“It will never happen,” I used to hear from supporters of assisted suicide when I warned that once killing is accepted as an answer to human suffering, it would metastasize from the terminally ill through the mentally ill.
Now that I am proven prescient–with both Netherlands and Belgian psychiatrists documented to be legally killing suicidal patients, the answer now often is, ”So what?” Or, “It may happen there, but it won’t happen here.”
Yes it will–once society widely accepts the bottom-line premise. Now, a Belgian magazine has more details about the 50 or 60 mentally ill people euthanized by Belgian psychiatrists each year. From the Humo story (Google translation):
Manic-depressive patients, in their manic moments, the most improbable things in [that] state: plunder their bank account for weeks staying in a five star hotel, numerous cars on buying one day. At that stage they are not mentally competent, that is obvious.
But come in moments of depression they back their exhaustion to the baseline, and they are indeed competent. Then they can say, for example: “I live for thirty years crazy highs and lows, I’ve tried everything to break that infernal cycle, including psychiatric hospitalization, but now I’m back on the baseline, and I know I have a few weeks left’m back for a dip in the depth or a jump in height. ” These are people who are eligible for euthanasia.
Oh, and here’s the best part: Mentally ill people have great organs to be harvested!
The slippery slope has become an avalanche of abandonment.
I feel like Slim Pickens whooping and hollering as he rides the atom bomb in Dr. Strangelove.