The relationship between palliative psychiatry and assisted dying: a scoping review

Palliative psychiatry applies palliative care principles to the mental health care of people experiencing severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI), with the aim of improving quality of life and alleviating suffering. As debates about assisted dying (AD) for mental illness expand globally, questions have emerged about how palliative psychiatry relates to AD.

This scoping review, guided by Arksey and O'Malley's scoping review framework, maps the scholarly and grey literature on the relationship between palliative psychiatry and AD. Database searches were run on April 30, 2025, and updated on September 2, 2025. Data were analyzed using descriptive numerical analysis and qualitative content analysis.

Among the 50 included publications, 15 characterized palliative psychiatry and AD as separate practices with distinct goals, while 13 proposed palliative psychiatry as an alternative care pathway to AD and care-as-usual.

The literature positions the relationship between palliative psychiatry and AD along a spectrum, from equivalent to differentiated, though most publications treat them as distinct. Future research should clarify the definition and practice of palliative psychiatry, and examine whether, and how, it may offer a quality of life-oriented alternative care pathway.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research provided financial support for this review. The funder had no role in study design; data collection, analysis, and synthesis; report writing; and the decision to submit the paper for publication.