Suicide Tourists dying in Switzerland
By Alex Schadenberg
The Dignitas suicide clinic in Switzerland helped to kill 335 suicidal people in the past two years with 85 percent of them being foreigners.
Ludwig Minelli, the director of the Dignitas suicide clinic in Zurich has recently released his statistics on the number of deaths at the Dignitias clinic.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1216810.ece
The Dignitas clinic admits to charging approximately 5000 British pounds (approximately $10,000) to assist the suicide of their clients. One must first pay a membership fee to Dignitas before they will consider assisting a persons suicide. Of course it has nothing to do with money.
Minelli stated that 50 percent of the deaths are German suicide tourists with the British and the French making up the next two most common nationalities to die at the clinic.
Dignitas has been involved with suicides in vans, similar to the acts by Dr. Kevorkian, and they currently employ the plastic bag and helium method. They began the bag and helium method to avoid the need to receive approval from a physician who would write the lethal prescription.
Recently the Swiss court approved a case of assisting a suicide of a person who was chronically depressed and not physically dying.
Previous comments by Wesley
http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2007/04/dignitas-to-finish-hate-crime-with.html
http://discardedlies.com/entry/?15281_
Doctors in Switzerland have compared the methods used by Dignitas to those that were used by the Nazi’s.
Some say that this is not a fair comparison because the Nazi’s weren’t concerned about the choice of the victim, but since when have depressed and suicidal people freely chose death.
It is imperative that countries support suicide prevention strategies for their most vulnerable citizens whom Minelli and his Dignitas team are preying on.
We must recognize that a caring society protects its vulnerable citizens at their greatest time of need.
Labels: Swiss Assisted Suicide
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 7:26 PM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
Don't forget the fascists in the White House driving our military to suicide.
Every day, five U.S. soldiers try to kill themselves. Before the Iraq war began, that figure was less than one suicide attempt a day.
The dramatic increase is revealed in new U.S. Army figures, which show 2,100 soldiers tried to commit suicide in 2007.
"Suicide attempts are rising and have risen over the last five years," said Col. Elspeth Cameron-Ritchie, an Army psychiatrist.
Concern over the rate of suicide attempts prompted Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, to introduce legislation Thursday to improve the military's suicide-prevention programs.
"Our troops and their families are under unprecedented levels of stress due to the pace and frequency of more than five years of deployments," Webb said in a written statement. Video Watch CNN Senior Pentagon Correspondent Jamie McIntyre on the reasons for the increase in suicides »
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, took to the Senate floor Thursday, urging more help for military members, especially for those returning from war.
"Our brave service members who face deployment after deployment without the rest, recovery and treatment they need are at the breaking point," Murray said.
She said Congress has given "hundreds of millions of dollars" to the military to improve its ability to provide mental health treatment, but said it will take more than money to resolve the problem.
"It takes leadership and it takes a change in the culture of war," she said. She said some soldiers had reported receiving nothing more than an 800 number to call for help.
"Many soldiers need a real person to talk to," she said. "And they need psychiatrists and they need psychologists."
According to Army statistics, the incidence of U.S. Army soldiers attempting suicide or inflicting injuries on themselves has skyrocketed in the nearly five years since the start of the Iraq war.
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