[Euthanasia and assisted suicide for psychiatric disorder]

Assisted death has been discussed for years in medicine. Ten countries have adopted legislation that authorises some form of euthanasia or assisted suicide, and the incidence and practices vary from country to country. Consideration of psychological pain linked to psychiatric disorders as a sufficient legal condition for enabling assisted death has added a new layer of complexity to the debate. Thus, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg legalised assisted suicide or euthanasia for psychiatric reasons. In these cases, it is not a question of choosing death conditions but the occurrence of death. This manuscript is a narrative review of the literature about characteristics of patients with psychiatric disorders who requested assisted death in these countries.

Scientific manuscripts, reports and legal documents were reviewed.

The incidence of assisted death for psychiatric reasons was low but has increased over the years. They represented 1.1 % of assisted deaths in Belgium (n=23) and 1.3 % in Netherlands (n=83) in 2017, and 4.5 % in Switzerland in 2014 when also considering dementia. The most frequent diagnoses were depressive and personality disorders. Patients were more often women than men, unlike suicide and middle aged.

Authors who support these practices emphasise the right to die with dignity and the inequality of ruling out patients with psychiatric reasons, whereas they meet the legal requirements, and psychological pain is as severe as somatic pain. Some major issues are highlighted: the close relationship between mood symptoms and death wish, thinking biases and cognitive disturbances that limit the ability to decide, access and consent to medical care, the difficulty of assessing psychological pain, and the definitions of incurability or treatment refractoriness in psychiatry. To date, medical knowledge and assessment tools are not sufficient to define possible indications and offer the best support possible to these patients.