Psychiatric euthanasia and the radical left alternative

Comment published on New York Times blog, in response to opinion essay by Ross Douthat, “What euthanasia has done to Canada,” December 4, 2022:

That the trend Douthat rightly finds alarming points solely to the conservatism thought implied in a Judeo-Christian ethics, is an unwarranted conclusion. As viable as a radical faith and ethics is a left critique of the creeping institutional thanatology of our capitalist bureaucratic liberalism.

Indeed, when psychiatry already admits that it cannot cure the "mental illnesses" that it has defined 20% of society's citizens into, wanting only to profitably wield sad treatments for managing lives defined as destined only for sadness, the potentiality of doctors encouraging people to end their lives because they are unhappy appears as a refutation by conclusion to an absurdity.

That many people live lives of unhappiness or "quiet desperation" (Thoreau) is a call to change our society and the way we live, rather than throw in the towel. If this means that sometimes conservatives and the anti-capitalist left share some pages, the theories and stories this can involve are worth exploring.

A conservative solution, supposing all government oppresses, is to deny that so many unhappy people should receive any help from social institutions (versus debating what that help should be), or to return it to enforcement of morals, and atonement for sin. A radical left solution knows that our mental health system is capitalist, and is organized for correctional social control and not, like psychoanalysis, art, or a radical politics, as a creative thinking. Let's start there.