X-Message-Number: 6510 Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 10:45:22 -0700 From: David Brandt-Erichsen <> Subject: Australia (from Dr. Nitschke) Forwarded from Dr. Philip Nitschke, Darwin, Australia: It is true, as reported, that Max Bell left the Territory, unwilling to wait for the necessary two remaining specialist doctor signatures he needed to make use of the new voluntary euthanasia law. His comment was that he was not prepared to wait in a hospital bed, getting weaker and weaker, for two specialist doctors to simply come and state the obvious, ie that he was not depressed, and that he was terminally ill. It was a humiliating experience for a proud man. But he has not given up. He simply wished to return to a "kinder" place to consider the few options he has left. One of those options is to be able to return to the Northern Territory if there is any progress on the search for supportive psychiatric and physician assessment. There is now some evidence that the Australian and New Zealand Royal College of Psychiatry is playing a damaging and destructive role in this affair. Whilst initially insisting that only a fully qualified psychiatrist would be able to determine the psychiatric "eligibility" of a patient requesting voluntary euthanasia under the NT Act, they are now arguing that the assessment that a patient "has no clinically treatable depression" is an impossible one for any psychiatrist to make! The search for a psychiatrist continues, and meanwhile Max Bell could well become the first martyr of the Territory's heavily medicallised "Rights of the Terminally Ill Act". --Philip Nitschke Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=6510