Protecting Psychiatric Patients and Others from the Assisted-Suicide Movement: Insights and Strategies

I would like to acknowledge with gratitude two individuals whose work provided the foundation for my thinking, and whom I have had the privilege to meet. I would like to thank Albert Ellis for developing his method of psychotherapy, and for communicating it so well in his workshops. His work has offered me much clarification about psychological misery and how to ease it. I would also like to thank Wesley J. Smith, whose clear vision of the ideas about death that are circulating in our society, and the effects of these ideas upon health care in America, gave me so much understanding, and whose writing style was an inspiration. I would like to thank Albert Ellis and N. Gregory Hamilton for writing the forewords for this book.

I would also like to thank those pioneers in the field—Herbert Hendin and Rita Marker—whose documentation of the problems of the assisted-suicide movement and whose insights are essential to everyone interested in this area.

I would also like to thank Rita Marker and the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force for creating and maintaining their web site (www.internationaltaskforce.org) from which I obtained much valuable information andinspiration.Special thanks to Wesley J. Smith and Kathi Hamlon for answering my questions.

I would like to thank Mary Johnson and the staff of the library at the Missouri Institute of Mental Health for helping me so many times, and the staff of numerous other libraries—Olin Library, Bernard Becker Medical Library, and the Law Library at Washington University, the St. Louis County Library, University City Public Library, and the St. Louis Public Library—who helped me find pertinent materials.

-ix-