As I was scrolling through the news yesterday, I came across this story in the Guardian. As most will know, the Netherlands has brought assisted dying into law. As many will also know, this is currently a live discussion in the UK and it seems almost inevitable that we will follow suit. The debates are currently happening but it seems like one of those campaigning issues that is all over the media now and has a whiff of sad inevitability about it. I would love to be proven wrong, I just suspect I won’t be.

Anyway, this Dutch woman hit the news because she has just won a landmark judgement granting her request for assisted dying. What makes this a landmark judgement, as opposed to just another run of the mill permission to be killed (what a horrible half sentence that is), is that she has been granted her request on the grounds of ‘unbearable mental suffering’. She suffers from chronic depression, anxiety, trauma and an unspecified personality disorder. In other words, her suicidal ideation and self-harm are no longer viewed as symptoms of her mental disorder to be relieved but as the very cure to the underlying mental health issues she currently faces.

Last month, I wrote this concerning such moves in Britain:

As many of you will know, I suffer from quite serious depressive illness. I have made more than one serious attempt on my own life and actively planned many more. Fortunately, I am alive today because I was not very effective at killing myself on my own and I now have some helpful medication that keeps me broadly on a level. The threat of assisted dying has some serious and real implications for people like me.

I went on:

If we are comfortable with people killing themselves, even encouraging some to do so, it will be hard to view as tragic those who do so as they struggle with mental illness. As we consider it less tragic, we may well find ourselves caring less about intervening with mental health services to avert it. If we follow the reasoning of Matthew Parris, the mentally ill are useless to society and, therefore, not worth saving. Not only is the cost of keeping them alive on benefits not worth it on such thinking, the broader cost of mental health interventions will similarly not be worth it. Just as some trumpeted abortion as health care because it is cheaper than paying out benefits and providing high level children’s and family services, so it won’t be long before we twig that the cheapest solution to mental health problems is to not bother intervening and then trumpet assisted dying as a form of health care too.

On a more personal note, I am alive today because I was not very competent in trying to kill myself. I am quite confident that if assisted dying were legalised and someone was willing to help, I would have been much more effective. If that someone is a doctor, it is nigh on guaranteed. If the grounds for assisted dying is the desire of the individual to die, and their willingness to be put out of their misery, it is hard to imagine anything other than a queue of severely ill, mentally tormented people lining up to take advantage of the provisions. We should be at least a bit troubled by the prospect of doctors being less concerned about how we might treat one’s suicidal ideation so much as proposing how they can help their patients most effectively carry it out!

Well, somewhat predictably, here we are looking at exactly that being proposed in the Netherlands. Indeed, not only proposed, but legally granted by court injunction. This, I think, really should make any British politician sit up and take notice. It should similarly make the British public sit up and take notice.

Despite the rhetoric and claims of those who bemoan slippery slopes, I think we do need to pay attention to where these things have gone before. Just like with the abortion debate, in which we were told this would only be for extreme cases and those with severe medical complications, we are now at the point of almost unmitigated access and claims of abortion as healthcare for all. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of where we are at, I am simply noting that what we were initially promised is now some considerable way down stream of that. And this is, frankly, typical of the vast majority of such legislation.

When we look at the introduction of assisted dying in places like the Netherlands, a similar phenomenon has happened. The terms on which it was promised have since shifted, its boundaries expanded and more and more people are included. We, just yesterday, now hear of its application to those who suffer mental anguish. So, the solution to people’s desire to kill themselves is going to be, how would you like us to help you do that? The sad truth is, this was all entirely predictable.

I am convinced that many argue for things such as abortion and assisted dying, ultimately, because they are cheaper than encouraging society to take its responsibilities to one another seriously and properly care for those who are in most need of help. It is also to the benefit of feckless men who neither want to take up familial responsibilities nor have the cost of doing so. Pumping money into single parent support and excellent children’s services is far more expensive than forcing the cost onto individuals and then telling them they can abort their children if the time and money is prohibitive.

I think the same is true for assisted dying. Why pay for expensive mental health treatments that may go on for a life time when there is a simple and particularly cheap option even being mooted by the seriously ill person themselves? Why bother with expensive palliative care? Why faff around with the cost of producing newer and better drugs when we have some old ones that will serve us in an entirely different, but ultimately much cheaper, way. It is horrible on every level and, frankly, a failure of society and morality.

But if you want to see how liberalism is wrecking everything, this is it writ large. Don’t think I mean “liberal” like America uses it. I mean hyper-individualist liberalism. Neoliberals, driven by nothing but economic output, salivate over this stuff. Matthew Parris said quite bluntly, it is time we realised economically useless lives should end and the cost of keeping them alive is not worth it. Gross, but honest. But the social liberals who believe in realising your true self and causing the body to match the mind – whilst arguing that it would be an absolute tragedy not to let trans people mutilate themselves in line with their minds otherwise they might kill themselves – are now effectively arguing the depressed should express what is in their mind and actively kill themselves out of what amounts to self-expression. Apparently suicide is both a tragedy and beautiful. It is similarly gross, but a liberal doublespeak gross that is nonsense leading to terrible ends.

The Socialist and the Reformed Evangelical in me hates all this. I hate it because community matters. We won’t help because it costs me too much is as offensive to Socialist principles as it is to Evangelical ones. We have responsibilities to one another and ought to setup society in order to meet people’s needs. To reduce people to economic units is offensive and to only meet needs based on cost-effectiveness is foul. It is immoral. It is a failure to care for the most vulnerable in society. Rather than actually help, we are simply suggesting people are better off dead. Society is better of with them dead. What we are witnessing is the last 50 years of economic and government policy, that has worked its way down through society, in the form of hyper-individualism driven by liberalism. It’s not a left-right issue, but a liberal-individualist vs communitarian-societal one.

But I mentioned weeks ago the worry for people like me. The fear of being told my depressive illness is best dealt with by killing myself. Rather than the doctor stopping me and helping my mind keep me from doing that, this move in law will encourage the doctor to do what I have tried several times to do before but with greater effectiveness. I am glad this law didn’t exist when I wanted to kill myself because, had it, I almost certainly would have succeeded. That it didn’t meant that I didn’t, the doctor helped and, as much as I wanted to die then, I am grateful that I didn’t today.

Despite all the current rhetoric from those who support assisted dying and the terms on which they want to bring it in, history tells us that is not where it will stay. We are already seeing laws brought in elsewhere expanding well beyond the terms on which they were brought in. I am deeply worried for people who suffer seriously with mental health issues, who asked on the wrong day or during the wrong year, might insist they really do want to die and that is their sound and reasonable choice. I fear many of those who would have said that once, wouldn’t say it today, but if the law introduces assisted dying they wouldn’t have any opportunity for their mind to heal and therefore change. I think we should worry about what we see elsewhere, we should worry about what is driving this push toward this change in law and we should stand against it.