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With the imposition of euthanasia upon medical practice in Canada and elsewhere, the internal logic of medicine itself – as a healing science built upon a 2500-year-old community of values – has been ignored and trampled. But in psychiatry, this aggressive vandalism is still more evident. The prevention of suicide is a principal goal of psychiatric treatment, a fundamental ethos. How can psychiatrists now be asked to validate and promote suicide? If the business of clinical psychiatry is not to produce a more satisfying relation to the experience of life, as reflected in the strength of an individual's desire to live (and to help find a path to a better future), then what is it for?

In Soviet Russia, political dissidents were often treated as psychiatric patients, on the grounds that their "irrationality" was demonstrated by their inability to understand the truth of Soviet doctrine. Once psychiatric diagnosis is subordinated to ideology, anything is possible...

read « HomeBlogPsychiatry and Euthanasia: profound implications for all medical practice Psychiatry and Eut »

Like an umbrella, good care shelters a person in adverse conditions,

enabling a journey from one place to another that can be shared with others...

read « Icare campaign »

The Dutch authorities have started their first-ever judicial proceedings for a breach of euthanasia laws. According to a statement by a public prosecutor in The Hague, a doctor gave a severe dementia sufferer a 'secret' dose of a sedative right before obtaining approval for the procedure. The medical complaints board has already found her guilty.

Sputnik discussed the issue with Professor Theo Boer, who teaches ethics at Groningen's Protestant Theological University and is a leading expert on the ethics of assisted dying...

read « 250% Increase' in Euthanasia Cases in 10 Years »

We are Canadian physicians who are dismayed and concerned by the impact – on patients, on doctors, on medical practice – of the universal implementation, in our country, of euthanasia defined as medical "care" to which all citizens are entitled (subject to the satisfaction of ambiguous and arbitrary qualifying criteria). Many of us feel so strongly about the difficulty of practicing under newly prescribed constraints that we may be forced, for reasons of personal integrity and professional conscience, to emigrate or to withdraw from practice altogether. All of us are deeply worried about the future of medicine in Canada. We believe this transformation will not only be detrimental to patient safety, but also damaging to that all-important perception by the public – and by physicians themselves – that we are truly a profession dedicated to healing alone. Thus, we are alarmed by attempts...

Article published in the World Medical Journa...

read « Euthanasia in Canada: a Cautionary Tale »

Sigrid Dierickx received her PhD recently in Ghent, Belgium (End-of-Life Care research Group). Her dissertation called Euthanasia practice in Belgium, a population-based evaluation of trends and currently debated issues can be read and downloaded here in PDF format.

The aim of the dissertation was to provide population-based evidence on general trends in euthanasia practice in Belgium and on particular current issues being debated regarding euthanasia...

read « Euthanasia practice in Belgium A population-based evaluation of trends and currently debated issues »

WHEN I began working as a doctor early in the 1970s, end-of-life care was in its infancy. Cicely Saunders had just begun her pioneering work on what she called "total pain" and very few clinicians knew how to alleviate pain and distress in the dying. Today the situation is transformed. Palliative care has been recognised as a clinical speciality in Britain for 30 years; indeed, the country was ranked in first place in The Economist Intelligence Unit's Quality of Death index. For most people in Britain today, dying does not mean an agonising death, but a gentle ebbing away of life.

Why, then, as medical science has made enormous strides in alleviating the pain and distress of dying, are we seeing relentless campaigning for the legalisation of what is being euphemistically called "assisted dying"...

read « Laws are not just regulatory instruments but send a powerful social message »

Dr Koerselman said doctors should be helping people live positive lives – rather than assisting them in suicide.

People wanting euthanasia for psychiatric reasons need advocates who will stand with them and renew their hope, a Dutch psychiatrist says...

read « Instead of killing, we must give hope to patients asking for euthanasia »