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


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