Source: PennLive.com
By Karl Benzio, M.D.
Being a psychiatrist for 30 years, I’ve successfully cared for thousands of patients, many critically or terminally ill throughout the United States and experiencing severe trauma in Uganda and Iraq. I see desperate people with unimaginable pain and realize contemplating suicide is complex and never occurs lightly.
But, allowing anyone, especially doctors, to help kill a person, is dangerous to patients, doctors, the healthcare system, and society, especially when much better and safer options exist. The real solution needs to combine proper expertise with true compassion.
Physician Assisted Suicide’s (PAS) most immediate danger, obviously, is to patients. Medical definition: suicide is the destruction of one’s own life and prospects. Suicidal people have impaired thinking and distorted judgment leading to compromised decision-making. This contradicts PAS backers’ claims that suicide can be “rational.”
All my training has been to help stop suicide and every state compassionately has laws to detain suicidal people against their will, ensuring life-saving protection, then treatment until suicidal intent is gone.
Suicidal people experience significant psychological and spiritual pain, then desire shortcuts to numb it. Callous, insensitive or unaware people reduce a suicidal patient’s value equivalent to that of a suffering pet or nuisance bug and propose “mercy” killing them. But people with real compassion recognize the suicidal person’s humanity and value, regardless of adversity or pain, then come alongside, bear their burden with them, and provide protection, love, hope, connection, forgiveness, value, and purpose coupled with sound psychiatric evaluation and treatment by trained, ethical professionals.
Suicide, you see, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Suicidality is very treatable, but severe cases really require a truly holistic spirit-mind-body approach. PTSD and depression coming from a life-threatening diagnosis and hopelessness from underlying PsychoSpiritual struggles precipitate suicidal intent. We don’t have to kill the patient to kill the suffering, just provide real compassion and an expert treatment.
Our impatient and all-knowing society selfishly imposes premature finish lines. We often leave at halftime and miss the great comeback, or at intermission and miss the show’s awesome turnaround. All life’s seasons are valuable, especially the last one. Great relational, spiritual, and psychological richness to the individual and loved ones come from our last days when we’ve all seen people persevere past hospice predictions, be outright cured, or reconciled with an estranged family member.
I have treated many suicidal patients, who, after being stopped from killing themselves, then appropriately treated, were grateful for the prolonged and now enjoyable life they were blessed to live. Don’t rob people by imposing a premature and permanent finish line.
But, if a person really wants to kill themselves, ultimately that choice is between them, their Creator, and their loved ones. Painlessly killing oneself is easy with numerous methods on many websites. If suicide is their ultimate desire, I can’t stop them. But, if suicide was truly honorable and PAS legislation’s goal is true autonomy, they shouldn’t need to involve anyone in their “autonomous” and “noble” act, especially a physician, a trained healer who’s vowed in their Hippocratic Oath to not give anyone “poison” to kill them or help them commit suicide. Bringing in another person reveals ambivalence and fear about their tragic decision. PAS ignores the patient’s ambivalence while critically endangering the doctor-patient relationship by undermining the bedrock trust and accountability society needs to have and see in their doctor, whose hands and character they put their life into and whose voice is the only one protecting those who don’t have one.
Many other dangers exist in PAS such as not requiring vital documentation of the death, botched attempts, mandating forging of the death certificate to not reveal suicide as the cause of death, expanding the definition of “terminal,” several countries now euthanizing without consent, and the dramatic increase in suicide in Oregon where PAS is legal, to name a few.
The PAS slippery slope ends in an abyss of catastrophe.
Please think about this: which society would you like to live in? The society that comes alongside, extends compassion, hope, possibility, connection, and love while showing society and youth we value a person’s life by treating them? Or the society that is cold, callous, sci-fi like, treating people like a commodity, terminating them quickly, cheaply, and quietly without documentation, conscience, or accountability? If unsure, wisdom should decide on the side of caution, safety, and morality to protect life when evaluating policies with deadly and long-reaching slippery slope tentacles.
Karl Benzio, MD, is a psychiatrist and Pennsylvania Director for American Academy of Medical Ethics. He is founder and director of Lighthouse Network, and Medical Director, Honey Lake Clinic.