Victoria’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2017: sending mixed messages on suicide

The Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill will allow for individuals who are suffering from a terminal illness and are not expected to live longer than 12 months to request to be killed or to kill themselves.

Sure, the circumstances in which that would be possible are limited. But here’s the rub. Any psychologist could also tell you that people who are diagnosed with a terminal illness often go through feelings of depression, grief and suicidal tendencies. It’s a normal experience for someone in that situation.

But this new bill which legalises assisted suicide doesn’t take this into account. It misses the possibility that a decision by a terminally ill person to end their lives might be driven more by depression than by the suffering caused by the terminal illness.

In fact, the bill doesn’t even require doctors to check on the consequent mental health of the patient. It doesn’t require doctors to check for an undiagnosed mental health issue; only a pre-diagnosed one.

Add to this that the stipulated 10-day waiting period between initiating a request and receiving the prescription for lethal drugs is nowhere near long enough to allow for a likely change in mental health. People can, and do, change from their initial pessimistic outlook on their life with an illness. People are able to have hope again.

The fact is that this bill fails to protect people with a terminal illness at a time when they are at their most psychologically vulnerable. And yet we’re deeply, and rightly, concerned when a person who has good physical health decides to commit suicide, and we try and do everything we can to stop it.

Why this double standard? Why the mixed messages? Surely life is valuable regardless of whether someone is terminally ill or not. That is the whole reason why we don’t want people to commit suicide. But if we start to make exceptions to this we imply that some lives are less valuable than others.

We shouldn’t send mixed messages about suicide. The Bill before the Parliament does just that. Instead, we should just send one clear one—don’t do it. Your life matters, no matter how bad you think it is.