Less disturbing than the raw percentage is the context in which some of these suicides have reportedly been carried out. People who are simply lonely, who have addictions, who don't have money, who feel they simply don't have options. In sum, not the kind of people who have a truly terminal illness and will pass away in a few weeks or months, but people who could potentially live well and flourish if resources existed to support them.
IMO, a society that reaches for suicide as a solution is going to be a society that consistently fails its most vulnerable.
They're not eligible conditions. And yet of course when you have a law like this, some cases will slip through the cracks due to the slippery slope nature of the thing. They're not a high percentage but there are many anecdotes. Here is an AP article from the middle of last year:
"Equally troubling, advocates say, are instances in which people have sought to be killed because they weren’t getting adequate government support to live."
What is eligible is pretty broad according to the article. "The law was later amended to allow people who are not terminally ill to choose death, significantly broadening the number of eligible people. Critics say that change removed a key safeguard aimed at protecting people with potentially years or decades of life left.
Today, any adult with a serious illness, disease or disability can seek help in dying."
There are many shocking anecdotes in that article, including the one it opens with. They don't all speak to "loneliness" or "money" but when I first read it last year I found it pretty shocking. Maybe you won't, but I think it's worth a read. Especially troubling to me are all of the disability advocates who disagree with the law:
"Landry said she shares the “grave concern” voiced last year by three U.N. human rights experts, who wrote that Canada’s euthanasia law appeared to violate the agency’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They said the law had a “discriminatory impact” on disabled people and was inconsistent with Canada’s obligations to uphold international human rights standards.
Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, described Canada’s law as “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”"
"Dr. Sonu Gaind, psychiatrist-in-chief at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, expressed concern about how the report describes people who accessed MAID whose natural deaths were not reasonably foreseeable. According to the report, 3.5 per cent of all MAID recipients — 463 people — did not have reasonably foreseeable deaths."
A small percentage, true, but it will grow absent efforts to limit these situations.
I came to post a similar thought too. I meet and help 4 old couples occasionally - in my neighbourhood, and some of my friend's parents - who now live alone. And all of them are physically healthy (as much as 70+ years old can be), and economically well off, but feel depressed due to crippling loneliness. Two of them openly tell me that they curse God for giving them a long life and just wish for death. If India had assisted suicide for old people, these are the kind of people who would be in front of the queue.
And that's one issue I have with such programs - one of the symptoms of depression is suicidal thoughts / ideation, which tends to disappear when depression is successfully treated. And depression also manifests itself in people with other illness. At the very least, these kind of assisted suicide programs should screen for depression in individuals opting for the program, and deny it to those depressed. They should instead be alternatively treated for depression.
Look at the success rate of SSRIs and other common antidepressants and you might find it's far from rare. You say yourself that the depression is near universal amongst the old people you know, have any of them had successful treatment?
No, unfortunately psychological treatment are neither easily available or popular in India. There is also a cultural aversion in the previous generation to availing such treatment. (On SSRIs note that the medical community is increasingly of the opinion that SSRIs don't help with depression in the long-term and may even be responsible for suicidal tendencies in those who never even had it in the first place. Cognitive Therapy is now the gold standard for the treatment of depression.)
IMO, a society that reaches for suicide as a solution is going to be a society that consistently fails its most vulnerable.