[NON BLOG] Idle Boast

Guess what page comes up first on this Google search?

[BRIEF NOTE] The Ethics of Assisted Suicide for the Depressed

The recent death of Charles Fariala, a 36 year old Montrealer suffering from multiple sclerosis who committed suicide following a worsening of his disease, has focused attention on assisted suicide in Canada since his mother, Marielle Houle, has been charged with helping him kill himself. Fariala's death has a certain measure of irony, given how he composed, with his former girlfriend Dulcinea Langfelder, the play Victoria, which had as its central theme the possibility of enjoying life even in extremity. In the Toronto Star, however, Langfelder is quoted as saying that Fariala's decision to commit suicide wasn't inconsistent with his philosophy.

"Charles himself was against legalizing euthanasia (the taking of a life without a patient's consent)," she said. "He worked as an orderly, and he knew that if euthanasia was legal, scores of people would just disappear. But this was not euthanasia; it was his decision. If I was his mother, and he asked me to assist in his suicide, how could I not do that? I think it would actually be sadistic to refuse him.

"Victoria is about dying with grace," she added. "That's what Charles did. He wanted to die in his mother's arms. He wanted to die peacefully. And that's what he did."

Michael Valpy, writing in The Globe and Mail, explored how common clinical depression is among many sufferers of degenerative diseases, including multiple sclerosis, and the possibility that this mental state can bias the decision-making process.

Deanna Groetzinger, a spokeswoman for the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada, said many people with the disease are severely disabled but "wonderfully active and wonderfully productive. The question I would raise is, was it MS that was affecting this person?"

There is, she said, a known link to depression. "But we know the depression can be treated."

If Mr. Fariala was experiencing untreated depression, was he capable of giving rational consent to having help ending his life?

Of course, not all depressions are the same. More importantly, It's quite possible, I'd think, to be depressed at learning that one has a medical condition which will progressively and unstoppably worsen over time, to strongly fear and resent the impact that this deterioration will have on your sense of comfort with your self, for this fear and resentment to be motivated by depression, and yet for the decision to end one's life to be entirely sensible. In some circumstances, depression is an entirely natural outcome; it's positively unnatural to expect people to be happy all of the time, least not with certainly grim outcomes.

And yet. In a critical survey of the Netherlands' assisted suicide policy, Herbert Hendin discussed the disturbing case of Netty Boomsma, a depressed Dutchwoman who calmly and consistently her doctor to help her kill herself, after her younger son committed suicide some years following the accidental death of her elder son. He makes the good point that in a society where assisted suicide is accepted, people who face serious life challenges and are trapped in apparently intractable depression will be more likely than not to seek out assisted suicide, criticizing her psychologists for not considering alternative treatments for her profound depression apart from a head-on confrontation with her grief over the death of her children. Speaking from my own personal experiences, seemingly intractable personal issues are rarely solved by head-on confrontation; sometimes, things must unexpectedly impinge from the outside, or one's own thoughts must undergo sudden phase shifts.

I won't come to a conclusion on assisted suicide, in this post or in the next couple of years. One might as well ask me to come to a definitive conclusion on abortion. Case-by-case considerations must be made. It's ad hoc, but what else can one conscientiously do?

[BRIEF NOTE] Yet Another Argument Against All-Hallowed Tradition

Via Jonathan Edelstein's Head Heeb, I found this outline of the first testimony in the infamous sexual assault trials. The British ITV channel has two articles covering the first phase of the trials, the former hostile and the latter more friendly. The Scotsman goes into more detail:

“Even as a teenager, [current Mayor] Steve Christian was a prominent and influential figure within his peer group. He was the leader of the pack.

His alleged victim, speaking via a video link from the New Zealand city of Auckland, broke down several times during her testimony.

She said as a young girl, of 11 or 12 years, she was taunted on the island for being a “half-caste,” and that she had been targeted and raped by Christian on four occasions. During the first attack, she said she was being held down by the defendant and two other men.

The woman said there was no one she or her parents could turn to on the island after the rapes. Under cross examination she said it was the norm on Pitcairn to keep quiet. Defense lawyers suggested other witnesses would likely contradict the woman’s claims that she was bullied at school and that sex simulation games took place at island gatherings.

Just a handful of islanders sat in their community hall, that has been converted into a court complex, to watch the case.

“I think they sense that they want to kind of keep away from it a bit and not really be involved in all of the details,” Ray Coombe, a visiting pastor told TVNZ.

[. . .]

On Tuesday, a group of women residents on the island came to the defense of the seven charged men, claiming the cases had been blown out of proportion and that the victims may have been coerced into testifying.

The Head Heeb has an extensive archive related to the various legal battles waged by the Pitcairn Islanders to alternatively reject British authority over their island and pass off what happened as something both consensual and an integral part of island culture.

If these allegations are true--and I suspect that they are--what the whole affair surrounding Pitcairn Island sexual assault trials demonstrates, very clearly, is that tradition can and is enthusiastically used as an excuse for all manner of barbarisms. Unconditional respect for culture is not compatible with unconditional respect for individual people. If I have to choose, I'll take the people every time.