every cradle is a grave. book by sarah perry
On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death Jean Amery
but the OP book really describes what injustice is going on : a book called Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine.
quotes from the book not my writing follow :
"FOR THE PERSON WHO TAKES HIS OWN LIFE, suicide is, prima facie, a solution. Nevertheless, we think, and are enjoined to think, that suicide is a problem, specifically a mental health or psychiatric problem. This is a novel idea and a very odd one. The idea of "suicide prevention" is odder still.Suicide is legal, but failed suicide is not: it is a violation of mental health laws, punished by coercions called "hospitalization" and "treatment."Suicide is legal, but assisted suicide is not: it is a violation of the criminal laws, punished by criminal sanctions, unless the "assistance" is rendered by a physician and is explicitly authorized by law, in which case it is considered a medical treatment called "physician-assisted suicide" (PAS).Suicide is legal, but is penalized and stigmatized in novel ways: if the act is committed by an active member of the armed forces, White House policy enjoins "the President from sending a letter of condolence to family members of troops who die by suicide"; and if the person who kills himself is receiving so-called mental health treatment, his therapist is likely to be accused of malpractice and declared guilty of it.'What do we mean when we say that an act is legal? We mean that the actor is free to speak about, plan, and perform it without penalty by agents of the state. Discussing and planning, say, cooking, or trying to cook and making a mess of it, are matters of indifference to the law. However, discussing and planning to kill oneself, or trying to do so and failing, are psychiatric transgressions, violations of mental health laws. Categorized as "dangerousness to self or others," these acts are punished by deprivations of liberty and coercions, called "hospitalization' and "treatment."Finally, so-called assisted suicide is a criminal offenseunless the assistance is provided by a licensed physician in a jurisdiction in which specific legislation explicitly permits it: then it is a medical service. If doctors performed assisted suicide by shooting, stabbing, or strangling us, at our request, would we still call it "physician-assisted suicide"? Would we still classify and condone it as a medical treatment?The truth is that the only thing that makes physicianassisted suicide a medical service is that the means used for it is a prescription for a barbiturate. Socrates, let us recall, died of assisted suicide: he killed himself by ingesting a lethal dose of a substance the Greeks called pharmakon-a word that means both medicine and poison-procured for him by others. The Greeks did not need medical help to kill themselves. Why do we act as if we do? Because we like the idea of dying peacefully, with a drug that puts us to sleep-forever-and because, at the same time, we wage wars on drugs especially useful for this purpose and suborn physicians to bootleg them. In the absence of prescription laws-and, more generally, of drug prohibition-there would be no need for, and no special problem of, physicianassisted suicide.If suicide be deemed a problem, it is a moral and political problem. Managing it as if it were a medical problem will succeed only in debasing medicine and corrupting the law. Although the air we breathe is heavily polluted with antisuicide propaganda, it cannot extinguish the knowledge that, at bottom, suicide is a solution.