I agree that Mr Rossiter had every right to die, as his condition was totally reliant on medical intervention, and dying was a "natural" thing for him to do.
So to put it in simple language, no one was killing him and he wasn't killing himself.
I think that all the publicity surrounding this case was unfortunate as to some people this case seems to validate suicide. Temporarily depressed people can seek suicide as a "treatment" for their condition and it has been shown they are encouraged to carry out the idea of killing themselves by the suicide of others. A local young mother of four with post natal depression died after travelling to Mexico. She chose her method of suicide after reading the writings of Dr Nitchke. There is nothing "dignified" about being orphaned, or losing your daughter, sister or wife.

In our society we have trouble coming to grips with suicide.

Everyone has a right to decide to end their life. Their life belongs to them.

The article states, "...Mr Rossiter had every right to die, as his condition was totally reliant on medical intervention, and dying was a "natural" thing for him to do. So to put it in simple language, no one was killing him and he wasn't killing himself."
I disagree. He was killing himself. By not choosing his medical treatment he was killing himself. Dieing was a 'natural' thing for him to do... since when has what is 'natural' been an ethical justification? It is 'natural' to give people no medical treatment and let 'nature' take its course. That doesn't mean it is right. The world is far more complicated than what is 'natural'.

Everyone's life belongs to them, we have a right to end our own life if we so wish. It is wrong for others to judge people for choosing to end their own life. You don't know what they are experiencing, so you cannot judge their decision.

In my opinion the N drug that allows someone to kill themselves should be accessible in this country. If people want to kill themselves, they have the right to do so. It is not our choice, it is theirs.

Perhaps less noticed is Rossiter's statement after the court verdict:

Quadriplegic man has doubts over right to die

WARWICK STANLEY AND ANDREA HAYWARD
August 15, 2009

Perth quadriplegic Christian Rossiter has won a landmark legal case giving him the right to starve himself to death, but now says he could yet be talked out of taking his life.

Mr Rossiter, who won the right to have his feeding tube removed in a judgment delivered on Friday by West Australian Chief Justice Wayne Martin, thanked the judge for his benevolence.

Speaking through a tracheotomy tube at Perth's Brightwater care facility, where he lives, Mr Rossiter said he was happy that he had won the right to die.

``I'm happy that I won my right to die, and (have) no sustenance and no water,'' he said.

``The judge was so benevolent that he considered those, that he set a legal precedent in Australian law.

``That similar quadriplegics can choose whether they want to live.''

Mr Rossiter said he would seek further medical advice from an experienced palliative care doctor before deciding not to be fed through a tube to his stomach.

He said there was some chance he could be dissuaded from ordering the tube to his stomach to be removed.

``I want to end my life, but after I speak to a medical professional,'' Mr Rossiter said.

``He could dissuade me. I have to seek advice. There's a possibility I could still be dissuaded.''

The fact that Rossiter has been given control over his life may mean that he chooses to extend it longer than he otherwise would have wanted otherwise. In the event, that seems not to have been the case but it has been noticed that when patients in terminal pain are given the opportunity to control injection of pain relief drugs, they tend to use less than when injections are administered by a nurse.

Control over one's destiny is a very important thing to have.

Millions of people don't have access to the sophisticated set up needed to keep Mr Rossiter alive, such as in Africa. They are not killing themselves when they die of malaria.


We do have trouble coming to grips with suicide. I had great difficulty coping with my son's suicide attempt and deep depression. Thank goodness no one was goading him on to kill himself and he survived the crisis as do many other people.

I disagree with making suicide easy, for the obvious reason that it canot be reversed.

"Millions of people don't have access to the sophisticated set up needed to keep Mr Rossiter alive, such as in Africa. They are not killing themselves when they die of malaria."
-Yes but Mr. Rossiter did have access to such treatment and by choosing not to access it he was causing his own death.

"We do have trouble coming to grips with suicide. I had great difficulty coping with my son's suicide attempt and deep depression. Thank goodness no one was goading him on to kill himself and he survived the crisis as do many other people."
-of course depression is a serious mental illness, and I would certainly not support 'goading people on' to commit suicide. However not all people who wish to commit suicide are mentally unstable. Those people who are mentally stable should have the right to choose.

"I disagree with making suicide easy, for the obvious reason that it canot be reversed."
-Yes it is a serious decision, yes it has serious consequences, but we as people sometimes must make serious decisions with serious consequences, like Mr. Rossiter did.

"-yes, but Mr Rossiter did have access to such treatment and by choosing not to access it he was causing his own death."

From the moment we are born we are walking a path that leads to death.
Christian Rossiter's death came because he enjoyed the excitment of high risk challenges. When he fell off the mountain he got the reverse side of the coin, which was massive injury, so it was a "natural" event for him to die.
My personal opinion is that risking death is irresponsible, but I accept that the general community thinks that excitment such as this is normal and healthy.
However, I think "cold blooded suicide", is different. When we take the fateful decision to end our life into our own hands, we are advertising to the wider community, the notion that life is not worth the effort. Potentially the influence of others to immitate suicide is proven. Grief from the suicide of a loved one is harder to cope with than others.
Perhaps people are driven by the need to escape from our individualistic and selfish society. Compare the small amount of human interaction we have emerging by car every day from our suburban home with the amount people have in poorer places in Africa or Asia where people walk or bus everywhere.

It a sad reflection on us all, that people want "giving up" to be validated as a "personal choice". Our gallant forebears who struggled through war, disease and poverty must surely be spinning their graves.

"It a sad reflection on us all, that people want "giving up" to be validated as a "personal choice". Our gallant forebears who struggled through war, disease and poverty must surely be spinning their graves."
-Many of our 'forbears' who struggled through war, disease and poverty also chose suicide. Suicide is not a new phenomenon. it has existed for centuries, if not since humanity itself began to exist. While I agree suicide is by no means an ideal situation, and while I also agree that there are problems regarding isolation etc. with contemporary society, I still believe it is an individual's right to choose to end his or her own life. It is not for me or you to decide for them. It is their choice.

I agree, provided that it is a thought-through, reasoned choice. Many people who attempt suicide when seriously depressed have second thoughts about it, and many of those who succeed when depressed probably would have also, had their attempt failed.

In 2003 Tad Friend published a lengthy piece in The New Yorker, in which he investigated the history of suicides linked with the Golden Gate Bridge. It is a famous suicide magnet: its thousandth jumper leapt over the side in July 1995. Friend reported:

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

Kevin Hines was eighteen when he took a municipal bus to the bridge one day in September, 2000. After treating himself to a last meal of Starbursts and Skittles, he paced back and forth and sobbed on the bridge walkway for half an hour. No one asked him what was wrong. A beautiful German tourist approached, handed him her camera, and asked him to take her picture, which he did. “I was like, ‘f--k this, nobody cares,’ ” he told me. “So I jumped.” But after he crossed the chord, he recalls, “My first thought was What the hell did I just do? I don’t want to die.”

Friend traces the long debate that went on about whether to erect suicide prevention barriers on the bridge, and writes:

A familiar argument against a barrier is that thwarted jumpers will simply go elsewhere. In 1953, a bridge supervisor named Mervin Lewis rejected an early proposal for a barrier by saying it was preferable that suicides jump into the Bay than dive off a building “and maybe kill somebody else.” (It’s a public-safety issue.) Although this belief makes intuitive sense, it is demonstrably untrue. Dr. Seiden’s study, “Where Are They Now?,” published in 1978, followed up on five hundred and fifteen people who were prevented from attempting suicide at the bridge between 1937 and 1971. After, on average, more than twenty-six years, ninety-four per cent of the would-be suicides were either still alive or had died of natural causes. “The findings confirm previous observations that suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented and acute in nature,” Seiden concluded; if you can get a suicidal person through his crisis—Seiden put the high-risk period at ninety days—chances are extremely good that he won’t kill himself later.

Christian Rossiter's case was not one where intervention should have overriden his own choice, but many suicides are not in the same category as his.

The link between suicide and mental illness has not been clearly established- some psychiatrists say 20% of patients who attempt suicide are mentally, others 100%.

This debate is a very serious one, and comes down to whether or not we believe the government has the right to decide whether someone lives. Suicide is currently illegal in Australia.

One of the most convincing arguments for suicide legalisation I heard from Philip Nitschke on 'Enough Rope':

ANDREW DENTON: The question is the danger that a young person, someone in the middle age, someone who’s not 80 may go through a depressive episode, and I, I think what you said there that seems to be what is the hardest bit about your cause to sell, which is for those that oppose you, for you to say well there’ll be some people that may unfortunately take it. That’s very easy for those that are opposed to stand up and say — “Here is a man that is prepared to sacrifice some lives to help some others.”


PHILIP NITSCHKE: Yeah, well look I mean the safest position I guess when you say ‘my causek’ I mean, if we argue for legislation, you’re not going to have anything like that. I’m saying something much broader than that. I’m saying everyone over the age of 65 should have access to these drugs. Now that’s not a particularly popular position, and there’s a lot of argument about that. People that would support the idea of legislation will not support the idea of wide, wide access to these lethal drugs by the broader or older population and I can see why that is. And I mean I’m not, I mean, I’m arguing the case for it because I think it’s a, it’s a, uh it would be a benefit for society. But what I really think would be a benefit for society is the introduction of legislation. That is absolutely safe.


ANDREW DENTON: I want to take you back to 2002, Perth woman, Lisette Nigot.


PHILIP NITSCHKE: Yeah.


ANDREW DENTON: An amazing documentary that was made about her decision to take her own life, with advice, assistance from Dr Nitschke. This was called ‘Mademoiselle and the Doctor’. We’ll show a little bit of that first.

CLIP


ANDREW DENTON: Now, she said it there. She didn’t want to be 80. She’d had enough. She was tired of life, and you said you tried to talk her out of it. What can you say to try and talk someone out of that situation?


PHILIP NITSCHKE: It seemed a bit strange to me but at some point I think we have to accept the fact that when intelligent, articulate, rational people make decisions that we don’t like, doesn’t mean we come along and try and impose on them our own views. And I said to some, look at her life and say “For God’s sake, Lisette, you’ve got a lot you can give.” And she said “No, I want, now is the time for me to die.” And so I found myself giving ground and giving ground and it was only when I started to give ground that our relationship started to improve. And so we actually did have a very good relationship in those last months, as I just said “Well, it’s unusual.” It was an interesting lady. It split the voluntary euthanasia movement across Australia, across the world in some ways, because people say you shouldn’t be dealing with people like this. And I was saying “Well, this is much broader than simply talking about help for very sick people. We’re really talking about whether people have a right to control that life or not.”


ANDREW DENTON: Do you understand why there are those who oppose you so fiercely, who feel so emotional about this issue, are so confronted by the thought that someone like Lisette at 80 would choose to kill herself simply because she wasn’t interested in living anymore?


PHILIP NITSCHKE: The thing that irks me most about people who oppose this issue is that they are quite keen to shove their worldview down other people’s throats. Now I don’t care if people want to have the most difficult protracted painful death they want. Good on them. That’s if they want to do it that’s fine. I will support them. I will give them access to the best medical treatment. They can sit there on a ventilator for as long as they like, but don’t come along and tell me to do it. Lisette wasn’t trying to tell everyone else that they have to die at the age of 80. She was simply saying that I want to die at the age of 80. Now why do we come as a society and judge her on this?


ANDREW DENTON: I want to show you something from Four Corners of, from May this year. This is a thing called ‘The Peanut Project.’

CLIP


ANDREW DENTON: What is ‘The Peanut Project’?


PHILIP NITSCHKE: Well, it’s a group of people that set out to say we want access to the best drug and of course the easiest way to do that is to travel overseas and buy it from Mexico. But these people have said “We want to work out whether we can do it ourselves.” And they’ve had a series of successes. In fact, some very recent success, where they’ve been able to go down that path of making the drug themselves. They say well…


ANDREW DENTON: And this is happening in Australia? They’re doing this…


PHILIP NITSCHKE: Yeah , that’s right.


ANDREW DENTON: This is outside the law.


PHILIP NITSCHKE: Yes, it’s not a, it’s not a legal process to sit down and make yourself Nembutal.


ANDREW DENTON: And how many taking the trek to Mexico?


PHILIP NITSCHKE: Oh we’re getting, we’re getting one a one a week. We’ve got a tour going over to Mexico soon. We don’t, we don’t all, we don’t all meet down at Kingsford Smith airport, the Nembutal tour to Mexico, but…

LAUGHTER


ANDREW DENTON: Just imagine ‘The Women’s Weekly End it All Now Tour.’


"...if people get themselves to San Diego at a certain date, which we give them, we make sure that they’ve got the best information, the most recent packaging, the places to go to so they can make that little two hour trip across the border into Tijuana, and come back with the drug."


PHILIP NITSCHKE: Exactly. But if people get themselves to San Diego at a certain date, which we give them, we make sure that they’ve got the best information, the most recent packaging, the places to go to so they can make that little two hour trip across the border into Tijuana, and come back with the drug.


ANDREW DENTON: You run suicide seminars for those that that wish to learn about things like ‘The Peanut Project.’ You believe it’s the right of people that to be able to choose how to control how they die. Is it OK for someone who’s perfectly healthy to come to these workshops?


PHILIP NITSCHKE: They’re mostly healthy. I mean, mostly we restrict age. You’ve got to be over a certain age to come along.


ANDREW DENTON: Which is?


PHILIP NITSCHKE: Oh 65. We have had, we’ve had, we’ve had exceptions with various good reasons. Or you could be a person who’s ill, but most people are well 65 and over, over age group.


ANDREW DENTON: And there they’re given what sort of information?


PHILIP NITSCHKE: Well, pretty much it’s a, it’s an environment where they can ask any questions they like. And I mean with the new laws in Australia it’s actually a crime now to talk on the telephone about this particular issue, but in a workshop environment we can talk openly about methods.

more at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/tra ... 094728.htm

Suicide rates:



METHOD OF SUICIDE

In 2005 the most frequent method of suicide was hanging (including strangulation and suffocation) which was used in half (51%) of all suicide deaths. Poisoning by drugs was used in 12% and poisoning by other methods (including by motor vehicle exhaust) was used in 16% of suicide deaths. Methods using firearms accounted for 7% of suicide deaths. The remaining group (Other) comprised 14% of suicide deaths and included deaths from drowning, jumping from a high place, and other methods. Suicide deaths using firearms have more than halved over the last ten years, from 389 deaths in 1995, to 147 deaths in 2005. See Table 5 for data on broad groupings of method of suicide.

There are about 2000 suicides each year in Australia at present.

More info http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mf/3309.0/

It's hard to talk about death. Death with dignity or without it.
Anyway he hurt his close people. And this is not just. I know that for sure as my younger brother was on his way of committing suicide as he thought he was unnecessary for the others, for his mother. Silly silly stuff.

How many of those who have and will post to this question I would ask "How Do You Feel About the Death Penalty?" How we accept the death of others is in my opinion at the center of this question. In my life I have faced this question in two very distinct cases one was person I went to school with he suffered from schizophrenia who the last time I spoke to him was doing push ups in a mud-puddle in front of a convenience store when asked why replied "that the voices told me to." latter a neighbor refused medical treatment for cancer.

How do I judge the merits of these cases? In my opinion there is only one ethical answer, with as much dignity and compassion as I am able to offer the family members who must deal with the shame and loss that they face and endure the future. In both cases the decision maker is not there to defened their choice or why they made them.

In my opinion it is moraly responsible to give compassion to the living and their friends they have suffered a loss that they are not able to change. As a society we have a moral responsibity to accept that not everyone is capable to live up to our personal standards of correct behavior and who is make the judgement call for everyone?

We sit in judgement of others at are own peril who you associate with are people who reflect your values. There is no gold standard no touch stone to guide our decisions, but we can be certin that how we treat others is the only thing we can control.

If I may refer to Lewis Carol's Humpty Dumpty in from memory through the looking glass 'When I use a word, it means exactly what I chose it to' [sic]. Perhaps I am being pedantic hear, I do not see Mr Rossiter's death to be a act of active euthanasia or suicide rather his death was as a result of the refusal of medical treatment.

As a Catholic, and a theologian we must remember that as the Catechism of the Catholic church teaches us we are to treat the sick with respect and dignity they deserve, all active tasks to preserve life needs to be taken, it is a fundament of my religion and our secular legal system that murder is unacceptable. However the Catholic Church does teach and differentiate between active and passive euthanasia.

To explain the difference between the two. Active euthanasia involves as the name suggests active steps be it physical or chemical to directly end an individual's life for example by an overdose of a drug / medication such as morphine, where as passive euthanasia, the type Mr Rossiter chose is removal of treatment and allowing nature to take its course is permissible.

Mr Rossiter has the right to comfort, he has the right to informed medical treatment, or its withdrawal, there does need to be active and careful explanation of what will happen by medical along with the appropriate support for all the key stake holders.

I do not believe that there should be steps to actively kill patients. I do not believe that active euthanasia should be permitted due to the possible abuse and exploitation of vulnerable people for financial gain. With the right to remove or end treatment there needs to be safe guards to prevent murder for assets and profit. Vulnerable people do need to be protected.