Materialism kills

“Social Causes of Rational Suicide in Older Adults,” 

 Neoliberalism changed human relationships within society from a civil sphere that enshrined a commitment to social solidarity and collaboration among fellow citizens to that of a universal market where human beings are pawns in calculations of profits and losses. Rather than emancipation and freedom, the markets created atomization and loneliness... 

The declaration of aging as a disease, pathologizes aging as an entity to be shunned and avoided, in oneself and others.

and who benefits? well, it will cut medical bills. (/s)

 . .Clinicians should also feel empowered to speak up against agism and recognize it in themselves. Acceptance of the idea of rational suicide in older adults is in itself ageist. It implicitly endorses a view that losses associated with aging result in a life that is not worth living.

from the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
 via National Review.

it goes beyond this of course: you know, I have always worked with the poor, (mostly AmerIndians but also rural white and Hispanics). This is not a problem with them, because they still hold the idea of family and respect their elders as being a source of wisdom. And despite what outsiders see as "family dysfunction", the family is still there as the first line to help each other.

or as one of our caregivers told a neurologists who pressured the family to remove the feeding tube from an alert but brain damaged relative: That's the difference between you white folks and us Indians: we respect our elder.

But the real danger is something no one wanst to admit: That it is minorities who are most vulnerable to be pressured into "non treatment" decisions, or being the victim of removing "futile care" or even the victim of a doctor who "gives them morphine haha" instead of treating their stroke.

(I refer to a visiting doctor who suggested we do this to one of our admissions with a stroke: the attending merely said "we don't do things like that here", but the visitor was a resident from Baltimore, and I wonder how many black old ladies got "morphine, ha ha" without their families knowing what he was doing).

traditional societies and most religions see the elderly as a source of experience and wisdom, and my Objibwe patients put it: suffering as part of the road that the Great spirit wants them to travel, to be endured bravely (This is not just Amerindian: my geeky brothers said the same thing about his cancer).

Indeed, evolutionary scientists now recognize that grandparents were important to the evolution of humanity: because they help raise grandchildren, and they often teach from the wisdom of experience.

ah yes: The subcontext of pushing suicide is the expense of caring for the senile... but hints that this would also treat the handicapped who are now supposedly more common than they were in the past. But were they? This argument goes back to the days of Plato, and anyone living in "S***hole countries" know that a lot of families have one or two of these people being care for in their homes.

but of course, in the modern world, if you are busy caring for Grandmom (or your autistic son, or even your normal 2 year old) it makes it hard for you to be productive and work full time.

But the real underlying reason for this is that the western culture that stresses autonomy and success defines life in money terms. If you aren't successful, you are a failure. And this is one reason that a lot of folks are taking drugs (legal and illegal), to treat their internal angst of a meaningless life.

in contrast, we prevatican II catholics saw suffering to be endured and offered up as a prayer. Indeed, in traditional societies there is the idea that everything that happens to a person is for a reason: we may not know the reason, and like Job we may be angry at God for letting us suffer, but nevertheless there is a reason for us to live despite weakness and needing help.