Terry Pratchett on assisted suicide : comments [Matthew's Journal]

Obviously (to me) it makes sense not to allow people who are mentally ill to make a decision for assisted suicide

I would disagree with you here - as juggzy says, "disengage the wish of somebody to kill themselves from the state of mental illness".. For instance, someone with occasional episodes (could be anything from anxiety to schizophrenia) who might have huge physical problems as well, whose therapist could demonstrate that they had the same unstinting wish throughout their remissions as well as their bad episodes...

It just reminds me of how sometimes people who seek gender reassignment are sometimes still asked to provide a psychiatrist's "certificate of sanity" before things can progress. This outmoded approach horribly stuffs those with more than one thing wrong with them :-(

Is all mental illness curable? Sadly not, but I think the more useful distinction is informed rational consent wrt the outlook of their condition, which will be hard to satisfy in many such desperate cases.

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The understanding of some physical illnesses is good, but over the whole field of physical illness understanding is patchy, and clearly there is still a lot to learn. It seems to me that mental illness is at a much earlier stage of understanding, and that seems to me to be part of the problem.

I would argue that if someone wants to kill him or herself because the voices in the head command it, then that is probalby not a good enough justification for an organisation tasked with assisting suicide for some people to make the decision to do so in that case. At least, not unless the voices cannot be silenced by any medication, are not a temporary affliction, and are, in effect, an incurable illness that causes much suffering.

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