Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 75(2)  May 2025

Correspondence

Psychiatrists call for Assisted Dying legislation to be overwhelmingly rejected

A group of psychiatrists wrote to the Times, expressing their grave concern about the Assisted Dying Bill. Their letter [1] was published on 4th Feb 2025

In the letter they stated their alarm at “the haste of the Committee considering the Bill for Assisted Dying. They stated their worry that three days of oral evidence seems insufficient to consider such a huge question as doctor-assisted suicide.” They made a plea for more time to consider written evidence (a plea that fell on deaf Parliamentary ears).

The psychiatrists stated a real and deep fear that Assisted Dying legislation will “undermine the daily efforts of psychiatrists across the UK to prevent suicide.”

There is so much evidence of the vulnerability of people who seek assisted killing- many will be very vulnerable to multiple pressures including the lack of palliative care , poor housing, coercion etc. As well as that, of course, depression will also be a huge factor. But even more than that, the fear of being a burden is a grave problem. The authors pointed out that in “Oregon in 2023, 43% cited ‘feeling a burden to caregivers’ as one of the reasons that they were seeking an assisted suicide, yet less than 1% were referred for Psychiatric or Psychological assessment.”

The psychiatrists went on to say that “In Canada in 2023, of those who had an assisted suicide under the criterion that death was reasonably foreseeable, 38.5% reported 'emotional distress, anxiety, fear or existential suffering' while 21.1% reported 'isolation or loneliness'.

The Assisted Dying Bill is deeply flawed and safeguards, while clamed to be the strongest in the world seem weak and easily circumvented.

Finally the authors of the letter lamented the reality that the Committee did not initially see the need to hear evidence on Assisted Dying from the College of Psychiatrists.

The letters 24 authors called, rightly, for the legislation to be overwhelmingly rejected..