Autism, Mental Illness, Euthanasia and the WaPo

(Cross-posted from the other blog.)

There was a piece in the Washington Post the other day with a striking headline: Where the Prescription for Autism can be Death.

Normally, if we're saying that the prescription for x is y, we mean to say that y is being suggested as a treatment for x. Painkillers are the prescription for a bad back, a steroid cream the prescription for eczema, and so on. Even if you find that phrasing a bit clunky, "prescription" implies the recommendation of a medical expert. On that basis, the implication here is that somewhere in the world, doctors are seeing patients, diagnosing autism, and saying, "I wonder if the best thing would be to kill you". That would be Quite a Big Deal.

The place in question is Holland. But a quick look at the article shows - surprise, surprise - nothing of what's hinted at in the headline. Here's the opening few sentences, edited slightly for formatting:

In early childhood, the Dutch psychiatric patient known as 2014-77 suffered neglect and abuse. When he was about 10, doctors diagnosed him with autism. For approximately two decades thereafter, he was in and out of treatment and made repeated suicide attempts. He suffered terribly, doctors later observed, from his inability to form relationships: “He responded to matters in a spontaneous and intense, sometimes even extreme, way. This led to problems.”
A few years ago, 2014-77 asked a psychiatrist to end his life. In the Netherlands, doctors may perform euthanasia — not only for terminal physical illness but also upon the “voluntary and well-considered” request of those suffering “unbearably” from incurable mental conditions.
The doctor declined, citing his belief that the case was treatable, as well as his own moral qualms. But he did transmit the request to colleagues, as Dutch norms require. They treated 2014-77 for one more year, determined his case was, indeed, hopeless and, in due course, administered a fatal dose of drugs. Thus did a man in his 30s whose only diagnosis was autism become one of 110 people to be euthanized for mental disorders in the Netherlands between 2011 and 2014.

So, then, it's a story about a man, who happened to be autistic, and who asked a psychiatrist for euthanasia. After a little to-ing and fro-ing, that request was granted. There is no reason to believe that this was a case of death being prescribed for autism. It's just that he happened to be autistic and to want to die, and a prescription for assistance was provided. Phrasing is important.
Dutch law on assisted dying is famously liberal; in considering the permissibility of euthanasia for psychiatric as well as somatic illnesses, it is in the minority of the minority of jurisdictions that consider the permissibility of any euthanasia. I have addressed the question of psychological suffering in relation to euthanasia elsewhere, and shan't rehearse the details here; suffice it to say, I don't see any reason in particular to think that mental illness and physical illness should be treated all that differently in principle:

Mature Content?

This is a slightly longer version of a post I've just published on the other blog.

There's an aisle at the supermarket that has a sign above it that reads "ADULT CEREALS".  Every time I see it, I snigger inwardly at the thought of sexually explicit cornflakes. (Pornflakes.  You're welcome.) It's not big, and it's not clever: I know that. But all these years living in south Manchester have taught me to grab whatever slivers of humour one can from life. Anyway... A friend's FB feed this morning pointed me in the direction of this: a page on Boredpanda showing some of the best entries to the 2016 Birth Photography competition. (Yeah: I know. I had no idea, either.)

I guess that birth photography is a bit of niche field.  The picture that one "Best in Category: Labour" - which you can see here - is, for my money, a brilliant image.  Some of the compositions are astonishingly good - but then, come to think of it, childbirth isn't exactly a surprise, so I suppose that if you're going to invite someone to photograph it, they're going to have plenty of time to make sure that the lighting is right.

A second thought that the pictures raise is this: no matter how much people bang on about the miracle of birth... well, nope.  Look at the labour picture again. I can't begin to express how glad I am that that's never going to happen to me; and I'm even more convinced than I was that I wouldn't want to play any part in inflicting that on another person.  (I think that there's all kinds of reasons why I have a duty not to reproduce, from overpopulation to the fact that I don't think it'd be desirable for a migrainous thicko like me to beget another generation of migrainous thickos; but not abetting that kind of agony in another human being is also on the list.  Fortunately, since it's unlikely that anyone would want a migrainous thicko to play any part in siring her child in the first place, this is not a problem I'm likely ever to encounter in practice.)

But my overriding response is something in the realm of astonishment that some of the pictures are blanked out as having "mature content".

I mean... really?

Looking at the Stats

I've been really remiss at posting since the beginning of the year, here and on the other blog.

But I've just looked at the stats, and it appears that I've been getting one hit a day here consistently.  Whoever you are... Awwwww.  Bless your soul.

On Voting with a Heavy Heart

Well, I'm going to vote to stay in, obviously.

I don't vote often; I have a rather tortured relationship with democracy because whether or not I approve of a person or policy has very little to do with the qualities of that person or policy, and I think that it'd be better overall if people like me just shut the hell up and left the task of running stuff to those with an education and expertise.  I voted in the last general election simply to add to the weight of votes against UKIP, rather than out of any positive choice.  All the same, I shall put my scepticism about plebiscites and elections to one side in June, and I shall vote for the UK to stay in the EU.  But I shall do so with a heavy heart.  Why so?  Because the terms on which the referendum is to be held are so dispiriting.

The syntactically-clunky wording of the referendum will be

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

This was at the behest of the Electoral Commission; the European Union Referendum Act (2015) has  a couple of formulations of the ballot.  Technically, neither wording has anything much to do with what David Cameron has just negotiated; but for him to ditch that negotiation would be such an act of brass neck that it's fair to say that the bindingness of the referendum will be tied to the agreement reached on the 19th: should anyone try to depart from that agreement, there'd be significant pressure to overturn the referendum result.  (I predict that that'll be UKIP's strategy whatever happens: insist that the deal is not being enforced properly by those dastardly Europeans, therefore they're acting in bad faith, therefore leave.  The result will make no difference at all to the likes of Farage.)  To all intents and purposes it's a referendum on an agreement that noone will read, and that the Leave side would reject no matter what it said unless it said "leave now".  But the agreement is central; and this is the problem.

Saving Money is Easy.

Here's a bit of silliness that's just popped up on my FB feed: something called the 365 Day Penny Challenge.

Want to know the easiest way to save £667.95 in a year?
Then I’ve got the thing for you…
The 365 Day Penny Challenge.
All you need is:

• A jar 
• Pennies 
• Will Power

Day 1 (usually 1st January) put 1p in the jar, the next day (Day 2) put 2p in and so on and so forth. 

At the end of the 365 you will have save[d] £667.95! 

You're not doubling what you save; day 3 would involve putting in 3p, day 100 £1, and so on.

All groovy... except I doubt that it's sustainable.  A person could quite easily have, say, £3 in their pocket to put into the jar on day 300.  But that they'd have almost £3 on day 299, AND £3 on day 300, AND £3.01 on day 301, and so on looks to me to be more of a stretch.  (That'd amount to over £21 in loose change over the course of a week.)

If you do have that amount of loose change every day, I suspect it's because you're going to the bank and taking out £5 every day, some of which you spend on odds and sods.  But you're still taking out £5.  Banking the change - which is in effect what you're doing by putting the change in a jar - is not making a saving.  It's just a matter of not spending the change.

Genius.

People are sharing this and calling it a good idea.

Besides: who pays for everything with cash anyway?  The whole premise of this rests on the idea that you're going to be forced to take money out from the bank every day in fixed denominations greater than you would want to spend (unless you're withdrawing money just so that you can put it in your jar, which is ridiculous).  But Tesco and pubs all take plastic now.  Hell, even my milkman takes a direct debit.

In other words, the idea isn't just capitalising on people withdrawing cash in fixed denominations greater than they would want to spend; it requires it, in the face of there being much more efficient and secure ways to buy stuff.  The only people for whom this could conceivably work are in the cash-in-hand economy.  For people who aren't my window-cleaner or builder... it's a bit dim.

New for 2016: Shaming 7-Year-Olds

Salon is running a story about a video that has apparently gone viral.  (I only know about it because of the Salon piece; maybe its virality is self-fulfilling.  Maybe I've just not been paying enough attention to YouTube.  But I digress.)

The video is only a minute or so long, and it shows two little girls receiving the gift of a doll.  I'm not good at guessing people's ages, but I'd guess that they're somewhere around 7 or 8 years old.  The doll happens to be black; the girls are white.  One girl looks as though she's disappointed with the gift, but trying to be diplomatic about it; the other bursts into tears.

"Their reaction shows how much a doll can tell us about race", says the byline.  The article concludes that, "[t]hough obviously not an official social experiment, their reaction is a comment on just how early in life racial bias forms".

Well, it might.

Rhodes to Palmyra

There are many things that look to be superficially alike, but that careful examination shows to be very different.  Sharks and dolphins are both grey-ish aquatic predators with a prominent dorsal fin.  It is not wholly unreasonable for someone unfamiliar with them to suppose that they are closely related: a child, or - less plausibly - a marine biologist visiting from another planet might make that mistake.  But closer inspection would reveal significant differences; and one would hope that the child or alien biologist would move away from thinking them the same sort of thing.  One would hope that a tolerably well-informed adult would have stopped making that kind of mistake a long time before, and would not get a newspaper column asserting that dolphins and sharks are very similar indeed.

This serves as a sort of preamble to a rumination on a story that broke a couple of weeks ago: that Oriel, Oxford, was considering removing a statue of Cecil Rhodes after coming under pressure from student protestors.  These protests echo similar protests in South Africa.

The rationale for getting shot of the guy is straightforward enough: that he was racist, imperialist, and not the sort of person whom modern academia should be honouring if it's ever going to stand a chance of becoming the post-racist, post-imperial community to which it aspires.  I've a certain amount of sympathy for this view - particularly in respect of the South African protests; after all, the colonial and post-colonial history of that country has been particularly bitter for the majority of the population.  Having a monument to him at Oriel strikes me as being slightly morally different, though I can't put my finger on why - so maybe it isn't that different after all.

On the other hand, there are counterarguments.  Rhodes was a man of his time; it is naive to pretend that we can, or should, whitewash history; if we want to understand where we are and to control where we're going, it pays to remember whence we came; and, anyway, Rhodes' personal legacy has enabled students from all around the world, of all races, to study at Oxford.  His reputation may be tarnished, but it is not without burnished bits as well.

The point is that the arguments about whether Rhodes must fall are complex, and worth hearing from both sides.

Not everyone seems to think this.