Doctors, Psychiatrists Support Assisted Suicide Survey: But Whether They Would Participate Another Matter

Two new surveys find that most Oregon psychiatrists and emergency room doctors think physician-assisted suicide should be legal for mentally competent, terminally ill patients.

Many, however, didn’t know if they would participate in it themselves.

Only a small percentage of psychiatrists said they would be able to determine a patient’s mental fitness in one visit.

The studies showed that 69 percent of both groups of doctors, in theory, favor assisted suicide, according to articles in the American Journal of Psychiatry and the October edition of Academic Emergency Medicine.

But many of the doctors had deep reservations about what they personally would do in individual situations if doctor-assisted suicide becomes legal in Oregon.

The two surveys polled Oregon’s 376 emergency room doctors and 418 psychiatrists in 1995. Of that number, 248 emergency doctors and 321 psychiatrists returned questionnaires.

Oregon’s assisted suicide law was overturned by a federal judge shortly after voters passed it in 1994, and has been on hold since then pending appeals.

Oregon’s law would allow doctors to write life-ending prescriptions for their mentally competent, terminally ill patients.

A psychiatrist or psychologist would have to examine a patient who requests suicide if the attending or consulting doctor believes the patient’s judgment is impaired by mental illness.

Only 6 percent of psychiatrists said they were certain they could tell in a single visit whether a patient was mentally impaired.

‘The implications are that (counseling) is a safeguard that was put into the measure to protect patients,” said Dr. Linda Ganzini, associate professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health Sciences University and an author of the psychiatrist study.

“But it may be very difficult to implement the safeguard. The problem is that there’s probably going to be patients who are very articulate, lucid and rational, and nobody’s going to doubt their rationality,” she said. “Then there will be lots of patients in a gray area with mild to moderate depressive symptoms, and it’s going to be very hard to determine how much it influences their decision in favor of assisted suicide.”

Psychiatrists will need clearly defined standards of mental competency in order to evaluate terminally ill patients properly, she said.