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Terry Pratchett Considers Assisted Suicide
cHALiTO writes "Beloved science fiction and fantasy writer Terry Pratchett has terminal early-onset Alzheimer's. He's determined to have the option of choosing the time and place of his death, rather than enduring the potentially horrific drawn-out death that Alzheimer's sometimes brings. But Britain bans assisted suicide, and Pratchett is campaigning to have the law changed. As part of this, he has visited Switzerland's Dignitas clinic, an assisted suicide facility, with a BBC camera crew, as part of a documentary that will include Britain's first televised suicide. Pratchett took home Dignitas's assisted suicide consent forms."
Well shit that sucks.
Half of me wants to cheer him on in the name of "the good fight." The other half wants to cry. I read a hell of a lot, but Discworld has given more joy than probably any other series.
It is every person's right to decide how they die. Not the governments.
If I were in his situation, I'd do about the same thing. I'd fill out the forms to be carried out in a few months. That way if he stopped progressing he could just do whatever, but if he kept progressing he may not be lucid so they could do their thing.
We'll miss you, Terry, but you have the power over your own life and I respect that.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Conan the Barbarian and most of the characters of discworld would disapprove. If you're going to die, do it AWESOMELY.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I was deeply saddened by the news last year when i heard of his illness. Terry Pratchett is still one of my favorite authors and i wish him a lot of time left.
But i have to confess that i understand his reactions 100%. Rotting away with Alzheimer is my personal worst nightmare. Though i am not allowed to vote in the UK, i will give his initiative my full support whereever i can.
I believe that, if you have don't have the right to end your own life, you are not free at all. My life belongs to me, but to no goverment, to no society and to no god.
Yours, Martin
The end of Western Civilization's downward slope is televising a man making his own decision about how to die in dignity, fighting for all the others that are denied this right today? That's what you call da nightmare? I seriously don't want to know the rest of your so-called "morals"...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Maybe he was saying homeopathy is legal assisted suicide?
Speaking as a libertarian:
Unless the government is claiming ownership of your body (which apparently the UK government is), you should be able to terminate yourself any time you want - especially if you're faced with a terminal illness. By not allowing him to commit suicide the government is basically making Mr. Pratchett the property of the queen. What year is this? 1772?
"The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it's so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law." - Judge Mansfield, Queen's Bench.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
It may be "Britain's first televised suicide", but PBS made a documentary on this topic before:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/suicidetourist/
Note that it was widely slammed as being some manner of disguised snuff movie. Watch it and make up your own mind.
Personally I think such statements are more indicative of the taboo that still rests on euthanasia (and death in general) than that they have any basis in the film's content or presentation.
In (not only) my opinion he should rather try some weed.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
I visualize dementia as slipping deeper and deeper into a dream-fog. At some point I would stop caring about things. At some point I'd be incapable of executing something as complicated as a suicide. There is an intermediate state where the patient can get very frustrated and angry at not being able to do things. And possibly paranoid at the strange new things happening around them.
It is horrific to you loved ones and care givers. They'd experience you disappearing and require lots of care. If you were not rich, then any inheritance would go away too.
Late stage dementia you forget the basic functions of life like eating, coughing, defecating, breathing, etc. These cause medical complications which eventually kill you.
When a man makes a conscious decision that he wants to die, and asks them to film it so as to spread his political beliefs, they're hardly taking advantage of him.
The death is happening regardless of it being filmed. You make it sound like the BBC offered to pay a family a million dollars for exclusive rights to make a movie so that they would change their minds and pull the plug. Western culture is doing just fine, despite countries like Britain and fundamentalists like you who can't handle letting people with a different view make their own minds.
Incorrect. Or at least missing the point.
For all of its failings, in the United States a hospital is required to do anything within their power short of "experimental procedures" to stabilize a person, regardless of their ability to pay, legal status, race, gender, or status as a wanted criminal. This doesn't help with things like cancer or such, as treatments for the cause are all experimental, and the treatments for the symptoms are superficial.
But if you are say, in a car crash and suffer nerve damage, the ER will attempt to save your nerves before they check your insurance. Basically, in the United States, you cannot be denied treatment for conditions for which we understand the root cause because of your ability to pay. And this fact has actually caused ERs in some parts of the country to shut down occasionally, as illegal aliens sometimes bring come in to the ER for things like an ear infection because they cannot be denied treatment, and without any sort of paper trail they also cannot be billed.
FanFictionRecs.net
Recently there have been lots of positive and promising developments in this area. May be he could help fund the lab battling the disease. Some examples:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110602122250.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601075126.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110531135714.htm
While western civilization is certainly doing its part to invent the dystopian future, I'm really not seeing it here.
An adult gives his informed consent to appear in a documentary about assisted suicide, in order to stimulate national discussion(and presumably advocate for his side against the current ban) of the individual's right to make medical choices according to their perceived good. Horribly, the documentary included a section chronicling the (not unmixed) aspects of the process, the emotional difficulties, and so forth.
Umm. Ok? Person dies the death they chose, to avoid an outcome they considered worse, and voluntarily appears in a documentary about that. That hardly seems like moral decline... compared to the fairly-recent-history of horrible death by untreatable disease, barbaric executions carried out as public entertainment, a few bouts of genocide, rampant lynchings(at the better of which, one could purchase commemerative photographs...) and so on and so forth.
Even if you consider assisted suicide morally equivallent to outright murder, the idea that western civilization is somehow inching its way up the murder-ometer is empirically nutty. The 20th century is a tough act to follow. If you don't hew to such a view, the idea that this is somehow a depraved occurrence becomes even harder to justify...
Since so many of the people who disagree with assisted suicide also (inexplicably) support the death penalty, all we have to do is make suicide a crime, and make it punishable by death.
http://catholicexchange.com/2011/06/14/154594/
For those that don't want to read it, this is the argument:
"If we adopt a law holding that a person has the right to kill himself, soon we will also adopt euthanasia; because if the individual has the right to say when his life is no longer worth living, soon society will claim this right as well."
The rest just bashes the media, liberalism, and socialism.
You use the word suicide, yet I don't think it means what you think it means.
And what is this "As has always happened in the past". If you are referring to anything that the Nazi's did, then that was not Legal or even assisted suicide. It was simple and plain murder.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You mean like throwing him off a boat?
Yeah, that would probably be effective.
I stole this Sig
Do you genuinely agree with the argument made in that post? It seems to throw around the word 'evil' a lot at the start, without really explaining why, and then goes on to suggest that if a person is allowed to choose their own time of death, suddenly we'll allow society as a whole to make that decision on their behalf. I fail to see how that point is founded, and I'd be interested to hear the logic if you think otherwise.
IFF the legalization of suicide goes down the (arguably wrongheaded) path of trying to carve out a series of intricate categories about who is and who isn't eligible...
A simple "competent adults, should they so chose" cuts through that reasonably quickly. As for neglect, ugly little not-so-secret is that people already get neglected, up to and including the point of death, if they don't attract support. On the outpatient side, you can usually find some examples sleeping on the steam vents if you live in a reasonably urban area. Inpatient, let's just say that nursing homes and juvenile detention facilities don't write so many scripts for sedatives and antipsychotics with sedative effects because it makes life harder for the staff...
Who made you god and gave you the right to decide who shall keep living in agony?
Although, the catholic church gives quite some easy options for assisted suicide; There are quite some "laws of god" in the bible that are punishable by death (depending on how you "explain" those stories). One could simply claim Earth is not the center of the universe, or you could become a Jew, or Muslim, perform witchcraft, or even simple blasphemy was reason enough for Christians to give assisted suicide in the past.
What's so hard to understand about "I think this should be legal in my country, and I'm going to make the sincerest political statement I can to that effect?"
If that's wrong, I don't want to be right.
Mod parent -1, Irrational.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Suicide is mans attempt to keep control of what he never had any control of. Himself.
I'm not sure I see any factual statement in that. Wanting to die with dignity and sparing the lives of others around him is not related to lacking control throughout life.
Legal suicide is an invitation for the 'state' to decide who is worthy to live and die because it immediately puts law makers in the position of deciding who's life is worthy of being required to live.
Many states already do that with the death penalty, but yet we are still not allowed to chose to legally commit suicide. In fact, it's illegal in many states to even attempt to commit suicide and you can be charged criminally if you attempt (and fail) to do so. Allowing someone to voluntarily commit assisted suicide does not put the government in control of that person's life, it puts the individual in charge.
As has always happened in the past legal suicide will not be fully voluntary for long , because it will be used as an excuse to not take care of those people who choose not to use the 'option' when they are no longer 'worthy' of support.
Again, we're talking about voluntary assisted suicide, which means that the individual chooses, not the government or care-taker. While it's entirely possible that the Power of Attorney could invoke assisted suicide on another individual, there could be laws placed against that if assisted suicide were to be made legal.
Point being, if someone wants to die, it should be their choice. My father's life-long best friend committed suicide in his back yard the day after getting a terminal cancer diagnosis; while in his case it was a little selfish, he spared his family many years of grueling stress and granted them a positive feeling that he is in a better place now.
People need to stop acting like Europe is a single country, first.
You're referring, principally, to France when it comes to 'illegality' of the hijab. This applies to public schools there, and also applies to e.g. wearing a cross. A hijab is still allowed in public, however, as it doesn't cover the face. You might be thinking of a burqa, or other clothing that conceals the face, being banned in public. Note that this also bans the wearing of skimasks, helmets (when not operating a vehicle requiring it), etc.
For euthanasia, you might be referring to Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and (to lesser extent) Ireland. In all of these there's strict rules to follow. I.e. it's not like a patient can walk up to a doctor and say "kill me" and have the doctor pull out a gun on them and shoot them in the head.
Recent law proposals in other countries to make euthanasia legal have been shot down - see e.g. Spain and Italy.
In other news.. France's parliament today decided that same sex marriage would not be allowed.
The same applies to the United States where each State has its own laws as well.
So yes, they're different.. but by grouping their constituent (nation) states together, the differences may be highlighted with a bias toward the group(s), as your post's subject shows.
You're right, on this forum it's a bit "brave" to post that link as representing your opinion on a person's right to die. One of my parents is pretty religious, so I understand that believing in things like sin and divine mandates are blanket arguments that can't be debated in the realm of reason. And so I'll try to respect your opinions on the matter.
I do, however, have to take issue with this bit: "If we adopt a law holding that a person has the right to kill himself, soon we will also adopt euthanasia; because if the individual has the right to say when his life is no longer worth living, soon society will claim this right as well."
This is silly in two ways. First, society often decides who is entitled to life anywhere that has a death penalty or ever sends soldiers to war. So there's nothing to lose in the way of conceptual high-ground. Second, this supposition that we'll begin euthanising our own, law-abiding citizens, against their will when they become sick has no supporting argument. The article simply assumes that to be true, for no apparent reason. It then goes on to blame these supposed future events on other, unrelated topics like abortion and socialized health care. Again, without any real correlative arguments... just flat assumptions. I won't list the more combative things it says about those of us that disagree on the topic... but they're pretty nasty.
So in the end you're left with, "it's wrong because god said so". It's fine for you to believe that, and I understand that it makes it your moral obligation to try to change minds on the subject. But that's hardly an effective argument for the rest of us to consider without any rational, non-religious arguments... right?
The original article is utter bollocks. Society does claim this right already, and the state has no plans on relenting either.
The church, with this one issue at least, is merely using the state's current stance to foist its views on the rest of us.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
1. Allow terminally ill people to die (relatively) painlessly in a sterile, comfortable environment.
2. ????
3. Logan's Run.
and that's plain silly.
"Beloved science fiction and fantasy writer Terry Pratchett has terminal early-onset Alzheimer's. He's determined to have the option of choosing the time and place of his death, rather than enduring the potentially horrific drawn-out death that Alzheimer's sometimes brings. But Britain bans assisted suicide, and Pratchett is campaigning to have the law changed.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUGGESTIONS. PLEASE UNDERSTAND HAVE A VERY BUSY SCHEDULE. I'LL GET BACK TO YOU WHEN I FIND THE TIME. BUT REST ASSURED I _WILL_ GET TO YOU.
Which is to say we already have socialized medicine in the US, it's just very badly managed. Putting in a proper system of socialized medicine would be much better and cheaper. The only other choice is letting people die in the streets.
The starting point for these evils is the liberal and materialistic view that man is the owner of his life; that he is free to choose the moment and manner of his death. Those who hold this view define suicide as “the last liberty of life.”
Free will my friend. Your religion my decide that my suicide is a sin; that does NOT deprive me of the right to commit that final sin. That right and decision is mine alone. Even if you prove correct, and i have indeed stolen that life from your God, judgment is his. It is not yours, not the Church's and most certainly not the State's.
If we adopt a law holding that a person has the right to kill himself, soon we will also adopt euthanasia; because if the individual has the right to say when his life is no longer worth living, soon society will claim this right as well.
Wait what? This is a pretty egregious logic fail - even for a religious organization. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are nearly diametrically opposed. One leaves the final decision in my hands; the other in the hands of society. Stating that there is a connection between the two is not sufficient to prove that connection.
Sorry, I stopped reading once I realized that the remainder of that "article" is based on both conflating the two actions, and upon the false premise that under your religion I do not have free will to sin or not.
"This is the threat represented by a people whose ethics are utilitarian, and whose politics are socialist, particularly with regard to socialized medicine. The idea will soon take hold–thanks to those whom we have empowered to tell our story in the media–that it is too expensive to allow some persons to live, and since the government provides the care, the government will have to decide when their lives will end."
Won't the glorious and charitable libertarians provide healthcare for all those people any way though if they or their loved ones want it? I mean you guys tell us we could just get rid of socialized health care altogether and charity would supply health care for all the poor ... so for a small group of people abandoned by state care it should be rather trivial should it not?
When my grandfather was dying of a necrotized intestine, for which there is no cure or treatment, it took him a week to die. A week during which 'pain management' did nothing.
I asked the doctor if there was any way we could hasten the inevitable. He was shocked and outraged at my lack of humanity.
It was then that I realized that if I treated a dog the way they were treating my grandpa, keeping a dog alive when you knew for a damn fact he was going to die within a week, but that week would be full of horrid pain, you'd be up on charges of animal cruelty.
Modern society extends, even requires, courtesies to dogs that they deny to human beings.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I lost a son to suicide in 2009. It brought unbelievable pain and suffering to our family. My son was suffering from schizophrenia and I don't think that he had the "courage" to hang himself. He was just suffering too much with his treatment and his life. It would've been much better if he had waited and he had prepared us for such a thing. Terry is not a coward. He wants to go with dignity and he is thinking about the ones who love him too.
No ER has ever shut down because of illegal aliens with ear infections. Ever. The cost of treating such cases is the cost of band-aids and aspirins, and spare time of doctors (which there is a lot of in an ER, when there aren't critical patients around, and when there are, the earaches do not get priority). Those costs get shifted to the other emergency cases, and take a small percentage of the massive profit margins that the hospitals, doctors, medical supply, and drug companies charge on them already.
Anyone who told you ERs are shutting down because illegals use them as clinics is full of bigoted political misinformation. It's bullshit promulgated by people who've forgotten the point of America is accepting those whose nations have failed them, not becoming just another one of those nations.
They can't freeze a head to last. They don't do it fast enough to preserve the cell walls, and they have a horrible history of being able to maintain the temperature.
Please keep in mind that thousands of people, once frozen as embryos, are walking around today, quite alive. Though the challenge of restoring the brain after freezing is a big one, it will be overcome.
In the now "civilized world" death used to be much more common and intimate - the above poster provided several examples. Children got diseases and died, women died in child birth. Moving down the hierarchy a bit, people used to kill and eat their own animals. Death was an integral part of life.
Recently we have pushed death away. Our food comes wrapped in plastic packages. Death happens in hospitals or nursing homes. Child mortality rates have fallen. We consider dealing with death "barbaric" or "primitive" or something for doctors or some such.
Medical treatment has advanced to the point where we can keep people alive far beyond what would generally be called a worthwhile life; our brains and bodies wear out and degrade, but we can keep alive through drugs & treatments.
The problem with suicide is that people often make the choice to take their own life when things are bad but may generally be expected to improve - jilted by a lover, bankruptcy, some other traumatic experience. Society has some obligation to keep people from making permanent decisions "in the heat of the moment".
I fall in the camp of if a person's situation cannot be reasonably expected to improve - incurable disease that will turn agonizing or incapacitating, then let them choose to check out before they become too miserable. When that point is is hard to determine. If you are diagnosed with Alzheimer's or AIDs should society allow you to check out immediately?
Tough questions. I wish Mr. Pratchett well.
I love Terry Pratchett and his writing. I love how his writing -- which started out pretty good -- has got even better and deeper over the years.
From his books, and interviews, and essays, it's pretty obvious that he's a pretty smart person, and probably values his intellect and personality.
Like him, I'd be pretty damn terrified of losing that. There are a lot of things I could live with, but losing my mind, actually losing my mind, that is terrifying. I too would NOT want to go through years of.. really, not being myself, not really being a /person/ anymore.
It's a hellish concept, and it's not like you get better eventually. I seriously hope that if it ever comes to that I'd be able to end my life in a calm, comfortable and, above all, dignified manner of my OWN choosing, rather than be subjected to a literal fate worse than death.
Hell, if my DOG ever gets to a place where she can't really be herself and wouldn't be able to actually be happy, I'd be able to do that for her.
I certainly hope that Terry Pratchett, who's brought so much joy and happiness to so many people, will be able to leave this world in a comfortable, painless and dignified manner of his own choosing. He deserves it. Everyone does.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
In more ways than the obvious ones. My mother has it, so I've had no choice but to learn about it. She can't really do chores any more though she still tries. She confuses clean and dirty dishes. She puts them in the wrong cupboards. She can't operate the washing machines any more, but she can and does still open the doors, stopping them. So we've had to either stand guard, or wash by hand, or use them at night when she is asleep. She's always thinking that people are coming over, or that we have to hurry up and go somewhere to meet people. She's beginning to have trouble remembering people. She really took to email, and was our family's big communicator. But about 2 years ago she stopped using it. Now she can't write anything but the most banal fluff. They say an early warning sign is difficulty with finances, and it was about 3 years ago we had to take over all the bill payments. The trigger was being 3 days late with a credit card payment. First time that ever happened, and the credit card company (Chase) wouldn't give an inch. I suppose the crisis made them hard ass. I paid the late fees and interest, and the entire bill, then I cancelled that credit card. A year later I finished cutting all ties with Chase, and closed my savings account with them.
How and when do you take the car keys away? We saw suspicious paint marks on the bumpers and doors, and knew we couldn't let her drive much longer. Dreaded having an ugly scene where we forcibly took her driver's license away. Making it harder was that her daily trips to the mall got her out of our hair so we could work. But we found a neat way around it. She was always misplacing her purse, with keys, credit cards, and all. In March last year, she got paranoid that thieves might break in, and hid her purse. Took us a week to find it that time. We used that to end her driving. Told her she couldn't drive until she found her license and car keys, and she didn't blow up and come down hard on us as it was obvious to her that it was her fault she'd lost her purse. We did not tell her when we finally found it.
Doctors, curse their greedy hides, are unable to do anything constructive about it. All they do is profit off our problems by selling us expensive prescriptions that may do nothing whatever. Aricept is a waste.
All that is pretty typical. It will get worse. I read that in the advanced stages, victims no longer have enough of a brain to coordinate walking, even if their bodies can still do it. So they have to use wheelchairs. We may ultimately have to put her in a nursing home. But I haven't yet told of a less obvious horror.
What I didn't know is how happy Alzheimer's victims are. She was always a moody person, prone to rampages over essentially trivial faults. She's a "sundowner", meaning that late afternoon is her triple witching hour so to speak. Her blood sugar bottoms out, and she becomes a hell of a grouch, more ready than usual to explode at any provocation whatever, and so ready to see provocation where there wasn't any. Got to feed her to calm her down and get her back to being just merely touchy and thin skinned. And then around 10 years ago, that changed. She became a much more pleasant, happy person. I took it as the wisdom of age. Thought she'd resolved to turn over a new leaf, and was succeeding. Everyone who met her told me how cool she was. And it gave me hope that people really can change, that genetics and formative events in our childhoods don't have to be our destinies. Now I understand that was the beginning of Alzheimer's. How can I express it? Horrifying to see that these improvements were thanks to irreversable brain damage, and that achieving happiness in life is perhaps not a worthy goal and not a real improvement.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I lost a son to suicide in 2009. It brought unbelievable pain and suffering to our family. My son was suffering from schizophrenia and I don't think that he had the "courage" to hang himself. He was just suffering too much with his treatment and his life. It would've been much better if he had waited and he had prepared us for such a thing.
Terry is not a coward. He wants to go with dignity and he is thinking about the ones who love him too.
With all respect, and as a father of 2 young children who does not wish to even try to imagine your pain.
I don't think it would have been easier on you if he had waited. Assuming lucid rational thought (which may not be a valid assumption for schizophrenia) If someone is at the point where they wish to end their life, their own perceived quality of that life is usually so low that each day is an unrelenting struggle. It's very hard to live your life for other people, even when you love them very much.The only comfort I imagine you can take is that your son is no longer in pain.
Though I don't know you, I'm very sorry for your loss.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It is often the case that those who suffer from Alzheimer's Disease live a happy life. My wife has recently been accepted in a home and for most of the time she seems quite happy with the life that she is living there. As a patient of Alzheimer's Disease you realize less and less what is going on when the disease progresses. But depressions and periodes of anxiety do occur. But it is often the people around the patient that suffer far more than the patient her/himself. I can testify this from first hand experience with respect to me, my children and our friends. In case I would be diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease that would be a reason for me to want to terminate my life and sparing the people around me the prolonged sufferings of having me see go backwards.
I think it should be possible to state that you want your life to be terminated when the disease has been progressed to a certain spcified level. There are some 'objective' milestones in the progress of the disease. Already dementia is one of the most expensive diseases in the western world, and especially in Europe, where the population is no longer growing, these costs are going to get much higher in the coming decades. Especially the last years are very expensive. That too would be a reason for me to consider early termination of my life, not wanting to put an unnecessary burden to society as a whole. But I also feel that people who do not want to terminate their life early, should get the best possible care.
First, I am in full support of a person's right to choose their time and place of death when confronted with certain death anyway (I voted for Oregon's "Death with Dignity" law - both times it came up.)
Second, I fully understand the debilitating effects of Alzheimer's, having multiple relatives who have succumb to it late in life.
However, since when is Alzheimer's itself "Terminal"? I have yet to have a relative die "because of Alzheimer's".
According to the latest statistics (http://public.health.oregon.gov/ProviderPartnerResources/EvaluationResearch/DeathwithDignityAct/Documents/yr13-tbl-1.pdf ,) the most common underlying illness that has prompted people to take advantage of Oregon's law is, by far, cancer. (Or, "Malignant neoplasms" as it is phrased in the report.) 80.8%. Next is ALS (aka "Lou Gehrig's Disease",) with 8%. Next Chronic lower respiratory disease (which covers lots of lung issues other than cancer,) with 3.8%, then AIDS at 1.5%, and "Other" rounding out the rest. They detail "Other" in the footnotes, and no Alzheimer's.
So, while I fully understand the desire of someone who is used to major functionality not wanting to succumb to the depths of Alzheimer's, to call it a Terminal Illness is lying to yourself.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.