It takes someone else being there, for a person in need, to choose to live.

The following was published by Compassionate Community Care on March 30, 2023.

“A world in which someone was prepared to listen to another’s distress seemed to her one in which it was worthwhile to live”1

By Alida Dance

When we look at how our world and how society functions today, it revolves around a lot of constant busyness and chaos. We may not even realize how easy it is to forget the most simple things in life.

This has become normal within our society, there are so many distractions at all times. How hard has it become to put aside distractions and give our full attentive heart to another person? We can see that there is a disconnect between people as the result of so many factors and I am sure you can think of some distractions you may struggle with, so I am not going to list them.

Let’s read this quote again. “A world in which someone was prepared to listen to another’s distress seemed to her one in which it was worthwhile to live.”

Viktor Frankl

This is referenced from the article attached below (it is worth a read!). This is the reason that a woman gave for choosing not to end her life. In summary, a woman had made a phone call in the middle of the night and the person on the other end answered, listened to her, helped talk her through depression, and gave her reasons to keep living. But none of the reasons he listed for her, were the reason why she chose to keep living. She chose to keep living because he answered the phone and just was willing to listen to her amidst her distress. This individual was Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and and former prisoner from a Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Viktor Frankl describes his experience in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning.

What captured this woman in need who one night called Dr Frankl is a familiar experience, a human experience of need, and seeking help, a call in distress encounters another who is willing to care and take time to listen and “be with” the other. This is the same experience that we share and can relate with here at Compassionate Community Care and is the exact reason for having established our helpline, 1-855-675-8749, for this reason: to be with, listen, and care for those who call.

At CCC, we are equipped and do our best to provide help and resources for any situation or circumstance someone may be reaching out for. Often when the person on the other end of the line makes the call, it can be as simple as just answering and listening. When you are being a person to share the weight that seems impossible for another to carry, it is not as heavy.

The helpline has been created for those who don’t know who else to turn to or for those who need extra support, and we are more than happy to help with any situation! We can all learn from this example of Viktor Frankl, and become more aware of and recognize what can make us distracted, and instead, drop everything and tune into the person and what they are saying. We can learn to hear beyond our ears and listen with our hearts; to better connect with others, heart to heart.

Have you ever experienced this kind of grace? How can you better listen to those around you? I challenge you to reflect on these questions and become aware of the things that separate us, because once we know where we fall short, we can make better efforts to fill the gaps and become better connected again.

1 Quote above from The Rabbi Sacks Legacy. Listening is the greatest gift we can give to a troubled soul. (2002 December 14). Retrieved on March 16, 2023, from (Link to the article).

Euthanasia and assisted suicide - contagion and corruption of compassion.

By Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Arthur Goldberg and Shimon Cowan have written an excellent analysis of euthanasia and assisted suicide laws from the point of view of Jewish scholars. The article: The contagion of euthanasia and the Corruption of Compassion was published in Public Discourse on September 11.

Goldberg and Cowan write about the issue based on several topic areas. They start their article by referring to the quick expansion of euthanasia "MAiD" in Canada.

In Canada, “natural death” must be “reasonably foreseeable” before a doctor may euthanize a patient. In spite of such statutory language, in A.B. v. Canada, a case decided this June, the Court judged that the anticipated natural death need not be “imminent”; it need not even be “connected to a particular terminal disease or condition.” Rather, Justice Paul Perell concluded, “what is a ‘reasonably foreseeable death’ is a person’s specific medical question to be made without necessarily making, but not precluding, a prognosis of the remaining lifespan.” Physician-assisted suicide may go forward as long as a medical professional considers “all of a particular person’s medical circumstances.” One wonders in what sort of case death would not be reasonably foreseeable, under this loose standard. 

The foundation for this decision was an earlier Canadian Supreme Court case, Carter v. Canada. It overturned the law that criminalized both the assisting of another’s suicide and the consenting to one’s own death, on the grounds that the law “unjustifiably infringed” upon the rights and freedoms of “competent adult persons.”

Goldberg and Cowan then write about the Contagion of euthanasia:

One vector for the contagion of euthanasia is the vagueness of the terms in which the conditions for termination of life are expressed. Alex Schadenberg, International Chair of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, provides a couple examples.  A.B. v. Canada, the case cited above, arose because the petitioner’s doctor was unwilling to execute a woman with excruciating osteoarthritis, fearing that if he did so, he might be charged with murder. If the requirement that death be “reasonably foreseeable” is supposed to rule anything out, it probably should rule out killing someone with painful, non-terminal arthritis—yet the court found some way to justify the killing. Schadenberg also points to a case of a young man in a Vancouver nursing home who was diagnosed with a neurological disease and struggled to “find a cure with massive doses of vitamins.” Nowhere near dying, this man was nevertheless killed by a Vancouver physician. 

The spread of the contagion is facilitated by financial motives also. Insurance companies, trying to save money, often seek to replace sanctity of life with so-called quality of life. Dr. Brian Callister, an associate professor at the University of Nevada School of Medicine and former head of the State’s Medical Association, attempted to transfer two patients to hospitals in other states, so they could receive potentially life-saving treatments unavailable in Nevada. His patients were denied insurance for their transfer and treatment. The insurers asked: “Have you considered suicide?” Speaking from personal experience, Dr. Callister says, “Assisted suicide changes the way we care for patients. It creates a dangerous segue to perverse incentives for insurance companies and there’s no going back from that.” 

But Dr. Callister’s experience is not isolated. Stephanie Packer, a vibrant mother of four from California, suffers with scholoderma, a terminal condition. She was advised by her insurance company to seek a prescription from her doctor for a lethal medicine that would only cost her a $1.20 co-pay, instead of granting her the financial assistance she sought for life-affirming treatments at UCLA.

Goldberg and Cowan then examine the question of the Psychological Contagion of Suicide:

On his Fox News show, Tucker Carlson highlighted the negative effect of 13 Reasons Why, a Netflix show, on two teenage girls in California. According to their parents, the girls committed suicides after “bringing” on episodes of the show. They blamed their children’s deaths on the show’s glamorization of suicide, its presentation of suicide as a response to the stresses of teenage life. 

It is perhaps no accident that Oregon, the first state to legalize assisted suicide, has a general suicide rate some 40 percent higher than the American national average. Whether legal “assisted suicide” fueled the State’s culture of suicide, or was fueled by an otherwise existing culture of suicide, the Oregon experience at least suggests that suicide as a culturally accepted “value” and legislation permitting “assisted suicide” go together.

The authors then examine the issue of conscience rights. They wrote:

Permitting euthanasia does not just harm those who are killed. It also harms those who are forced to kill, or else suffer legal consequences or be forced from a profession. Legislation implemented in Ontario—and similar legislation proposed in Victoria, Australia—forces physicians who oppose personal involvement in euthanasia or “assisted suicide” to “effectively refer” their patients to another physician who will kill. “Effective referral” is defined as a referral to carry out the purposes of the Act. That means a specific referral either “to someone who will do it or someone who will arrange it. Either way,” EPC Chair Alex Schadenberg explains, “it’s a referral for the purpose of death.” It thus denies conscience rights to medical professionals who do not understand killing their patients to be part of their craft. 

In the view of Larry Worthen, executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Association of Canada, when doctors are told they must send their patient to an executioner, “we are being forced to violate our deeply held religious beliefs. Effective referral and participating in assisted death are morally and ethically the same thing. This forces people of conscience and faith to act against their moral convictions and threatens the very core of why they became physicians, which is to help to heal people.” 

Dr. Mark D’Souza, a palliative care physician and board director of Concerned Ontario Doctors, indicates that as a “conscientious objector,” he objects to killing a patient. As a result, he and several other doctors he knows will no longer accept patients needing palliative care. The palliative care system in the community in which he practices (Scarborough) is grossly under serviced. The effect of these retirements is to worsen available care for patients in severe pain. In addition to contradicting the very concept of palliative care, the availability of euthanasia also tends to undermine its practice; where euthanasia is available, funding for palliative care falls correspondingly.

The authors then examine the question of compassion:

Euthanasia therefore abandons people at their most vulnerable. Rather than providing compassion and support for people in their suffering, euthanasia presents a callous and insensitive “alternative.” As Viktor Frankl points out, the essential human dimension is neither body nor mind, but rather a soul or conscience with both mind and body as its vehicles and challenges. The task of soul or conscience is to respond purposefully and ethically to the predicaments of mind and body. 

We can see a shining example of true compassion in the case of an Oregon resident, Jeanette Hall. After receiving a terminal diagnosis of cancer, she requested lethal drugs, thinking it appropriate to “do what our law allowed”—a law for which she voted. Her doctor, however, encouraged her not to give up, even though medical diagnosis gave her six months to live. A decade later she is still surviving.

The authors finally deal with the the inalienable rights and obligations we have towards persons. They conclude their article by stating:

In a previous Public Discourse essay, we spoke about the conditions required to achieve restoration of the political-moral center. One essential ingredient is to overcome a culture of sanctioned killing, to re-anchor our contemporary culture towards the protection of life, rather than its disposal. To do this we must crystallize into our collective consciousness the principles of the Noahide Code, the moral root of our great religious traditions and our civilization.

Thank you Arthur Goldberg and Shimon Cowen for researching issues related to euthanasia and assisted suicide from a Jewish point of view.

Viktor Frankl: Finding meaning in suffering.

This article was written by Stephanie Gray and published on her blog on December 7, 2016.

By Stephanie Gray

Image Source: Prof. Dr. Franz Vesely,
Viktor-Frankl-Archiv, Wikimedia Commons

When acceptance of assisted suicide was written into Canadian law earlier this year, one of the criteria for it became this: that the person “have a grievous and irremediable medical condition” which is defined, in part, as an “illness, disease or disability or …state of decline [that] causes them enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to them and that cannot be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.”

Everyone suffers at some point or another, but most do not select suicide. So to suffer so much that one chooses death over life is to suffer to the point of despair. Rather than assisting with a despairing person’s suicide, we ought to instead consider the insight of psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl. In this interview he talks about the following mathematical equation his observations and lived experiences caused him to create:

D = S – M

He explains it as follows: Despair equals Suffering without Meaning. Some people get cancer. Others get hurt in car accidents. These are very real cases of suffering—not to be minimized. But whether someone despairs in light of these experiences is in direct proportion to whether they find meaning in the situation or not.

Dr. Frankl cites a teenager in Texas who became a quadriplegic—undoubtedly, an experience of suffering. And yet she did not despair as others in her situation have. What set this young woman apart was not her experience of suffering but her response to it: She spent her days reading newspapers and watching the news for an important purpose—whenever there was a story about someone experiencing difficult and challenging times, she would ask that a stick be placed in her mouth so she could use it to press keys to type out letters of encouragement, consolation, and hope to the people she read about. Dr. Frankl said, “She’s full of confidence. She has a strong sense of abundant meaning in her life.” She turned her experience of suffering into a springboard to reach out to others; it enabled her to have empathy and share hope. In short, she found meaning.

Or take another person with quadriplegia, a young man who became paralyzed at 17 years old. Dr. Frankl received a letter from him: “I broke my neck but it did not break me. I am at present helpless and this handicap will remain with myself apparently forever.” Why, like the aforementioned young woman, did this man not despair? Because he found meaning in his situation: “I want to become a psychologist to help others,” he said in explaining his decision to pursue post-secondary education. “And I’m sure that my suffering will add an essential contribution to my ability to understand others and to help other people.”

When speaking of individuals like the two mentioned, Dr. Frankl noted, “They can mold their predicament into an accomplishment on the human level; they can turn their tragedies into a personal triumph. But they must know for what—what should I do with it?”

The brilliance of this philosophy is that it empowers everyone. While we cannot necessarily escape suffering, we can escape despair, and we can escape it in direct proportion to the meaning we allow ourselves to find in a situation. In other words, when circumstances prevent us fromeliminating suffering, perspective allows us to add meaning, and that, in turn, helps alleviate the suffering itself.

This can happen in profound ways. Dr. Frankl told a story about a man who was electrocuted and all four of his limbs had to be amputated. That patient wrote, “Before this terrible accident I was bored, always bored, and always drunk. And since my accident I know what it means to be happy.”

This is proof that happiness is not determined by physical wellbeing but by an attitude of the mind. So if someone is struggling in this area and requests assisted suicide, it’s our job—not to facilitate their despair—but to facilitate their search for meaning.

If a Holocaust survivor, amputee, and quadriplegics can do this, why can’t we all?