatable mental illness or disorder, then it is the failure to treat which is immensely cruel, and killing you because you might appear to want that in the moment, because of under-funding of the resources which would restore your health, is abhorrent.
We’re seeing the same short-term thinking in the treatment of dysphoria in teens; the only difference is that the teens who undergo the appalling medical and surgical alternative to real treatment are still alive afterwards, and can sue for the abuse.
A dead person cannot sue; I don’t want to have to find out whether or not their bereaved families can.
I’m a bit unhappy in the way you split up the possibilities.
What if you are suicidally miserable because you are in severe, intractable, possibly increasing pain from a condition that won’t kill you? What if you are suicidally miserable because you are in severe, intractable, possibly increasing pain because for whatever reason, docters refuse to increase your pain killers?
I see no reason to treat mental misery differently from physical misery. Sure if your condition is treatable it is cruel when you are not in effect getting treatement. But for the person in question it hardly matters whether he doesn’t get treatment because there isn’t one of that he doesn’t get treatment because where he lives they are unable to provide this treatement (in a timely fashion). It also doesn’t matter to him whether his misery has a mental or a physical cause. In as sense all pain is mental. It is not the physical condition that makes the pain unbearable, it is how your brain can cope or not that makes the difference between bearable and unbearable.