Do we stand by our Hippocratic Oath when providing physician-assisted suicide?
Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is a form of euthanasia in which a physician provides the patient with the pertinent information, and, in certain cases, a prescription for the necessary lethal drugs, so that the individual can willingly and successfully terminate his or her own life. The justification for PAS is the compassionate relief of intractable human suffering. Euthanasia and PAS are accepted practices in European countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
Dr. Saeed Ahmed
Such patients are mentally incapable of making the difficult decision to end their life and therefore should require a psychiatric evaluation to include counseling prior to making a decision to engage in PAS. For patients with mental illness, PAS is even more problematic than for terminally ill patients, because patients may lack the capacity to make rational and responsible decisions. Indeed, there are sizable loopholes where our medical system lacks safeguards and similarly lacks the requirements for a thorough, pre-PAS mental health examination, family notifications, and consultations, and for the minimally necessary legal pressure required to ensure patient cooperation.
Critical role of mental health workers
Although PAS has been legalized in those five U.S. states, its support and cases have stalled in recent years, indicating serious ethical concerns, mostly because of multileveled challenges of combating and delineating cultural stereotypes, quantifying mental capacity, gauging quality of life, and deciding where to situate psychiatrists in the PAS decision.
The psychiatrist’s role is being debated. In the United States, opponents take issue with current PAS-legal state’s legislation regarding psychiatric evaluations. For example, Oregon stipulates a psychiatrist referral only in cases where a physician other than a psychiatrist believes the patient’s judgment is impaired. It’s agreed that psychiatrists have the best skill set to assess a patient’s perceptions. Other PAS-legal states require a psychiatrist or psychologist assessment before making the decision. Unfortunately, though, physicians have rarely referred these patients to psychiatrists before offering PAS as an option.
PAS opponents target standards by which concepts like “quality of life” or “contributing member of society” are judged – specifically, that “unbearable suffering” and its ramifications are ill defined – people whose lives are deemed “not worth living” (including the terminally ill) would be susceptible to “sympathetic death” via PAS that might result from PAS legalization. Opponents also argue that recognizing a suicide “right” contradicts that a significant number of suicide attempters have mental illness and need help. They say that legalizing PAS would enable mentally incapacitated people to commit the irreversible act based on their distorted perceptions without providing them the expected assistance from their profession.1
The use of euthanasia or PAS gradually is trending from physically terminally ill patients toward psychiatrically complex patients. There are cases in which euthanasia or PAS was requested by psychiatric patients who had chronic psychiatric, medical, and psychosocial histories rather than purely physical ailment histories. In one study, Scott Y. H. Kim, MD, PhD, and his associates reviewed cases in the Netherlands in which either euthanasia or PAS for psychiatric disorders was deployed. The granted PAS requests appeared to involve physician judgment without psychiatric input.
The study reviewed 66 cases: 55% of patients had chronic severe conditions with extensive histories of attempted suicides and psychiatric hospitalizations, demonstrating that the granted euthanasia and PAS requests had involved extensive evaluations. However, 11% of cases had no independent psychiatric input, and 24% involved disagreement among the physicians.2 PAS proponents and opponents support the involvement and expertise of psychiatrists in all of this.
Psychiatrists have long contended that suicide attempts are often a “cry for help,” not an earnest act to end one’s life. Legalizing PAS tells suicidal individuals that society does not care whether they live or die – a truly un-Hippocratic stance. The stereotypes tossed around in the PAS debate, which could mean life or death, need to be unpacked with specific criteria attached, rather than preconceptions.