1. I have a number of friends who are disabled in some way, or chronically ill. I also have a number of friends who struggle regularly with severe depression. (These are generally not people who are refusing medication or who have gone off their medication; these are people for whom antidepressants don't work well, or don't work consistently.) The friends with severe depression suffer so much more than the friends with disabilities. My friends with fibromyalgia who live with chronic pain seem to live much better lives, overall, than my friends with intractable depression. Even when they're in a flare. In terms of day-to-day suffering, depression WINS. (Or loses. You know.)
And yet there seems to be a strong sense among assisted suicide advocates that it is not OK to allow severely depressed people to commit suicide, even if they have depression that has proved unresponsive to medication. Even if their depression is unresponsive to medication and to ECT.
2. I feel a great deal of sympathy for end-stage cancer patients, and for those who've seen end-stage cancer patients that were not being medicated adequately who are terrified of dying that way. But I've seen arguments for assisted suicide where people say things like, "there is no pain medication to deal with loss of dignity; becoming incontinent (or having to be fed or being physically dependent on others in some significant way) is utterly intolerable for me to contemplate." The ableism in a statement like this is appalling to me. I think ableism makes it really easy for able-bodied people to see it as reasonable for a disabled person to want to die, rather than realizing they've been sucked into an irrational world view.
3. I would really like to read more about the therapy for dying people; my grandmother is not terminally ill, but she is old and increasingly feeble, and definitely suffers from that sense of a lack of meaning, fear of being a burden, etc. Are there any books about this for a lay audience?
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1. I have a number of friends who are disabled in some way, or chronically ill. I also have a number of friends who struggle regularly with severe depression. (These are generally not people who are refusing medication or who have gone off their medication; these are people for whom antidepressants don't work well, or don't work consistently.) The friends with severe depression suffer so much more than the friends with disabilities. My friends with fibromyalgia who live with chronic pain seem to live much better lives, overall, than my friends with intractable depression. Even when they're in a flare. In terms of day-to-day suffering, depression WINS. (Or loses. You know.)
And yet there seems to be a strong sense among assisted suicide advocates that it is not OK to allow severely depressed people to commit suicide, even if they have depression that has proved unresponsive to medication. Even if their depression is unresponsive to medication and to ECT.
2. I feel a great deal of sympathy for end-stage cancer patients, and for those who've seen end-stage cancer patients that were not being medicated adequately who are terrified of dying that way. But I've seen arguments for assisted suicide where people say things like, "there is no pain medication to deal with loss of dignity; becoming incontinent (or having to be fed or being physically dependent on others in some significant way) is utterly intolerable for me to contemplate." The ableism in a statement like this is appalling to me. I think ableism makes it really easy for able-bodied people to see it as reasonable for a disabled person to want to die, rather than realizing they've been sucked into an irrational world view.
3. I would really like to read more about the therapy for dying people; my grandmother is not terminally ill, but she is old and increasingly feeble, and definitely suffers from that sense of a lack of meaning, fear of being a burden, etc. Are there any books about this for a lay audience?