His own experience assisting his terminally ill wife in ending her life set him on a path to founding the Hemlock Society and writing a best-selling guide.
Derek Humphry, a British-born journalist whose experience helping his terminally ill wife end her life led him to become a crusading pioneer in the right-to-die movement and to publish “Final Exit,” a best-selling guide to suicide, died on Jan. 2 in Eugene, Ore. He was 94.
His death, at a hospice facility, was announced by his family.
With a populist flair and a knack for speaking matter-of-factly about death, Mr. Humphry almost single-handedly galvanized a national conversation about physician-assisted suicide in the early 1980s, at a time when the idea had been little more than an esoteric theory batted around by medical ethicists.
“He was the one who really put this cause on the map in America,” said Ian Dowbiggin, a professor at the University of Prince Edward Island and the author of “A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine” (2005). “The people who support the notion of physician-assisted suicide absolutely owe him a big thanks.”
In 1975, Mr. Humphry was working as a reporter for The Sunday Times of London when Jean Humphry, his wife of 22 years, was in the final stages of terminal bone cancer. Hoping to avoid prolonged suffering, she asked him to help her die...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/health/derek-humphry-dead.html?smid=em-share
For the majority of patients, I don't see the need for assisted suicide. It is not all the hard to kill yourself. Doing it yourself also prevents the possibility of the one you asked for help to be charged with murder.
ReplyDeleteThe exception are those individuals who are paralyzed in such a way that that cannot move on their own, in that case they should be allowed to get assistance. However, there needs to be multiple provable ways to show they actually wanted to die so as not to implicate the assister for murder.
(This is pretty unorganized rambling, so bear with me lol.) I think a lot of it boils down to the distinction between active and passive suicidal ideation (basically the difference between wanting to die and not wanting to be alive). When I was struggling with suicidal ideation a few years ago, it was mostly passive for me - I fantasized about not existing, but it was uncommon for me to actually contemplate methods of suicide. Most methods of suicide are violent or painful. I didn't want to die like that to spare myself emotional pain, and a person wanting to end their life to avoid physical pain likely wouldn't want to experience a painful death either, even though it'd mean less pain in the long run - brains are weird like that. Death from overdose seems like the least painful method, but it can be tricky to get right without assistance (this is the reason that men successfully commit suicide more often than women, even though women are more likely to attempt it; women usually attempt to overdose, while men usually shoot themselves). If it doesn't kill you (and without assistance, it usually doesn't), it can really screw you up medically.
DeleteI also think it might give their survivors more closure? This is mostly just an assumption, obviously I have no actual experience with this, but if I had a terminally ill friend/family member, learning that they'd ended their life with assistance from a physician would be easier for me to swallow than learning that they'd taken matters into their own hands, even though it's the same result in the end.