For every one suicide in our country, the American Association of Suicidology estimates 25 non-fatal suicide attempts. The British Journal of Psychiatry found most people who survive suicide do not attempt to kill themselves again: “nine out of 10 people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date.”
Suicide attempts don’t simply seek out death. They give expression to misery. They cry out for help. They seek an end, not to life, but to suffering, shame and depression. By bringing these buried miseries into the light, suicide attempts often motivate the loving intervention of family, friends, neighbors and the medical community. In most suicide attempts, it is life and not death that has the final word.
It is baseless and unintelligent to imagine an attempt at medically-assisted suicide is not as much a cry for help as any other suicide attempt. When a loved one expresses a desire to kill themselves, we are counseled to restrict their access to “lethal means” — to hide medication and firearms. But in places like California, an incredible “lethal means” — a cocktail of poisons, sedatives and painkillers known as DDMA or DDMP — is mailed to their home.
Unlike every other form of suicide, in which the desire to live and the desire to die are so obviously at war in the individual, medically-assisted suicide is presumed to be a rational, unchanging choice. This is foolish. Consider Michael Freeland, whose story was recorded by the National Council on Disability:
At age 62, Michael Freeland had a 43-year medical history of significant depression and suicide attempts. After receiving a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, he requested assisted suicide. Dr. Peter Reagan, an assisted suicide advocate who was associated with the group Compassion in Dying (later renamed Compassion & Choices), a leading pro-assisted suicide organization, prescribed lethal drugs to Michael Freeland. … Freeland then made a telephone call to Physicians for Compassionate Care (PCC), a medical group dedicated to improving the care of seriously ill people without resorting to assisted suicide. The call was answered by a PCC volunteer who was trained in counseling people with serious illness. With encouragement from a doctor recommended by PCC, Freeland underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment, which alleviated his cancer symptoms significantly. PCC volunteers arranged for him to receive adequate pain care, other appropriate medication, and 24-hour attendant services. A PCC volunteer stayed in touch with him to offer encouragement, as did some old friends, who began to visit him daily. He also received assistance to resolve other health and personal problems. With this multifaceted assistance, his suffering abated, as did his wish to take lethal drugs. He was able to fully reconcile with his daughter, who had been estranged from him during certain periods. In the end, he lived 2 years post-diagnosis; he eventually died of natural causes.
Michael’s story shows the attempt at medically-assisted suicide follows the same path as other suicide attempts: an ambivalent desire that does not end in death but in the intervention of friends and caregivers who reaffirm that life is worth living. But what if Michael’s desire to live became conscious and decisive, not after the appointment prescribing him poison pills, but after swallowing them? Within suicide states, physicians help sick people to kill themselves in a way that ensures their suicide attempt will not be the occasion of any positive, life-affirming change. The poisons commonly used in medically-assisted suicides are maximally lethal. Survival is not an option.
It is easy to imagine no one regrets medically-assisted suicide; after all, its victims all are dead. It is easy to imagine medically-assisted suicide is an unchanging and unambivalent decision rather than a cry for help. Suicide States like Oregon are not required to keep any record of the time between the ingestion of poison pills and death, records concerning complications are quickly destroyed and “this destruction of essential data makes it impossible to carry out retrospective analysis of Oregon’s assisted deaths.”
Likewise, it is easy to imagine those who attempt medically-assisted suicide are clear-headed individuals, rather than people suffering underlying causes of hopelessness and neglect. In Suicide States, the trend is to meet the request for suicide with great haste. Oregon has seen “a reduction in the length of the physician–patient relationship from 18 weeks in 2010 to 5 weeks in 2022,” to refer those requesting suicide to a willing physician and decidedly not to investigate the possibility the person requesting medically-assisted suicide might be depressed — “the proportion referred for psychiatric assessment remains low at just 1%.” Unwilling to listen to a cry for help, medical practitioners in Suicide States are increasingly unable to recognize it.
We’re not like that in West Virginia. Here, when the sick, disabled or ill express a desire to kill themselves, we do not ignore everything we know about suicide and prescribe them poison any more than we hand them a loaded gun. We help. Our mothers and fathers can trust a physician in West Virginia with what afflictions and depressions trouble them and their doctor will not repay their trust by recommending death. This is a confidence we cannot take for granted. Without a vigorous rejection of medically-assisted suicide, the future chosen by Canada where medically-assisted suicide is now the fifth leading cause of death could well become our own.
That’s why it is vital to vote for Amendment One this November. It secures our state from medically-assisted suicide and the culture of indifference and carelessness it promotes. It affirms the goodness of suicide prevention. And it sends a clear and confident message that West Virginia is not a place of fear and despair, but a state of courage and hope.
Pat McGeehan, R-Hancock, is in his sixth term in the West Virginia House of Delegates. A graduate of the US Air Force Academy, he serves as Dean of a private school in the Northern Panhandle. Pat resides with his daughter Kennedy in Chester.