Proponents of physician-assisted suicide increasingly are advocating extending the practice beyond the terminally ill to the chronically depressed, The Baptist Press reports.
Jacob Appel, who teaches at Brown University in Providence, R.I., wrote in the May-June issue of the Hastings Center Report that the arguments used to defend assisted suicide for the terminally ill can be applied "in many cases of purely psychological disease," including "repeated bouts of severe depression."
"(T)he principles favoring legal assisted suicide lead logically to the extension of these rights to some mentally ill patients," Appel wrote. "Most likely, the taboo against assisted suicide for the mentally ill is a well-meaning yet misplaced response to the long history of mistreatment that those with psychiatric illness have endured in Western societies."
Bioethics specialist Wesley Smith, a lawyer for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, agrees with Appel.
In Appel's article, "we finally have a clearer picture of where the right-to-die crowd wishes to take America," Smith wrote in the July 5 online version of The Weekly Standard.
"The natural trajectory of assisted suicide advocacy leads" to increasingly wider categories -- "from the terminally ill, to the disabled and chronically ill, to the 'tired of life' elderly, and eventually to the mentally ill," Smith said.
