I’m disabled. Here’s why I am scared of the assisted dying bill

The bill puts us at risk of coercion by family members, and doctors wrongly predicting that we are going to die.

Some might assume that disabled people would be breathing a sigh of relief at the thought of MPs backing the ‘assisted dying bill’ on 29 November, or conversely that it has nothing to do with us. Neither is true.

I was born with a significant impairment which means, among other things, that I have known pain and injuries all my life. I, like most disabled people, have enormous compassion for those whose lives end in serious pain.

It needn’t be like this. Like many other disabled people, I believe money and effort should be put into assisting us to live with dignity before it is spent on our deaths.

For many years now, we have seen cut after cut to our benefits and, even more seriously, reductions in the number of people the Department of Work and Pensions deems entitled to support. The savagery of these austerity policies has resulted in hundreds of deaths, as John Pring, the editor and founder of the Disability News Service, writes in his new book, The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence.

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Below are some web sites that may help if you are facing this kind of predicament.

John Bellamy Comments - for as usual - he has an opinion.....

Many seem to have missed the point in all of this. Many are jumping on the ' poor me ' attention seeking band wagon and think their voice needs to be heard when they are talking clap trap. They think that by throwing money at a situation will help, when it doesn't.

My Mother lived a horrendous life for the last 4 years with dementia and disabled, with a Widow's Hump, in a bed all day in a Care Home calling for help and attention, which left her stressed, and when I visited she didn't know which one of the twins I was ( I am a twin ) and would ask who the strange women I was with the last time I visited - which was my brother and his wife of - at that time - over 30 years - yet she didn't know who she was.

If told a decade beforehand this would be her end, she would have INSISTED we put a pillow over her face and never - ever - let it get that bad and let her go out with dignity, not with shit all over her hands as she fumbled in her diaper ...

She had been a famous singer - fashion model and entertainer. She had spend decades ' on stage' and as a very beautiful women, took great pride in her appearance, and to know that she would end up in a bed with shitty hands and whiskers - which I would shave for her, she would have INSISTED we do something to help her before it got that bad.

It would have been her absolute right to take control of how she ended her life and with some sort of dignity, and not as it turns out, in an appalling emotional and physical state.

If any of my dogs had been that ill - STRAIGHT DOWN THE VET and anything else would have been cruel, and people would have got onto me to have any animal suffering, put down, yet we insist on keeping people alive even when all life quality has gone and all they are - as in my mothers case, is a physical body with part of a mind and slowly sinking into death over some years and there was no joy, no pleasure, no quality, and yet being told by the government and those too afraid of death that they will deny another the right as to how and when they leave this plane of existence, is simply wrong.

How dare someone else tell me if and when I can take my own life if and when my life quality - ONLY through bad health and where there is no hope, AND NOT if depressed, disabled or anything else and those who scream that families will coerce them into ' doing it' and talking absolute clap trap and any family who does that , I think I'd rather be out of it than know I have relatives like this.

My brothers Mother-In-Law is over 90 and has been housebound for some years, hardly recognises her own children and has wanted to die for some years - but she is kept alive against her own wishes and this is wrong. She wants to die. She is sick of being old, disabled, with dementia and bad health. She wakes in the mornings crying because she has to endure another day and crying because she knows how painful it is for her family to witness.

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Samaritans

Available for anyone struggling to cope. They provide a safe place to talk 24 hours a day.

Phone: 116 123. Website: Samaritans

Shout

A 24/7 text service, free on all major mobile networks, for anyone struggling to cope and in need of immediate help.

Text SHOUT to 85258. Website: Shout

Papyrus

Support, practical advice and information to young people considering suicide and can also offer help and advice if you’re concerned about someone you know.

Phone: 0800 068 41 41. Website: Papyrus