Swiss Allow Assisted Suicide Virtually on Demand

The Swiss assisted suicide facilitating organization Dignitas, has issued a euphoric notice to the death on demand crowd with news that a Swiss court has apparently accepted that the group can help kill the mentally ill as a matter of human rights. I have seen the below quoted memo from two separate sources—one an assisted suicide advocacy organization—so I regard it as a bona fide Dignitas communication issued to co-believers around the world. (It is, however, possible that the memo misstates the court ruling and indeed, this ruling hasn’t hit the news yet, so it might not be true.)

The memo is too long to print in full, (it can be linked above), but here is the gist:

“Dignitas in Switzerland issued this bulletin on 1 February 2007: The Swiss Federal Court has acknowledged the right of a person to determine the way and the point in time of his/hers end of life as a guaranteed European human right and at the same time basically granted mentally ill this right just like everyone else, if they have capacity of discernment...

The Federal Court stated as follows:
*The right of self-determination in the sense of article 8 § 1 ECHR includes the right to decide on the way and the point in time of ending ones own life; providing the affected person is able to form his/her will freely and act thereafter.

*It cannot be denied that an incurable, long-lasting, severe mental impairment similar to a somatic one can create a suffering out of which a patient would find his/her life in the long run not worth living anymore...However, utmost restraint needs to be exercised: It has to be distinguished between the wish to die that is expression of a curable psychic distortion and which calls for treatment, and the wish to die that bases on a self-determined, carefully considered and lasting decision of a lucid person (“balance suicide”) which possibly needs to be respected...

* [T]he appropriate assessment requires the presentation of a special in-depth psychiatric opinion.

On Thursday, the General Secretary of DIGNITAS, Ludwig A. Minelli, explained that with the acknowledgement of the right to an accompanied suicide as an ECHR-right all intentions to prevent with special “rules” people from other countries to come to Switzerland for an accompanied suicide to have no more grounds.”

If the court did indeed rule as claimed, death on demand—the ultimate destination of the nihilistic euthanasia movement—has come to Europe. And lest one tut-tut and say such things could not happen here, that mentally ill people can’t get assisted suicide—they may have already. Recall that Oregon does not explicitly require competence or mental health to qualify for assisted suicide, but rather, that the patient merely be “capable,” meaning able to communicate a medical decision. (Many depressed and otherwise mentally ill people can communicate medical decisions.) Indeed, we have seen in the Michael P. Freeland case, an Oregon man permitted by psychiatrists to keep the his lethal prescription of poison pills even after he was hospitalized for psychotic delusions and required a court-appointed guardian.

And as for the concept of a “balanced suicide,” it is being promoted in US mental health journals under the category of “rational suicide.”

What it is, of course, is utter abandonment.