A boost for suicide by self-starvation from the Washington Post

By Wesley J. Smith   We aren’t an anti-suicide culture anymore. Oh, sure. We bemoan those of veterans and teenagers — still — but the elderly, ill, and disabled? Not so much. The assisted-suicide movement boosts suicide in many forms. One of the most insidious is known in euthanasia parlance as VSED, which stands for “voluntary stop …

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Suicide rates much higher among UK people with disabilities.

By Ann Farmer Editor’s note. This appeared on the blog of Alex Schadenberg. According to statistics from the Office for National Statistics [ONS] , ‘[s]uicide rates are much higher among disabled people’, with nearly ‘50 men with disabilities out of every 100,000’ taking ‘their own lives’, while the figures for disabled women are 19 out …

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Suicide Contagion

By Wesley J. Smith  I have often argued that, as a matter of logic and intuition, the widespread legalization of assisted suicide will increase both the rate of assisted suicides and the rate of unassisted suicides. After all, many people conflate what is “legal” with what is “right.” Once a state gives its imprimatur to …

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Some Canadian doctors are refusing to treat attempted suicides

By Michael Cook Canada’s new euthanasia laws are perplexing doctors who have to deal with suicide attempts. According to the National Post , there have been a number of reports of doctors who refused to treat people who had tried to kill themselves. In the case of poisons, remedies were readily available. Quebec’s College of …

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The very dark story arc of “13 Reasons Why” and the threat of suicide contagion

By Nancy Valko Today, it is hard to keep up with the constant stream of information coming not only from TV and movies but also from the social network. But to understand and hopefully to protect and help our children and others in today’s culture, it is important to keep up with current media and …

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Psychiatrist Opens Door to “Rational Suicide”

  By  Wesley J. Smith I have been warning for many years about the “rational suicide” movement within the mental health professions. The latest thrust to have psychiatrists sanction some suicidal patients’ self-destruction was just published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry–alarming considering the euthanasia movement’s current energetic attempts to legalize doctor-facilitated death there. Psychiatrist Angela Ho argues that helping …

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Papageno and Werther effects–public policy lessons for the prevention of suicide

By Dr. Peter Saunders Editor’s note. This post ran in 2011, but I did not run across it until today. It is a brilliant explanation of how suicide should not be portrayed in the media—and why. Dr. Saunders is a former general surgeon and is CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a UK-based organization with 4,500 …

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