Mendez

Kenya Mendez
Ms. Sanchez
English 4
13 April 2015
Assisted Suicide

Helping someone kill themselves is like committing murder instead of helping them end
their life they should help them see the positive things about themselves. Assisted suicide is
immoral no matter how much you want to justify it, helping someone die should be a crime.
Most physicians think that helping them die is a cure since they are already suffering dying
would be like a relief to the ill.
According to a 2005 Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey, 60 percent
of those polled believe that people have a moral right to end their lives if they suffer from great
pain and foresee no opportunity to improve their physical and or mental health
condition(Connors 18). A person must have their own decision wether or not to end their life
but they should do it on their own not with help. When a physician gets in it theyre helping get
rid of life of someone who could possibly be cured, assisted suicide is an easy way out, helping
someone find strength is the challenge. In 2005, 29 percent of Americans believed that killing a
terminally ill spouse was never justified(Connors 19). If a spouse is ill let time do their thing if
they are gonna die then what give physicians the right to make their time shorter. When the act
is forced underground, a physician may tell you the patient, Im going to give you this bottle of
secobarbital, but dont take it all at once, or it can kill you (Yount 57). Physicians who help a

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patient commit suicide the dirty way without their permission or at least the permission of the
law should be put to death penalty or at least to jail it is just as if someone committed murder and
it should be punishable by law.
Suicide is mostly found in teenagers since they are the most emotional. Suicide
contagion is real, she said. Social behavior is contagious and influential (Connors 88). They
are highly influenced by their peers or famous people. Teenagers are who can not handle the
most pain or any means of suffering. Suicide is an advertisement for a way out of your
problems, he says, and with any advertising, if its repeated, its more effective (Connors 91).
This is a form of assisted suicide because it is as if they are showing them how they should end
their life. There is some evidence that those who die in clusters wouldnt have acted on their
own (Connors 88). Since they are with a group of people and they do not want to seem out of
place or uncool they feel pressured into following what the group is doing. All teenagers want to
fit in with at least one group of people, and if they find a group they fit in with they feel as if
they should follow their example. If you really look at we are who our friends are.
Once someone has attempted to commit suicide they are put under medication to get you
of depression. Antidepressants double your thoughts of suicide instead of lowering it (Connors
116). If an antidepressant double your thoughts then why do they keep prescribing them to
people? Doctors should know the side effects of all medication and they must know that people
feel this way, could it be that your doctor doesnt know how to help you and they think that
making you feel worse and you actually committing suicide will help you be at peace. When
you try to stop taking these drugs , you can suffer an emotionally-distressing withdrawal that
includes crashing with depression, fatigue and feelings of hopelessness, and often involves

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painful physical symptoms such as flu-like syndrome, muscle cramps and shock-like
headaches (Connors 116). They get you hooked on this medication and with or without it you
still feel terrible. Medication will not be the cure to depression, there is obviously a reason on to
why you feel this way and there is help, there is always someone out there willing to listen to you
and make you feel better. Most do not ask for help because they think they are just a burden and
that their problems are not important. Talking about their problems might be what helps someone
decide not to go through with actually committing suicide.Doctors are instructed, through
industry propaganda, to reduce patient drop-out by managing the side effects and
encouraging patients to stick with the program rather than encouraging physicians to listen to
patients individual sensitivities (Connors 114). The doctors are causing a patient more mental
health instead of reducing it. How could they encourage you to continue taking something that
makes you feel worse? Doctors as much as everyone else in this world are corrupted and would
do anything to not look bad. They might not put the knife in your hand but putting the thought of
suicide in your head is just as worse.
Physicians think that when you help a patient die that they are helping them by relieving
them of pain and suffering. A number of underlying reasons for a request for help in dying is
possible. Loss of control, fear of abandonment or burdening others, financial hardship, physical
and psychological symptoms, and personal beliefs are all potential cause of suffering (Yount
51). When a patient is ill and know that for the rest of their life they are going to be undergoing
medication or needing a family member there at all times for physical help, they feel that they
will not be happy and that its not life living the way that they do. Most physicians do not help a
patient to the fullest extent they go through with the patients request without telling them that

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there are other options. Furthermore, the decision to prescribe lethal medication should never be
considered until all other options have been exhausted (Yount 55). A physician might say that
they have given you all the options that you have but a person should never quit on life, because
life is so beautiful. Do not ever give up always ask for more, always have hope that God can give
you a miracle. As long youre fighting and strong a physician should give you every option not
just an easy way out because life is hard and you can not give up that easy.
The goal of palliative care is to provide comfort for the rest of the patient's life, and a
peaceful death (Palliative). Physicians should talk to their patients about palliative care so that
they will not suffer through their incurable illness. Supporters of palliative care believe that
many terminally ill patients ask to die because they suffer from untreated pain, undiagnosed
depression, despair, or social isolation (Palliative). Most patients do not get the full information
of how they can be treated if they do not have a cure for their illness. Palliative care will make
their pain and suffering more tolerable and they might possibly enjoy the few months, weeks,
days, hours, or even seconds of there life. Palliative care is medical care provided to people
dying of an incurable illness. (Palliative). If more people knew about this or at least families
knew about this they might not rush into the decision of physician assisted suicide.
Jonathan was a survivor. For nearly 15 years, he had coped with the tremendous
emotional and physical burdens of living with HIV and liver disease. But when his longtime
physician assured him that medicine could no longer offer him hope of a life without pain or
incapacity, Jonathan decided it was time to die on his terms. For 10 years, Jonathan lived his life
to the fullest despite two serious diseases. Jonathan was becoming more and more dependent on
others, unable to use eating utensils or leave his apartment alone. For two months in early 1996,

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Jonathan was completely bedridden; a close friend cared for him during the day and Marty cared
for him at night. Although he recovered, Jonathan acknowledged that his liver was failing. The
hepatic encephalopathy had become chronic, sending him into near-comatose states if he did not
constantly evacuate the ammonia from his system. Jonathan didn't want to die. He kept hoping
his body could maintain the fight. "The bar kept being set lower" as Jonathan's illness
progressed, says Marty. Jonathan was willing to continue living if he could get out of the
apartment once a week and maybe see a film. But as the effects of his disease worsened, his
quality of life became increasingly intolerable. Two weeks before he died, he woke up one night
and asked Marty what had happened to him that year. "It was as if he had been sleepwalking
through the previous year. He couldn't remember how his life had been reduced to this."
Jonathan wanted to discuss assisted suicide with his physician, who had been his caretaker for a
decade. Within a few months he would slip into a coma and die; he could suffer. Jonathan
wanted his physician to help him die. His physician complied; he said he was there to help ease
suffering. He wrote Jonathan a prescription and Jonathan immediately had it filled. A month
before he died, Jonathan once again went to the doctor to get one final confirmation of his
terminal diagnosis. After that, Jonathan began planning his death. Marty called Jonathan's friends
and they came over. His mother flew up from Florida. Jonathan didn't tell them he was going to
end his life; he just wanted to see them a last time and offer his own goodbye. It was his own
way of having a living memorial. He also wanted to get a do not resuscitate order (DNR). He
was worried that if he fell into a coma, the nursing aides who were caring for him at home would
call an ambulance and he would be resuscitated. Jonathan seemed peaceful. His liver disease had
made him a chronic insomniac. Marty hadn't seen Jonathan sleep so soundly in more than two

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years. Jonathan stopped breathing six hours later, with his cat sleeping next to him on the bed.
Jonathan died the way he wanted -- not in a hospital room, suffering, but in his own home with
people who loved him. When Jonathan felt that his life had deteriorated beyond recognition and
that all hope of recovery had been taken from him, he decided to take control over the one final
thing that he really could control: his own death. Jonathan had started keeping lists to bring to the
doctor because he was forgetting so many things. On the top of the paper was the phrase "quality
of life." It was underlined.
In conclusion famous people, teenagers, and physicians are major causes of assisted
suicide. Suicide contagion is real, she said. Social behavior is contagious and
influential (Connors 88). Teenagers will follow the crowd and they will do what there idols do
because they feel as if they are who inspires them. Teenagers are always being peer pressured to
do things they should not in order to be part of a group. Late adolescence is often the age at
which serious psychological disorders, like bipolarity and schizophrenia, first manifest, and
psychiatrists note that a suicide in the midst is a trigger mainly to those already thinking about
suicide (Connors 89). With the thought of suicide slowly popping up in their head it will keep
just coming and coming until you actually have the courage to end their life. Drug Enforcement
Administration that their intent in dispensing high dosage medications is to relieve symptoms,
not hasten death (Yount 58). The antidepressants that are prescribed makes someone worse and
less happy it intentionally makes you more depressed to drain you of strength so that you will not
be able to commit suicide.