On the moral acceptability of physician-assisted dying for non-autonomous psychiatric patients

Résumé

Several authors have recently suggested that the suffering caused by mental illness could provide moral grounds for physician-assisted dying. Yet they typically require that psychiatric-assisted dying could come to question in the cases of autonomous, or rational, psychiatric patients only. Given that also non-autonomous psychiatric patients can sometimes suffer unbearably, this limitation appears questionable. In this article, I maintain that restricting psychiatric-assisted dying to autonomous, or rational, psychiatric patients would not be compatible with endorsing certain end-of-life practices commonly accepted in current medical ethics and law, practices often referred to as 'passive euthanasia'. SUICIDE-ASSISTÉ ÉTHIQUE PATIENT-PSYCHIATRIQUE AUTONOMIE ACCEPTABILITÉ PRISE-DÉCISION FIN-DE-VIE ÉTUDE-CAS