NCJ Number
183078
Editor(s)
Richard C. Monk
Date Published
1998
Length
26 pages
Annotation
The director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine contends that many patients who indicate they want to die are actually mentally depressed individuals who should be counseled and not helped to die, while a professor and five other philosophers maintain that individuals have a moral and a constitutional right to determine their own life's value.
Abstract
The psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University notes that the issue of physician-assisted suicide was largely brought to public attention by Jack Kevorkian, who helped more than 85 people die in Michigan in the 1990's. In Oregon, physicians may legally prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients. Of the estimated 30,000 suicides committed annually in the United States, less than 3 percent are by terminally ill people and only a very small fraction of that number are likely to have been assisted suicides. However, the number of patients who die because physicians and family members elected to withhold medicines or other life-sustaining supplies or simply failed to revive them is considerably larger. Compounding the issue of euthanasia, already laden with symbolic and emotional implications, is the fact that modern medicine can often prolong the lives of the severely injured and the elderly. The psychiatrist opposes euthanasia, believing that therapeutic counseling should be pursued instead. In contrast, the professor strongly supports euthanasia and indicates that the right to die is protected by the due process clause. He further argues that state interests do not justify a categorical prohibition on all assisted suicides and that each individual has a right to exercise some control over the time and manner of his or her death.