An Emerging Ethical Crisis: Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia of Psychiatric Patients

PRESENTER

Mark S. Komrad, MD, DFAPA

Faculty of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins, Tulane, and University of Maryland

Author of "You Need Help:  A Step-by-Step Plan to Convince a Loved One to Get Counseling."

Learning Objectives

• Review the history of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, and the gradual evolution from being used for the terminally ill to the non-terminally ill, and from those who suffer physically to those who suffer only mentally.  
• Describe how legal assisted suicide and euthanasia of non-terminal psychiatric patients has been occurring in the Netherlands and Belgium and is impending in Canada.
• Appreciate the ethical arguments that have been deployed to support this practice and the ethical arguments against it.
• Identify the essential ethos and core values of what it means to be a psychiatrist and how providing suicide for patients inverts that ethos.
• Understand how “futility” is a common legal requirement for medical euthanasia, but it is not characteristic of psychiatric disorders due to many factors. It is not possible to discern for which patients suicide could be provided from those for whom it should be prevented. 

Intended Audience: Physicians, Psychiatry Clinical Staff

Physician credits awarded. Lunch will be served.