Assisted Suicide is Never a Treatment for Mental Illness

Addressing the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group, Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley Smith said that activists and pressure groups often use fear, in particular fear-mongering on the difficulties of death, to push through their agenda.

He added that people “very rarely” commit assisted suicide because of pain, but do so for existential reasons. These reasons may include being worried about losing their dignity and a fear of being a burden to their families and loved ones.

“I can’t think of anything more cruel than letting somebody who’s having a terrible awful time getting through the night because of existential anguish feel that their deaths have a greater value than their lives,” Smith said.

He added that assisted suicide violates human rights by creating a two-tier system of valuing lives which says to some people ‘Yes your suicide is worth preventing’, but says to others ‘yours isn’t’.