End of life decision-making and psychiatric illness

Clinical Center

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Abstract

This project involves both empirical and normative analyses, initially focusing on a specific subset of practices in some European settings. There are publicly available summaries of cases that some review committees deem particularly educational and therefore make accessible. One subset consists of most of those cases in which people have received assisted death for psychiatric illnesses. The first study in this overall project was a qualitative analysis of 66 cases (2011 to 2014 cases published as of July 2015), describing the profiles of the patients as well as outlining how the review committees evaluate such cases. The main report was published as: Kim SYH, De Vries RG, Peteet JR. Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide of Patients with Psychiatric Disorders in the Netherlands 2011 to 2014. JAMA Psychiatry. 73(4), 362-368. doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2015.2887 A second report focusing on the issue of decision-making capacity of persons requesting psychiatric euthanasia will be published this fall in Psychosomatics. We also published a commentary in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.