Is this Sickness Unto Death?

After Mass yesterday we sat around having a coffee and chatted about the recent depressing news as the 'Culture of Death' advances upon the media, the Courts, the Law Lords. Now some vocal MPs are gathering strength to launch another assault on the lives of the most vulnerable by overturning years of law protecting human life and replacing them with new laws on assisted suicide and euthanasia.

It seems to be everywhere in the news. Death, viewed now widely as a welcome reprieve from sickness and illness, disease and suffering, is being greeted so openly that people are willing to have the 'right' to take your own life or making others complicit in your suicide, perfectly legal and acceptable in modern society.

Death is of course not the end. It is not, at least, the end that many people think it is. The human soul is immortal. Death is for us a moment of fearful uncertainty, but great trust in God, in His Mercy and in the intercession of the Angels and Saints for us. What a Catholic hopes for with his whole heart is for a good, happy and holy death, fortified by the Sacraments. The whole idea of suicide is anathema to Catholics because of the knowledge of Who is on the other side, that is, God, our Judge and our Saviour.

That is not to say that Christian souls have not committed suicide. Yet, the Church teaches that culpability for the sin of suicide can be mitigated on grounds of a person's mental state at the time. Here in Brighton, here at St Mary Magdalen's even, there are more than a couple of parishioners who suffer mental health problems, paranoid schizophrenia, psychotic issues, severe and deep depression and a host of mental health problems. There are men and women here who have been sectioned, locked up in mental hospitals, been injected with drugs, or even had anti-psychotic drugs placed literally up their behinds by mental heath services in order to keep them quiet. One man has been sectioned 5 times.

"There is not enough love in those hospitals," he said, "I wish I could be allowed to just have a relapse and trust the staff to be compassionate with me, but they don't allow it. That is why I am on so many drugs to combat schizophrenia." It turned out that the drug he is on has nasty side effects, including impotency. I have another friend on anti-psychotic medication and that person says it makes you infertile. I sometimes wonder whether medication for the mentally ill has been deliberately developed to have side effects which mean that those with mental health problems can't breed. I've no evidence, just a hunch.

Anyway, I am digressing. The main point is that as we sat around the table discussing this, the point was raised that assisted suicide and euthanasia laws were a door through which some pretty horrendous things could walk through. If the Government cuts funding for mental health and it is cheaper to offer vulnerable men and women a couple of pills and an 'easy way out', if those suffering mental health problems complain of their plight, these patients are vulnerable to abuse by those charged with their protection. If even the idea of assisted suicide is placed on the table, then laws such as the ones being proposed by MPs, Lords and advocates for the 'right to die' may be ushering in a new Nazism by stealth, or even by accident...a new Holocaust.

Already, it appears, mental health patients are not always treated by the services charged with their care very well. Some complain of a lack of love in the hospitals, some complain of a lack of respect, of staff who mock them behind their backs and who despise them for their condition. Some have been abused sexually, physically and verbally. Some complain that in general they feel that they are made to feel somehow inhuman, or sub-human, having been sectioned, and having been held against their will in a place which does not treat them with true human dignity. Of course there are lots of 'angels' who work with mental health patients, but not all in the profession are messengers of peace.

Dignity in Dying is one organisation which I expect fully backs proposed reforms to existing UK law on assisted suicide. Yet, dignity is what this is all about. It is respect for human dignity that leads men and women to care for society's most vulnerable, for those with disabilities, for the elderly, homeless, abandoned, mentally ill and those in need of palliative care. Human dignity is upheld not by killing, but in loving service to the needs of another.

Dignity, respect for human dignity was the first thing to go in Germany during the Third Reich. In order to stop a Fourth Reich appearing on these very shores, the kind of legislation being proposed, even for these difficult cases which involve men and women who suffer from terminal illnesses, has to be rejected, and rejected utterly, as being contrary to what constitutes a good society. If legislation like the kinds of things you hear on the radio everyday nowadays ever gets instituted in the UK, I would suggest it will not be long before things get very, very out of hand.

Mental hospitals are secretive places, not places where the public go and see what is happening on a regular basis. A lot of terrible things happen in secretive places. The full horror of the Holocaust was not realised by the World until after the end of WWII. More than one person I was talking with last night lamented that the future for patients and residents, because of the assisted suicide debate and its possible outcome, could be in very grave threat indeed.