By: Eric Metaxas
BreakPoint
When does the right to suicide become an obligation to die? Once again, Europe is pushing the boundaries.“If you were a psychiatrist and a chronically depressed patient told you he wanted to die, what would you do?” That’s the question Charles Lane of the Washington Post recently asked.
In the United States, at least for now, the answer would be to employ a combination of talk therapy and drugs to ease the patient’s pain and alleviate what psychiatrists call “suicidal ideation.” If necessary, you might consider hospitalizing your patient.
But in Belgium, as Lane tells readers, “you might prescribe this vulnerable, desperate person a fatal dose of sodium thiopental.”
As Lane tells readers, between 2007 and 2011, 100 people went to a clinic in Belgium seeking euthanasia. While most of them were clinically depressed, not all of them were. Some of them were schizophrenic; others had Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism.
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