As we saw in cases of civil disobedience, the law might sometimes forbid us to do things which are the right things to do, or command us to do things which we judge to be immoral. We do not have laws commanding kindly speech, or laws forbidding speech full of hate. Laws serve to undergird the structures necessary for societal life, and to regulate those actions by which each of us has significant impact on the life and well-being of others. On both counts, the Task Force judged that there are factual situations which dictate against the wisdom of a social policy of medically assisted suicide. There is a significant incidence of undiagnosed clinical depression among chronically and terminally ill patients, and this depression can lead to apparently rational requests for suicide.
Clinical experience shows that such suicidal ideation disappears when the depression is treated.
The fact that such depression is often missed by physicians makes it difficult to see how a system of assisted suicide could avoid the danger of responding to requests that are not in fact the expression of autonomous wishes. This misunderstanding may contribute to the poor diagnosis and treatment of depression in patients with chronic or terminal illness. The presence of symptoms that are associated with both the illness and depression make the diagnosis even more difficult. The suggestion that severe pain in terminally ill patients should be a reason for systematically provided assisted suicide is made in a societal situation of widespread and acknowledged undertreatment and inadequate treatment of pain. As in the case of undiagnosed depressive patients so also for patients suffering severe pain, The Task Force judged that the prudent public policy is that of seriously addressing the reasons for such poor medical management, not of initiating a radically new public health care policy which offers a great chance of harm to significant numbers of people.