Should I Have Killed Myself?

You know, every time I tell myself I'm staying away from "political" topics and the like, something else draws me back into the muck. This time it's a link shared by a friend via email, to an article that looks a lot like satire...until you do a little digging and realize no, the story might actually be worse then the click-baity headline suggests.

I've heard that parts of this "movement" gained steam in the last few years, led by Western democracies like the Netherlands and Canada. I've stayed away from commenting or even following the rabbit hole farther than necessary. Until today. Until I read enough of an article that scared the f*ck out of me.

What If I'd Been Dutch?

I was suicidal in 2020. It was summertime, less than a year from my last day on active duty, and I was convinced my death was the only logical course of action and best outcome for my wife and two sons. I'm not going to detail that experience here; I've written about it before and it's a tough thing to write and read about. What matters is that my wife literally picked me up off the floor one day and practically shoved me into a psychiatrist's office. Three years on, I'm so grateful for the life my family and I share, and the years of conversations with God I'm now catching up on. And it seemed to me, for most of the last three years, no one around me would've argued that I should have killed myself. The U.S. Government (as of 2017) spent in excess of $100 million on "suicide" and its "suicide prevention" while professionals in healthcare and academia said it wasn't enough. In 2018, more than 10 million Americans thought about suicide, while almost 2 million made an attempt. And thankfully, according to their official website anyway, President Biden and Vice President Harris are directing a host of activities aimed at preventing suicide among adults and children. So imagine my dismay learning that countries closely allied with (and in many ways similar to) the U.S. have either laws on the books or legislation in the works that allows physicians to offer euthanasia as a service to adults and minors as young as 12 in a range of physical and mental states.

Canada made news lately for its "Medical Assistance in Dying" debate, centered lately on whether "mature minors" may request help in "terminating" their lives. It's hard enough to read stories about retired military members offered state-sanctioned suicide instead of a wheelchair; it's quite another to see advocacy for children (someone under 18, for our purposes here) to receive a doctor's help to kill themselves. Then I came across my friend's link, about the current law in the Netherlands that allows parents to "terminate the life" of even newborn infants.

Yes. Dutch parents may kill their children based on an assessment of their "unbearable suffering" and lack of "prospect of improvement."

You might now poke at the fact that I characterized parents as killers above. I know I did. Because they have to consent to a physician's deliberate administration of death to their child. I'm not sure what else to call the "termination of life." But nevermind that.

As a father to two young boys, it's hard enough seeing either of them sick or hurting after falling off the couch or tripping on the sidewalk. No parent wants to see their child suffer, much less under a burden that has no hope of abating. But neither can I imagine directing a healthcare provider to take my child's life. Not when most of us know how medical conditions can change and improve, or how often medical diagnoses and prognoses can be wrong. Physicians and support staff mess up regularly in emergency situations (it's bound to happen, so let's not indict all of medicine because of it) and, as it turns out, when compelled to offer long-term predictions to people with cancer diagnoses. In either case, I think it's evident that human error has always played a role in whether we know what's wrong with us medically or not, to say nothing of the millions of people who self-diagnose via mobile apps like WebMD or their provider's own symptom-checker.

Which brings me back to my state of mind in 2020, and another allowance in Dutch law--for euthanasia (or assisted suicide) offered to people as young as age 12 (with parental consent mandatory until 16) where the illness does not have to be physically manifest at all. The BBC in 2018 profiled a Dutch woman, age 29, who suffered years of psychiatric illness--just in case anyone's skeptical that mental illness would be considered cause for euthanasia. Aurelia Brouwers?was suffering and had contemplated (and attempted) suicide multiple times. She described "every breath" as "torture."

Though Dutch providers rejected Aurelia's applications for euthanasia, she appealed to an international panel under The Hague called the End of Life Clinic, a resource of "last resort" for cases like Aurelia's. This clinic's patient list is apparently "younger than" normal, according to Dr. Kit Vanmechelen, a psychiatrist (as of 2018) who worked on the panel assessing applications for euthanasia from psychiatric patients. It seems in Canada, not to mention several U.S. states, the trend is toward broadening such access for people who view their own illness and suffering as too much to bear. If you haven't already made what to me was a startling connection, let me nudge you along...

Hitler Also Thought Killing People Would Solve His Problems

At the same time we see a trend among so-called "developed" governments to authorize doctors who will endorse suicide, if not kill the patient themselves, we're also watching as our veterans support apparatus fails miserably at providing the kinds of long-term support our troops desperately need after sacrificing life and limb on the country's behalf. My mental and physical ailments pale in comparison to those the VA and private practice sees from other American veterans daily. So what's to stop someone (or many) from arguing that to curtail rising budgets and pressure on government resources, we should be "compassionate" and offer euthanasia to struggling servicemembers? Only God knows what I would've said had it been suggested to me by the VA as an alternative to a medical device or any other intervention; are we all really up for this?

Then there's another version of this story, and truly the one that scared me enough to start writing down how I felt. What if one my kids, God help me, begins suffering from a severe mental illness? What if they're one of the millions of young kids and teens who deal with bouts of depression and anxiety every day? How long before we've slid into a place where assessing a sixth grader for euthanasia becomes okay because they've said they're suffering "unbearably?" Parental involvement in "decision making" is expected in the Netherlands for kids 16 and older, yet the government site's description stops short of mandating parental consent in a legal sense...so your high school junior or senior could ask for the government's help to kill themselves and the attending physician doesn't need your permission or support to help your child go through with it. So does that mean the government, or family physician, may not need parental permission to suggest the idea in the first place? At what point do we become uncomfortable? I'm hoping it's sometime before a son or daughter's in the exam room for a sports physical and they start talking about how hard life's been and how long they've been struggling, lest that attending physician off-handedly says they have a "solution" for that.

Call Me Whatever You Want

You can call me names or dismiss me outright. I don't really care. What I would like is for someone to show me how what I'm talking about, and afraid of, really isn't possible in the U.S. 'Cause I just don't know and am not convinced we're not already on this path given the treacherous debate on individual affirmation. How far does affirmation go before we've explicitly endorsed someone suicidal ideation as a no-kidding statement on the worthlessness of their life?