Assisted suicide for all, not for some

As more and more countries adopt the idea of assisted suicide–thankfully of course–one has to ponder why assisted suicide is only available to those who are terminally ill and mentally sane? Why can the option be made available to those who are not terminally ill but yet mentally sane? Not everyone who is suicidal is mentally incompetent and lacking the ability to reason and/or understand the consequence of actions.

Canada has yet to adopt the rules and guidelines for assisted suicide. Thankfully due to a Supreme Court landmark decision, the court has made assisted suicide legal and gave a year for the Government of Canada to forge the necessary laws surrounding it. Without reviewing the legislation I am willing to bet that the requirements will look something like this: i) terminally ill with remaining life expectation of less than 6 mos; ii) deemed mentally competent; iii) has expressed desire to die by euthanasia; iv) diagnosis of life expectancy and mental competency correlated by more than one physician. These are aspects of the framework that was offered by the Supreme Court.

As I write this, do I come across as someone who is incompetent? Do I come across as mentally insane? Probably not. I will grant that I am medicated *technically* for depression and anxiety though I am confident that it is more than this and has to do with my internal wiring. Am I wrong? I have expressed this to psychiatrists and psychologists, all of whom seem to know me better than I know myself.

Life to me is routine. I go to bed at night. I wake up in the morning. I shower. I have something to eat. I check the news. I somehow manage to wander into the outside world. I interact with people on a very superficial level when confronted with the need to interact–I try to avoid verbal interaction at every point that I can. No matter what I do it always seems the same thing day in and day out; it is boring and mundane.

I will not get into my past and the environment in which I was raised. That is available on a separate post. That said, it boggles my mind why society cares so much about keeping me alive. If society cares so much how is it that I experienced the levels of abuse growing up? Perhaps if society cared so much then as society does now I may not be in the same predicament as I am now. I know the cards that I have been dealt in the poker game of life. I have a losing hand, the deck is and remaims stacked. I want to fold, I know that I am not going to win. No one cares.  But yet society wants me to play my hand and keep playing though I know that regardless of what I do the deck remains stacked to the advantage of others (others who do not have the same level of challenges).

I want to die. I am perhaps described as apathetic.  There isn’t a pill for that.  Is it the words of “I want to die” in that order that makes me insane and not mentally competent? Do the words that I have forged together in this post not have coherency? Why must the circumstances for entitlement to chose my destiny be contingent on a terminal illness, bearing in mind that we are all terminal given the fact that we all die in the end. It is because I am not terminally ill (with some sort of disease that qualifies) I am forced to explore avenues that may or may not guarantee my demise which is disconcerting to me. It also disconcerts me of what someone else will find. These two points are simply not fair. There are tonnes of ways to die by choice–hanging, overdose, cutting, etc. None of these are guaranteed to be of success, failure is less than desirable. And so I remain, doomed to die in the end playing the hand that I’ve been dealt and going through the motions of “life”. I exist. I do not live. And here I remain (for now) until I meet my demise either at my own hand or by fate. Regardless of such, the ending remains the same, that being infinite peaceful darkness the question remains however of when.

Many of us live in countries of freedom.  The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that every Canadian has the right to … life, liberty, and security.  With everything that I have stated we still do not live in a free society.  The ultimate freedom yet remains elusive and out of reach; the ultimate freedom is for one to chose one’s one demise regardless of one’s medical diagnosis.