General hospital psychiatry
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Gen Hosp Psychiatry · Jul 2004
Psychiatric consultation with regard to requests for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.
The objective of this article is to describe the practice of psychiatric consultation with regard to explicit requests for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands. Written questionnaires were sent to an unselected sample of 673 Dutch psychiatrists, about half of all such specialists in the Netherlands. The response rate was 83%. ⋯ In most, but not all, cases where the patient's request for physician-assisted death was refused, the respondent had judged that the request was not well considered or that the patient had a treatable mental disorder, or that the decision-making was influenced by transference and countertransference. We conclude that psychiatric consultation for patients requesting physician-assisted death in the Netherlands is rare, as in other countries. The issue of psychiatric consultation with regard to requests for physician-assisted death, especially in patients with a physical disease, needs to be further addressed.