The police and GMC should be investigating the London psychiatrist that Michael Irwin is protecting
By Dr. Peter Saunders
Editor’s note. Dr. Saunders is a former general surgeon and is
CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a UK-based organization with 4,500
UK doctors and 1,000 medical students as members.
Michael Irwin
The papers are full today of a report (initially carried by the Daily
Mirror) about the first British man with dementia to have an assisted
suicide at the Dignitas facility in Zurich, Switzerland.
The BBC is now running the story which will give it even wider
coverage but it has also been reported by the Telegraph, Independent and
Daily Mail. I have personally been asked to comment by the BBC, Mirror,
Times, and Telegraph.
This story (on which I originally commented in March) is in the news
because Michael Irwin , who heads up the campaign group SOARS (Society
for Old Age Rational Suicide), gave an exclusive interview to the Daily
Mirror reporting that an 83 year old man with early dementia had killed
himself at Dignitas seven weeks ago. The Mirror then splashed it on
their front page. Now other news outlets are playing catch up in the
usual feeding frenzy.
Irwin claims to have ‘helped’ the (unnamed) man in question by
referring him to a London psychiatrist (currently also unnamed) who
provided him with a medical certificate to say that he was mentally
competent enough to make an informed decision about being helped to kill
himself.
Irwin believes that assisted suicide should be available to elderly
people on demand and seems determined to make himself a martyr for the
pro-euthanasia cause by progressively pushing the legal boundaries so
this case was very helpful to his cause.
According to the Daily Mirror he now claims to have helped at least 25 people to die at Dignitas.
In 2005 the General Medical Council found him guilty of serious
professional misconduct and struck him off the medical register after he
admitted supplying sleeping pills to help a friend die although you
will seldom see this reported.
Ever since, ironically and curiously, he seems to have escaped
prosecution by virtue of the fact that he is no longer a registered
medical practitioner. This is in spite of the fact that encouraging or
assisting a suicide remains a crime carrying up to a 14 year prison
sentence under the Suicide Act 1961.
This is because the Director of Public Prosecutions has decided that
he hasn’t yet fulfilled his prosecution criteria. The problem this has
created is that Irwin will go on annexing the Sudetenland until he
provokes a reaction from the DPP or police because he sees that any
reaction will give even more publicity to his cause.
However there is now a new twist to the tale. In deliberately
concealing the identity of the London psychiatrist who issued the
certificate of mental capacity to this patient Irwin may well now be
obstructing the course of justice.
The Director of Public Prosecutions makes it clear that doctors
acting in a professional capacity to assist a suicide are likely to be
prosecuted and the General Medical Council (GMC) has warned that such
doctors risk censure, including being struck off the medical register.
That would seem to place the unnamed psychiatrist at risk of both being prosecuted and also losing his licence to practice.
So at very least it would seem that this case should be fully investigated by the police and the GMC.
However on past form I would expect that Irwin will make it extremely
difficult for them. He has cleverly, with the media’s full cooperation,
created an unsolved mystery that will run and run and ensure that he
himself stays in the media spotlight.
The reason for this is that Irwin is actually a campaigner who craves
publicity. So he will talk to the media when it suits him but will also
withhold incriminating information when it best suits his cause.
He is playing ‘catch me if you can’.
I suspect he would quite like to be prosecuted to give his cause even
more of the oxygen of publicity and will continue to push the envelope
more and more until he elicits a response.
Those selling newspapers are of course only too happy to oblige but
in the process they risk fuelling more anxiety and suicide contagion
amongst the worried well.
What we learn from Irwin is that pro-euthanasia campaigners will
always push the boundaries. This is because once you accept the argument
that there is such a thing as a life not worth living it is not
possible to draft a law to encompass all who would like to fall within
its remit without eventually opening it up to everyone.
The minute assisted suicide is allowed for anyone at all others will
come using the same arguments of compassion and autonomy with allegedly
equally deserving cases that fall just outside the existing legal
boundaries. And they will claim that in the interests of equality they
should have access to it too.
And so we see in any jurisdiction where euthanasia or assisted
suicide has been legalised that incremental extension steadily takes
place (e.g., Oregon, Belgium, Netherlands).
First there is a year by year increase in numbers and then,
accompanying this, a widening of the categories of people to be
included.
First we have mentally competent, adults with less than six months to
live (as Dignity in Dying and Lord Falconer are pushing for here). Then
there are those who are ‘suffering unbearably’ (in mind or body) but
not terminally ill; then minors who are judged capable of making up
their own minds; then the mentally incompetent who ‘would have wanted
it’ had they been able to say.
Irwin wants assisted suicide to be available not just for those who
have early dementia, but for any elderly people who feel that their time
has come.
The problem is that one cannot grant the legal right to assisted
suicide to any group without at the same time removing legal protection
from other similar people.
If the law ever were to change in this country vulnerable people
would feel constrained to end their lives for fear of being a burden
upon loved ones. Or alternatively loved ones would feel constrained to
help their determined elderly relatives.
This pressure would be felt with real intensity at this time of
economic recession when many families are struggling to make ends meet.
Given the number of people and organisations who stand to gain
financially from the deaths of elderly people it would be a certain
recipe for personal and institutional elder abuse.
People with dementia and their families need the best possible care
and support, not campaigns for the removal of their legal protection.
Our current law provides the right balance. On the one hand the
penalties it holds in reserve act as a powerful deterrent to
exploitation and abuse. On the other hand it gives discretion to
prosecutors and judges in dealing with hard cases. It does not need
changing.
The odd thing about this whole drama is why this 83 year old man,
given his obvious mental capability, did not simply take his own life
without requiring assistance.
But then, had he done that, it would not have been an international
news story and would not have helped Michael Irwin’s campaign.
Editor’s note. This first appeared at
pjsaunders.blogspot.com
Source NRLC News
No
longer does the UK have to be concerned with passing laws to allow
physicians to kill those who “want to die”. Things have now deteriorated
to the point that physicians in the their health care system are
deciding on their own to kill the medically vulnerable.
Let’s
wind the clock back to 2003. In January wheelchair-bound quadriplegic
actor Christopher Reeve visited Australia to promote the legalisation of
“therapeutic cloning”. This was absolutely necessary, he said, or
patients would die needlessly. Scepticism about the potential of
embryonic stem cells was utterly unwarranted. “That’s a myth,” he told
his Australian audience. “That’s not true. Don’t let anyone tell you it
is a pipedream.”
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