by Jessie Roberts
P.W. Buchanan discusses a study that compared seniors who committed suicide to seniors who died from natural causes:
While debate about the ethics of elder suicide tends to revolve around terminal illnesses and loss of autonomy, those end-of-life issues didn’t turn out to be the common causes of real-life suicides among the elderly. The study found that those who took their own lives actually had less impairment of “functional autonomy” in their final months of life. Those who took their own lives also had fewer chronic health problems than those who died naturally. “In our study,” the report observes, “suicide cases were found to have a lower risk of having cancer, emphysema, and cardiovascular disease at the time of death.”
Now, one could posit that these elderly people had decided to end their lives precisely because they were still able to and because they anticipated imminent impairment. Significantly, however, the study found that mental health, most notably depression, was a variable that showed up much more frequently in the suicide cases than in the control cases. Based on the psychological autopsies, “the suicide cases were ten times more likely to present a current psychiatric disorder during the six months preceding death than the controls.”
All of which complicates how we think about elder suicide. It might be another vestige of dogma, but why am I more inclined to privilege physical pain and external circumstances when I consider the ethics of suicide? Why does internal pain, in the form of mental illness and chemical imbalance, strike me as a less acceptable reason? And isn’t this why physicians’ opinions are part of the law—because we want to limit suicide to those who are unarguably rational?
The Dish 