Professor Desmond O'Neill:

Sometimes you have to go back to our concern about suicide, for example. When we decriminalised suicide it was not to create suicide as a right, it was so as not to cause distress, in particular for families or where there had been a failed attempt at suicide. The decriminalisation was part of an understanding of distress and suffering and not adding to it through the legislative route. New Zealand and Australia are obviously very young. There is the idea you can put in these safeguards, when all of those will almost certainly be challenged under human rights law, and all will be eroded. In the first case of euthanasia in the Netherlands where the doctor was taken up, the judge said it was probably acceptable because the patient had bedsores and the room reeked of urine. All we could think was that this was the most awful justification of poor care. The impulse should be to get the pressure sores healed, and in most proper care facilities you will not smell urine. The danger here is despair and nihilism. We have imperfect systems, and we have to have a margin that always supports the therapeutic impulse. We think of the bombshell that is suicide. The reason we are concerned is not that everybody who commits suicide has a mental illness of some kind. The John Donne poem states that every time we lose somebody we lose a part of ourselves as well. Choice, autonomy and having a say are now key. I sometimes hear the medical model being used loosely as a phrase. We go for the biopsychosocial model. That is the core part of healthcare. We also find people growing in their illness. For many advocates at time when they are looking to the future, we find that most of them end up dying a natural death like Terry Pratchett.

I circulated to members material on the stress these type of choices put on people around them.