If you want to see how liberalism is wrecking everything, this is it writ large. Don’t think I mean “liberal” like America uses it. I mean hyper-individualist liberalism. Neoliberals, driven by nothing but economic output, salivate over this stuff. Matthew Parris said quite bluntly, it is time we realised economically useless lives should end and the cost of keeping them alive is not worth it. Gross, but honest.
As I was scrolling through the news yesterday, I came across this story in the Guardian. As most will know, the Netherlands has brought assisted dying into law. As many will also know, this is currently a live discussion in the UK and it seems almost inevitable that we will follow suit. The debates are currently happening but it seems like one of those campaigning issues that is all over the media now and has a whiff of sad inevitability about it. I would love to be proven wrong, I just suspect I won’t be.
Anyway, this Dutch woman hit the news because she has just won a landmark judgement granting her request for assisted dying. What makes this a landmark judgement, as opposed to just another run of the mill permission to be killed (what a horrible half sentence that is), is that she has been granted her request on the grounds of ‘unbearable mental suffering’. She suffers from chronic depression, anxiety, trauma and an unspecified personality disorder. In other words, her suicidal ideation and self-harm are no longer viewed as symptoms of her mental disorder to be relieved but as the very cure to the underlying mental health issues she currently faces.
Last month, I wrote this concerning such moves in Britain:
As many of you will know, I suffer from quite serious depressive illness. I have made more than one serious attempt on my own life and actively planned many more. Fortunately, I am alive today because I was not very effective at killing myself on my own and I now have some helpful medication that keeps me broadly on a level. The threat of assisted dying has some serious and real implications for people like me.
I went on:
If we are comfortable with people killing themselves, even encouraging some to do so, it will be hard to view as tragic those who do so as they struggle with mental illness. As we consider it less tragic, we may well find ourselves caring less about intervening with mental health services to avert it. If we follow the reasoning of Matthew Parris, the mentally ill are useless to society and, therefore, not worth saving. Not only is the cost of keeping them alive on benefits not worth it on such thinking, the broader cost of mental health interventions will similarly not be worth it. Just as some trumpeted abortion as health care because it is cheaper than paying out benefits and providing high level children’s and family services, so it won’t be long before we twig that the cheapest solution to mental health problems is to not bother intervening and then trumpet assisted dying as a form of health care too.
On a more personal note, I am alive today because I was not very competent in trying to kill myself. I am quite confident that if assisted dying were legalised and someone was willing to help, I would have been much more effective. If that someone is a doctor, it is nigh on guaranteed. If the grounds for assisted dying is the desire of the individual to die, and their willingness to be put out of their misery, it is hard to imagine anything other than a queue of severely ill, mentally tormented people not lining up to take advantage of the provisions. We should be at least a bit troubled by the prospect of doctors being less concerned about how we might treat one’s suicidal ideation so much as proposing how they can help their patients most effectively carry it out!
Well, somewhat predictably, here we are looking at exactly that being proposed in the Netherlands. Indeed, not only proposed, but legally granted by court injunction. This, I think, really should make any British politician sit up and take notice. It should similarly make the British public sit up and take notice.