Initiative 1000

Initiative 1000.  Assisted suicide.  Clearly pertinent to nursing.  Coming from a nursing/health care perspective, I think it makes it even more difficult to figure out what I should think about this b/c in some capacity I will be involved in situations where assisted suicide could be a possibility.  

There's the side of "first do no harm" and the point being to save lives, not end them.  But then there's also the whole thing about the patient's needs coming first, doing everything in your power to help the patient, but in the end, not letting him/her suffer.  So what do you do?  Allow a person to end their life prematurely (i.e. even more prematurely than the illness is already taking them), or require that they continue living until the illness/disease takes them. But then again, it's still suicide, making the conscious decision to end your own life, often not seen as a good idea.  

But what about the people who discontinue life support or choose not to receive treatments for cancer, for example.  We don't consider that suicide, just their choice to not endure the hardships of treatment. But in an indirect way, that's technically kind of suicide too because the person (and/or family) is making a decision to either end the person's life or discontinue efforts to sustain life.  But don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to argue that choosing not to endure intensive cancer treatment is dishonorable or sacrilegious or even suicide, but if you really break it down to the elements, in some ways it's a form of assisted suicide, someone (other than God, or science, or whatever) is making the conscious decision to discontinue life, usually based on suffering (i.e. the suffering one may endure through chemo treatments outweighs the benefits of the treatment, so dying sooner, but happier and healthier sounds more appealing).  So, is this assisted suicide initiative, in fact, somewhat similar to a patient choosing not to accept treatment?  I presume that the person choosing assisted suicide is doing so to minimize suffering, time spent in hospitals, and other various burdens (on family, friends, etc, including financial burdens).  If that be the case, I support it.  I don't see that as a cop-out, but rather as a similar decision to "I would rather not endure intensive treatments which will significantly decrease my quality of life".  

But in the end, I don't really know.  How can you really regulate what conditions are eligible for assisted suicide?  So, if it is strictly for medical conditions, terminal illnesses, what about psychological conditions, severe depression, etc.  If you let people end their lives because they are depressed, that's just "regular" (illegal) suicide, but you also can't disregard psychological conditions as medical issues.  But maybe you could say that some physical conditions are not treatable under Western Medicine, and that say, depression, you can "get over" or treat with anti-depressants/anti-psychotics, etc, but maybe you can't "cure" a person with depression and it will "kill" them one way or another. Maybe not physically kill them, but reduce his/her quality of life to the point that it may not be worth living.  So then if depression and terminal cancer both decrease a person's quality of life that much, then they're the same thing and should/could both qualify for assisted suicide.  But I'm also not trying to say that people with depression should just throw in the towel and commit suicide, b/c maybe they can be helped. Maybe the real question is, whether talking about physical conditions or mental/emotional conditions, when is enough, enough? My goodness, my brain is tired now. I will have to think about this more later.