In my last post, I summarized data that documented concerns about the physician-assisted suicides of psychiatric patients in the Netherlands. Several North American jurisdictions have legalized or are considering legalizing physician-assisted suicide. Should the right to assisted suicide be extended to persons who want to end the suffering they experience from mental illness?
No US state is considering legislation that would permit the assisted suicide of a mentally ill patient. But the question will arise. Liberal societies believe that all citizens are entitled to the equal protection of the law. So if a right is granted to one class of citizens, and the boundaries of that class are arbitrary, there will be pressure to knock those barriers down.
Canada has recently established the right to physician-assisted suicide, and Canadians are debating who should have that right. Previously, it was a crime to abet a suicide. But in Carter v. Canada (2015), the Supreme Court of Canada held that it was unconstitutional* to
prohibit physician-assisted death for a competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual.
Notice that the Court did not limit this right to those who are near death. After all, if a person has a right to suicide to escape intolerable suffering during the last days of her life, why should she be forced to endure it for decades?
The Court gave the Canadian government a year (since extended) to write laws and regulations implementing physician-assisted suicide. From the Carter decision, we can see that physicians will be able to assist the suicides of competent adults with irremediable and enduring conditions that cause intolerable suffering.
So, can the suffering of severe mental illness be intolerable? In his classic memoir of his depression, Darkness Visible, William Styron wrote that
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.
Can severe mental illnesses be irremediable and enduring? Yes: some patients suffer incurably. However, many cases have an episodic course, with suffering that is irremediable but not necessarily enduring. It is an open question whether psychiatrists can accurately distinguish cases in which the suffering will remit from those that never will.
Are psychiatric patients competent to consent? Even some severely mentally ill people can be competent to make important life decisions. Nevertheless, we should be extremely careful about the competence of psychiatric patients to consent to assisted suicide.
Mental illness is the strongest known risk factor for suicide. Danish researchers linked a national registry of psychiatric patients to vital statistics data. They found that adult men with mental illnesses are more than 12 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population and women are more than 13 times more likely. These exceptional ratios are why preventing suicide is the first priority of mental health clinicians. Further, the epidemiology of suicide poses this question: Is the desire of a mentally ill person to take his life a reasonable response to his situation or a symptom of his disease?
Legal competence requires that a person be able to appreciate his situation and its consequences. However, hopelessness is both a key symptom of depression and an important indicator of suicide risk. Styron:
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
A person can be hopeless because she has accurately appraised her future. But the mentally ill often underestimate and devalue their prospects. Styron wrote about his illness that
The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow.
Or so he felt at the time. Yet after that episode, Styron’s condition remitted. He experienced a final relapse at the end of his life. But a midlife suicide would have cost him and his family many healthy years, and it would have cost the world Darkness Visible and A Tidewater Morning.
The Canadian Parliament is working on the law required by the Supreme Court. The Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Physician-Assisted Dying recommended
That individuals not be excluded from eligibility for medical assistance in dying based on the fact that they have a psychiatric condition.
The Committee cited the argument of the ethicist and lawyer Jocelyn Downie that
[M]ental illness should not be an exclusion criterion [for assisted suicide]. It was not excluded by the Supreme Court, and not all individuals with mental illness are incompetent. Physicians already routinely determine whether someone is competent, even when they have a mental illness.
Physicians do routinely make competence determinations. This is because these determinations have to be made and there is no reason to think that anyone else can do a better job of it. Those aren’t strong grounds for believing that physicians can validly and reliably determine when a desire to end one’s life is a reasonable decision and when it is a symptom of mental illness.
In an assisted-suicide competence determination, a false negative error is a patient deprived of her rights and a false positive error is a dead patient. We have no estimates of the likelihoods of these grievous errors. The Canadian parliamentarians have confidence in physicians’ abilities to determine whether mentally ill people are competent to consent to assisted suicide. But this confidence lacks a scientific foundation.
Concern for the autonomy and dignity of the mentally ill means that we should urgently develop valid procedures for determining which patients are competent to consent to assisted suicide. Concern for their lives means that we should precede incrementally and not include mental illness until we’ve worked this out.
*Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms says that
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.
The Court reasoned that
the prohibition [of assisted suicide] deprives some individuals of life, as it has the effect of forcing some individuals to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable. The rights to liberty and security of the person… are also engaged [because an] individual’s response to a grievous and irremediable medical condition is a matter critical to their dignity and autonomy [and denying] people in this situation the right to make decisions concerning their bodily integrity and medical care… trenches on their liberty. And by leaving them to endure intolerable suffering, it impinges on their security of the person.
