SWISS SUICIDE CLINIC DIGNITAS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Swiss suicide clinic Dignitas probed after 'patient suffering from paranoid schizophrenia was given suicide kit'
By Mail Foreign Service
on 31st May 2010

Swiss suicide clinic Dignitas is under investigation over claims that it ignored a patient's distressed mental condition to give him drugs to end his own life.

Strict assisted suicide laws in Switzerland state that each patient must be of sound mind and able to understand the consequences of their actions.

But now details have emerged of a patient who was allegedly given a DIY suicide kit prescribed by a Zurich gynaeologist despite suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

Under Swiss law the deadly substance patients need to use to die have to be handed over on prescription after careful consideration of the facts of the case.

But a Dignitas report on the 39-year-old Spanish man's mental state was a few lines that barely covered half a page of A4 paper, say local media reports on the death.

Swiss medical authorities, now investigating the case, described the incident as a 'serious neglect of care' and warned that the doctor should have more carefully investigated.
Dignitas has long campaigned for the right to allow anyone who wants to die to be able to end their life and not just the terminally ill, and was rapped in 2005 after one of its doctors administered a lethal cocktail of drugs to a German suicide tourist after she forged papers to say she was dying.

The elderly German woman had persuaded her GP in Augsburg, Germany, to give her a false report indicating she was terminally ill with cirrhosis of the liver, saying she needed it for work reasons.

The woman then used the certificate to seek help from doctors at the Swiss clinic, who assisted her suicide. Her German GP, who has also not been named, said he had no idea what she was really going to do with the certificate.

At the time Dignitas founder Ludwig Minelli denied the organisation had done anything wrong. He said: 'The doctor's report that I was given indicated the woman was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver as well as hepatitis.'

He also defended the move despite the deception, saying: 'Every person in Europe has the right to choose to die, even if they are not terminally ill.'

Minelli has even lobbied government officials for the right to extend the current laws and also said he was prepared to test them in the courts.

A former Dignitas nurse Soraya Wernli described the organisation as profit orientated, and said in the two-and-a-half years she spent working for Minelli at his 'clinic' in Zurich she came to believe that Dignitas was less about ethical euthanasia for the terminally ill and more of a money-making machine.

She has launched lawsuits against him, and spent the last eight months of her time at the clinic acting as an undercover informant for the police, who were also concerned by Minelli.

Nominated for the Prize of Courage by a Swiss newspaper in 2007 - she garnered praise for her efforts in exposing what she claims is a 'production line of death concerned only with profits'.

Minelli, a former journalist who has two daughters, has never been prosecuted for an illegal killing, but Mrs Wernli said she has seen enough to know the Swiss authorities' indifference to his practice is wrong.

Two months ago Diginitas was criticised after up to 300 urns filled with ashes were found at the bottom of a Swiss lake.



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