Assisted Suicide as a Remedy for Suffering? The End-of-Life Preferences of British “Suicide Tourists”

Richards, Naomi

doi:10.1080/01459740.2016.1255610

Cited by 39 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 27 publications

(22 reference statements)

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“…Medicine's power to frame and manage aspects of human existence moves into clear focus here. The participation of medical professionals in aided deaths not only affords patients a key measure of social legitimacy, but it also diffuses attendant moral responsibilities for their death and increases chances for a successful outcome because of the perceived technical know‐how of clinicians (see Richards 2017, 353). According to one prescribing physician in Portland, once he began offering his attendance at their deaths, nearly all his patients have taken him up on it, even though all he does is watch the patient drink the lethal medication.…”

Section: The Medicalization Of Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The state-through its medical professionals-thus preserves the right to determine who gets to opt out of life and to differentiate between a moral and an immoral death. It is precisely the involvement of physicians and state authorities that lends medically assisted deaths a significant measure of social and moral legitimacy-a quality notably absent in popular understandings of suicide and in cases where terminally ill people use "do-it-yourself " methods to end their own lives (Richards 2017).…”

Section: Authorizing Death and The Limits Of Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Author(iz)ing Death: Medical Aid-in-Dying and the Morality of Suicide

Hannig

2019

Cult. Anthropol.

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In 2017, Oregon marked the twentieth anniversary of enacting the Death with Dignity Act, allowing terminally ill, mentally competent adult patients to end their life by ingesting a lethal medication prescribed by their physician. In U.S. public discourse, medical aid‐in‐dying is frequently equated with the terminology and morality of suicide, much to the frustration of those who use and administer the law. This article reflects on the stakes of maintaining a distinction between a medically assisted death and the most common cultural category for self‐inflicted death—suicide. It uncovers the complicated dialectic between authorship and authorization that characterizes medical assistance in dying and attendant moralities of purposive death, speaking to broader disciplinary concerns in the cultural study of death and medicine. By stressing the primacy of debilitating, life‐limiting illness in an aided death and by submitting such a death to the rationale and management of institutionalized medicine, advocates carve out a form of intentional death that occupies a category of its own. The diffusion of agency onto a patient's fatal illness, medicine, and the state—both discursively and in practice—enhances the moral and social acceptability of an assisted death, which becomes an authorized form of dying that looks very different from the socially deviant act of suicide.

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Section: The Medicalization Of Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Authorizing Death and The Limits Of Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

Author(iz)ing Death: Medical Aid-in-Dying and the Morality of Suicide

Hannig

2019

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…As research undertaken by one of the authors has shown, even among Christians, belief in the redemptive potential of suffering is no longer a given, and Christians as well as those of other faiths, also opt for assisted dying. [46] The option to lawfully end your life with assistance validates the view that there is no value in dying unless the suffering person says so. We therefore contend that lawful assisted dying will further champion an evolving cultural script that constructs any form of pain and suffering at the end of life as meaningless and untenable, as well as fundamentally questioning the belief that suffering at the end of life yields particular forms of compassion and relations between people.…”

Section: The Suffering Experiencementioning

confidence: 90%

What is the cultural value of dying in an era of assisted dying?

Richards

Krawczyk

2019

Med Humanities

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Assisted dying is now a lawful and integral component of many societies 'death system', orienting individual and collective encounters with death and dying. While only a very small number of people living with terminal illness in these societies will opt for an assisted death, the choice nevertheless exists for those who satisfy the legal criteria. Theoretically, in these jurisdictions, this turns dying into an optional part of the human lifecycle; a final phase of life that, until now, seemed a universal feature of life except in instances of sudden death. As anthropologists specialising in death and dying, we pose the question of how the various cultural scripts that have sought to give meaning to dying in post-industrial Western societies since the mid-twentieth century might be affected by the advent of assisted dying. We begin by building on both medical and social science literature to construct a working definition of 'dying'.We then identify four dominant cultural scripts: psychological growth; preparation for death; the suffering experience; and the caring experience. After outlining each script, we discuss how it may (or may not) be affected by the increase in assisted dying legislation. We propose that it is the 'caring' script; the notion of affective, intergenerational bonds created through the experience of caring for people specifically in the last few months or weeks of their life, which are likely to be most affected. However, we find that access to these cultural scripts is already limited because of the widespread reluctance to recognise and name 'dying', and the challenges of doing so. Consequently, the various cultural scripts we identify are negated not by the increase in assisted dying, but rather by a combination of medical advances and institutional orthodoxies which limit opportunity for people to experience themselves, or others, as 'dying'.

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“…(Eutanasi er derimot forbudt i straffeloven.) Sveits har lenge hatt en «selvmordsturisme»: Pasienter fra andre land drar dit for å begå selvmord med medikamenter (Richards, 2016), også norske pasienter (Materstvedt, 2015b).…”

Section: Av-medikalisering Av Selvmord?unclassified

“…Lov om eutanasi og assistert selvmord. (2016). www.parl.gc.ca/ HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=8384014 Cook, M. (2016.…”

Section: Avsluttende Merknadermentioning

confidence: 99%

Den medisinske selvmorderen i individualismens tid

Materstvedt¹

2017

Suicid.

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ER DET NOENSINNE rasjonelt å ta sitt liv? Spør man en filosof, som undertegnede er, kan jeg garantere at vedkommende umiddelbart vil spørre tilbake: «Hva mener du med 'rasjonelt'?» Det finnes en hel skog, for ikke å si flere skoger, av filosofisk litteratur om begrepet. Og det er slett ingen enighet om dets innhold -til tross for at enkelte prøver (hardt) å fange rasjonalitetens vesen.Et eksempel er Harvard-filosofen Robert Nozick , som i 1993 utga en bok med den ambisiøse tittelen The Nature of Rationality. Et annet er den tyske filosofen Karl-Otto Apel (Materstvedt, 1999). I Norge er saerlig Jon Elster kjent for sine teorier om rasjonalitet, eksempelvis i Ulysses and the Sirens (1979). Så svaret avhenger helt av hvilken teori man «sokner» til -en teori som selv må begrunnes, ingen liten jobb ...Men jeg skal ikke plage leserne av Suicidologi med mer utlegning av dette feltet. I stedet skal jeg gå rett på sak, og relatere spørsmålet til en medisinsk kontekst: Finnes det noen lidelser som er av en slik art at det kan vaere rasjonelt å drepe seg selv? To av de mest sentrale filosofene i den klassiske liberale tradisjonen, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) og Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), har skrevet mye som er relevant for dette spørsmålet. Den medisinske selvmorderen i individualismens tid Av Lars Johan Materstvedt SAMMENDRAGArtikkelen starter med en drøfting av selvmordets rasjonalitet sett fra en filosofisk synsvinkel. Deretter forklares og defineres termene «eutanasi» og «legeassistert selvmord», som begge fortolkes moralsk som former for kontrollerte, medikaliserte selvmord. Det gis deretter en beskrivelse av hvor normalisert begge deler har blitt i BeNeLux-landene, og at dette kan leses som uttrykk for en individualistisk kultur der kontroll med egen død er blitt stadig viktigere. Artikkelen beskriver også hvordan praksisen med assistert selvmord i Sveits er spesiell ved at den ikke involverer helsepersonell i saerlig grad. Dernest beskrives norsk forskning på kreftpasienters forhold til eutanasi og legeassistert selvmord, samt at pasienters ønske om disse typene unaturlig død kan vaere svaert komplekse. Til slutt problematiseres forestillingen om at vi vet vår eget beste, og det antydes at vi er mindre rasjonelle enn vi har for vane å tro.The present article takes as its point of departure a discussion of the rationality of suicide from a philosophical point of view. It goes on to explain and define the terms "euthanasia" and "physician-assisted suicide", which are both given a moral interpretation as forms of controlled, medicalised suicide. Subsequently, a description is offered of how normalised both practices have become in the BeNeLux countries, and that this phenomenon may be seen as an expression of an individualistic culture in which control of one's own death has gained increased importance over the years. The article also delineates in what way the practice of assisted suicide in Switzerland is particular in that health care personnel are involved in a quite limited fashion. There follows a presentation of ...

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Assisted Suicide as a Remedy for Suffering? The End-of-Life Preferences of British “Suicide Tourists”

Cited by 39 publications

References 27 publications

Author(iz)ing Death: Medical Aid-in-Dying and the Morality of Suicide

Author(iz)ing Death: Medical Aid-in-Dying and the Morality of Suicide

What is the cultural value of dying in an era of assisted dying?

Den medisinske selvmorderen i individualismens tid

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