The American public is shifting towards acceptance of doctor-assisted suicide in cases of patients with terminal disease. But what about when the patient is not terminal, but suffers from a neurodegenerative disease that will rob him of his dignity?
A year after comedian Robin Williams’ suicide, his widow announced that he had Lewy Body dementia in addition to Parkinson’s disease. Had he lived on, he would have begun losing the ability to move, think clearly, and make decisions.
In his latest Forbes column, Penn Memory Center Co-Director Jason Karlawish writes that the stigma associated with neurodegenerative diseases is more closely connected with the prognosis than with the diagnosis.
“As we pursue prevention, we’ll be labeling persons with neurodegenerative diseases at a stage when their disease is largely ahead of them,” he writes. “The ways we talk about living with Alzheimer’s disease, about the future after an early diagnosis, will shape whether we feel stigma and therefore a threat to our dignity and so our desire to be dead.”
Read the full column at www.forbes.com.