ects of the right-to-die decision as a "rational structure" for the terminally ill: actively assuming control over one's death; waiting for cure, timing death during a predictable period of terminal decline, especially in AIDS cases; and the interests of others. Battin, who favors acceptance of a patient-directed right to die, suggests that physicians, mental-health counselors, and significant others can either reinforce (good) or disrupt (bad) the rational construct of the decision at every level of choice.
Along similar lines, Humphry and Wickett (296) cite the belief of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who does not "necessarily regard suicide as abnormal behavior" and who acknowledges the extent of personal control that suicides exercise, but who also is said to declare that advocates of active voluntary euthanasia or PAS are really advocating "putting themselves out of their own misery--the agony of seeing a loved one suffer." Byock (who advocates the hospice alternative, where the terminally ill can die in humane care instead of institutional noncare or PAS) basically
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