Disorder In The American Courts Quotes

Clarence Thomas after being falsely accused: “This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.

There are times when wanting your own death is seen not as pathological but as a rational decision, a choice to which you are entitled. It's telling, though, that the kinds of pain North American society acknowledges as so unbearable as to make death an acceptable choice don't include the pain caused by mental illness. In Canada and in some US states, a doctor can legally help you die if you have terminal cancer, but not if a mental illness is wrecking your life. That could change—there will likely be court challenges of the mental illness prohibition on medically assisted death—but a proper discussion of what that might look like, of how a doctor would distinguish between a desire to die driven by a disorder's skewed thinking and a desire to die driven by a rational assessment of what a disorder is doing to your life, is beyond the scope of this book. It is no doubt a question society will have to answer: Why does the pain of people who are crazy carry less weight than the pain of those who are not?