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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 »

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 »

The experience from Belgium suggests that euthanasia can have unexpected consequences for a patient's autonomy,

Article published in The Economist, Aug 24th 201...

read « Proper palliative care makes assisted dying unnecessary »

Euthanasia in children: Prof Stefaan Van Gool, a child cancer specialist in Belgium expresses his doubts about the recent extension of the law in Belgium to permit euthanasia in children with no lower age limit.

VIDE...

read « VIDEO : Euthanasia for children ? »

The impact of euthanasia in practice: Dr Benoit Beuselinck, a cancer specialist in Belgium, relates his experience of the application of the euthanasia law in Belgium and his concerns about further changes in the future.

read « Euthanasia in Belgium »

The issue of physician assisted suicide is one that has been debated both in the medical community and in the general population. Recent law changes by some European countries have brought the issue to the forefront perhaps more than ever before. -

Mark S. Komrad, MD, Ethicist in Residence for the Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore discussed these changes during the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Atlanta. Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have been at the forefront of these changes over the past decade, allowing mental illness access to this procedure moving beyond terminally ill patients who were the only ones who qualified up until this point. - See more HER...

read « Changing Landscape of Physician Assisted Suicide »