Unfortunately I don't see dementia being the type of condition that gets included any time soon -- that would be portrayed as massive 'coercion', where vulnerable people are being persuaded into suicide without understanding what is happening. And you would have tons of imagery about happy smiling grannies who don't know what time of day it is and believe that their children are some random long-dead person out of their past, but are physically fit as a fiddle and take pleasure in the little things of the moment. Of course that isn't (necessarily) the reality of dying of dementia...
Talking about money is also a big red flag for most people, with the idea being that the elderly will be made to feel 'a burden' and morally pressurised by their heirs to kill themselves before they have 'used up the children's inheritance' -- I even had that from one of my own relatives, a highly educated and strong-willed woman who to my astonishment felt convinced that if she wasn't actively banned by law from committing suicide then she would somehow feel herself inescapably compelled to do so for her children's benefit (both of whom she loves very much, and who so far as I know have no desire to kill off their mother in order to inherit her grotty old flat!)
Personally I feel that it is entirely wrong for the general public to believe that it is fine for doctors to kill people passively through protracted dehydration (withholding nourishment from those who are clearly dying), but wicked for them to kill the same patients actively and more mercifully. But then I just don't see human life as something that should be preserved indefinitely and at any cost: suicide to me has always seemed an entirely rational response to the unbearable, and keeping the 'soul' clinging to the body for a few more days of an existence that has to be medicated out of all awareness in order to make it vaguely tolerable seems both pointless and cruel. What good does it do a dying man to prolong his final agonies beyond what nature would ever allow? It's like those arguments about whether or not you should ever 'switch off the life-support machine' for patients in a vegetative state, because very occasionally a very few of them do recover a certain amount of awareness -- but if you have a patient whose body is actively shutting down, what is gained by stretching out the process while drugging him into a coma so that you can say he isn't actually in pain? What is the value of those extra days -- beyond the easing of the carers' conscience?
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Talking about money is also a big red flag for most people, with the idea being that the elderly will be made to feel 'a burden' and morally pressurised by their heirs to kill themselves before they have 'used up the children's inheritance' -- I even had that from one of my own relatives, a highly educated and strong-willed woman who to my astonishment felt convinced that if she wasn't actively banned by law from committing suicide then she would somehow feel herself inescapably compelled to do so for her children's benefit (both of whom she loves very much, and who so far as I know have no desire to kill off their mother in order to inherit her grotty old flat!)
Personally I feel that it is entirely wrong for the general public to believe that it is fine for doctors to kill people passively through protracted dehydration (withholding nourishment from those who are clearly dying), but wicked for them to kill the same patients actively and more mercifully. But then I just don't see human life as something that should be preserved indefinitely and at any cost: suicide to me has always seemed an entirely rational response to the unbearable, and keeping the 'soul' clinging to the body for a few more days of an existence that has to be medicated out of all awareness in order to make it vaguely tolerable seems both pointless and cruel. What good does it do a dying man to prolong his final agonies beyond what nature would ever allow? It's like those arguments about whether or not you should ever 'switch off the life-support machine' for patients in a vegetative state, because very occasionally a very few of them do recover a certain amount of awareness -- but if you have a patient whose body is actively shutting down, what is gained by stretching out the process while drugging him into a coma so that you can say he isn't actually in pain? What is the value of those extra days -- beyond the easing of the carers' conscience?