…enario one, we have a person who does not have disabilities other than mental health challenges. This person shows up to the hospital with an intent and plan to die by suicide. Maybe they’ve already made an attempt, and have been brought to the hospital by someone else. When this patient is admitted, they are evaluated by a medical professional. This evaluation includes several core components to learn more about the patient’s current state and pr…
…althcare for disabled people, particularly discrimination related to clinical algorithms in healthcare decision making, organ transplantation and suicide prevention. Quality of Life Assumptions and the Use of Clinical Algorithms Involuntary withdrawal of life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT) is a practice that has prematurely ended the lives of disabled and chronically ill people without the consent of patients or their surrogate decision mak…
…bled” policies, and we have a message: EQUALITY Every human being is of equal value. Laws that treat some lives as worth protecting, and other lives as worth ending, are discriminatory. DIGNITY Dignity isn’t a handout, and our doctors can’t give it to us in the form of a lethal prescription. We don’t need to die to have dignity – we already have it. DIVERSITY Human diversity is a beautiful fact of life. There is no one perfect kind of human being…
…hat we are extremely concerned that assisted suicide, sometimes euphemistically called “aid in dying,” could be legalized in Montana. It is estimated that there are 21,265 cases of elder abuse annually in Montana, reported and unreported (http://web.archive.org/web/20101021101332/http://www.eadaily.com/15/elder-abuse-statistics/). Statistically, 90 percent of elder abusers are a family member or trusted other. Similarly, people with disabilities a…
…on a ventilator after a bullet wound inflicted in Iraq resulted in his total paralysis from the neck down. Here are some of the comments from Gold and Coleman: Statistically, spinal-cord patients are more likely to be young and male — hurt in sports, auto accidents or other trauma. Unlike older patients, who may come to be disabled more gradually, they are suddenly forced to imagine a life with grave limitations. And, most likely, they’ve interna…
