Assisted suicide or culpable suicide: is there a difference?

Is there a right to physician-assisted suicide?

In Part I, the author explains that it is the adjudication between the conflicting claims of individual liberty, personal autonomy and self-determination versus the preservation of life as a societal value that is at the core of the issue posed by physician-assisted suicide. In Part II, author makes the case against suicide, noting that liberty is not absolute and the state retains powers of so...

Assisted Suicide and Unassisted Suicide: What's the Difference?

Introduction Discussions about whether or not to legalize assisted suicide often fail to take into account the fact that unassisted suicide [1] is already legal.[2] Failure to consider this fact means that unless there is a significant difference between assisted suicide and unassisted suicide that justifies prohibiting the former while permitting the latter, one must either accept inconsistenc...

Palliative care or assisted suicide?

There Is No Difference in IQ between Suicide and Non-Suicide Psychiatric Patients: A Retrospective Case-Control Study

OBJECTIVE The goal of this study was to examine the association between IQ and suicide in psychiatric patients. METHODS We conducted a nested case-control study using data obtained from psychiatric patients affiliated with a general hospital in Seoul, Korea. In a one-to-two ratio the psychiatric patients who died of suicide (Suicide Group; n=35) were matched to those who didn't (Non-suicide G...

When is physician assisted suicide or euthanasia acceptable?

OBJECTIVES To discover what factors affect lay people's judgments of the acceptability of physician assisted suicide and euthanasia and how these factors interact. DESIGN Participants rated the acceptability of either physician assisted suicide or euthanasia for 72 patient vignettes with a five factor design--that is, all combinations of patient's age (three levels); curability of illness (tw...