What’s Going on in Canada? Why is Life so Cheap?
CTV News has reported a case in which a depressed man was allowed to apply for a medically assisted death (euthanasia), even though he was not terminally ill. The request was accepted despite opposition from his family:
“A British Columbia man who struggled with depression and showed no signs of facing an imminent demise was given a medically-assisted death despite desperate pleas from his loved ones, family members say. Alan Nichols was admitted to Chilliwack General Hospital in June, at age 61, after he was found dehydrated and malnourished. One month later, he died by injection. Days before his death, family members begged Nichols… not to go through with the procedure. They still don’t know why doctors approved the life-ending procedure and insist that Nichols did not fit the government criteria of facing an ‘imminent death’. ‘He didn’t have a life-threatening disease. He was capable of getting around. He was capable of doing almost anything that you had to do to survive’, his brother, Gary Nichols, told CTV News”¹.
Gary received a phone call to say that his brother was scheduled for an assisted death, but “the doctor said they couldn’t provide any other information, including the medical reason for the procedure”, and that the patient was the only person who could stop the procedure.
I thought that doctors were motivated by healing and helping ill people, not helping them to die unnecessarily. Furthermore, the Discovery Institute in the USA believes that this euthanasia death “would seem to be well outside the legal guidelines”².
This is not an isolated example. Canada is promoted as a liberal, tolerant country. In 2016, however, the Discovery Institute published another article entitled Canada Is on the Verge of Instituting the Most Radical Culture of Death in the World³. It’s worth checking out the whole article, but here are some extracts:
“That’s right, if the nation’s Supreme Court conjures a ‘right’ to be dead, Canada will be more radical than the Netherlands, which allows psychiatrists to euthanize the mentally ill. More radical than Belgium, in which euthanasia of the disabled and mentally ill have been conjoined with organ harvesting… The Supreme Court’s ruling is so broad and absolute, it would appear to create a positive right to be killed if one has a diagnosable medical condition… Topping it off, euthanasia will be a free service paid for by the government under Canada’s single payer health plan. That works really well for socialized medicine as there is no cheaper ‘medical treatment’ than a lethal injection”.
Alan Nichols was merely depressed. Is that a reason to grant assisted suicide? Depression is not a terminal illness. Indeed it is surprising that not everyone feels depressed. After all, many modern scientists assure us that:
- the universe, which is essentially a machine, operating according to the laws of physics, is pitilessly indifferent to humans
- there is no purpose or meaning to human existence, in fact the whole universe is purposeless
- our sense of self, our identity, who we are, is an illusion
- there is no such thing as a soul
- there is no afterlife; when the body dies, we die.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell expressed this better than anyone else: “That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave … All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built”⁴.
If this is true why wouldn’t we all be severely depressed? It’s hard to imagine how anyone could be happy. I have argued in an earlier article⁵ that Russell, rather than expressing universal truth, was severely depressed because of personal circumstances, and in need of therapy. The same was probably true of Alan Nichols. I don’t know how much a euthanasia drug costs, but I imagine it’s a lot cheaper than many sessions of one-to-one therapy. It’s also a lot more convenient, resolving a tricky medical problem in one quick session. However, it’s also a lot more callous and uncaring. What is going on in the minds of Canadian judges and doctors? Are Canadian citizens allowing this to happen without protest?
Even though depression would seem to be an appropriate response to the supposed human condition, it nevertheless continues to be considered an illness by the medical profession, specifically a brain problem which can be cured by drugs. There was an interesting article on this theme recently on Medium by Mariana Lenharo⁶. The title was Why It’s So Hard to Develop a New Drug for Depression, the subtitle being Depression is still mystifying to researchers.
She reports that “Over 17 million Americans have diagnosed depression and about a third of people with depression do not respond well to currently available antidepressants”. The problem is perceived to be that the brain is difficult to understand:
- “Developing a truly new drug for mental illness is no easy task, as the brain is one of the most mystery-laden areas of medicine”.
- “The discovery of new medications for depression is especially fraught. The brain is a highly complicated organ and scientists still don’t fully understand the various causes of depression and how to treat them”.
- “The unanswered questions are not just about how antidepressants work, but also about what exactly goes on inside a depressed brain”.
Has no one considered the possibility that mental illness might be an illness of the mind, not the brain? Or perhaps of the personal psyche, or of the soul? It’s likely that these scientists don’t believe in any of these, however. Nor the medical professionals at the hospital which so easily assented to the euthanasia of Alan Nichols.
What is the true explanation of depression? It may be only one isolated example, but I can attest that my own severe depression was resolved through self-analysis which allowed me to understand the source of the problems, and spiritual awakening. Is the medical profession unwilling to contemplate such possibilities? It seems that they would rather help people die quickly. Is this merely because it is the cheapest option, or is it because that’s how locked into their materialist worldview they are?
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics, and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website www.spiritualityinpolitics.com (click here and here).
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Bibliography:
https://evolutionnews.org/2019/09/depressed-man-euthanized-in-canada/
Footnotes:
2. from article in bibliography
3. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/01/canada_is_on_th102441.html
4. The Free Man’s Worship, 1903, https://users.drew.edu/jlenz/br-free-mans-worship.html
5. https://medium.com/@graham.pemberton/the-psychology-of-atheism-bertrand-russell-8a75d3d63482
6. https://elemental.medium.com/why-its-so-hard-to-develop-a-new-drug-for-depression-cb264db2e388
