The right to a peaceful death may seem a strange topic when we’re all so intent on staying alive during the COVID-19 pandemic. But, many people I know who are highly conscientious about social distancing also support the idea of rational suicide. They are not, in fact, suicidal in the normally understood sense, but do want the right to a good death at a time of their choosing.
I was recently part of a panel discussion on mental health and rational suicide. This webpost includes the substance of my talk.

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Lisette Nigot had “a good life”. She wanted a good death. Two weeks before her eightieth birthday, she took an overdose of barbiturates.
“I am of sound mind,” her suicide note read, “not ill or in pain or depressed”.
Lisette’s story, exemplifying rational suicide, is told in the documentary film “Mademoiselle and the Doctor” (featuring Philip Nitschke as “the Doctor”).
Lisette died by choice. Should we all have that choice?

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Euthanasia is not a topic of everyday conversation. Understandably. There are many barriers. But, Nikki Gemmell’s account of her mother’s suicide left me feeling urgent about the need to break taboos. Secrecy appears a poor choice, but how do you navigate such shadowed territory with loved ones who would be left behind?

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“I support euthanasia,” I would have said, without hesitation, until recently. That was before my friend, Eva, begged me to help her to die. What a huge thing it would be, I now realise, to decide the timing of another person’s death – even if it was legal, which in Australia it currently is not. Eva is now in palliative care, alive but with no life. Palliation is no panacea either, I have learned, and nothing about dying is black and white.

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Dr Rodney Syme has been deliberately provoking Australian law on euthanasia for twenty years, having assisted thirty deaths since 1996. He describes his motivation in terms of professional ethics, and sees his behavior as a form of non-violent civil disobedience. This post puts his position and its (currently criminal) legal status on record…Joan Beckwith.

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Philip Nitschke, euthanasia campaigner, says we need more words FOR suicide. I think we mostly need more words ABOUT suicide, particularly when the intolerable pain is primarily sociopsychospiritual. In this post I raise five questions for discussion and comment…Joan Beckwith.

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