Profs & Pints Baltimore: Assisted Suicide for Mental Illness

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Assisted Suicide for Mental Illness,” on a growing practice that raises huge ethical questions, with Mark Komrad, M.D., a psychiatrist and medical ethicist on the teaching faculty of the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins, Tulane, and Louisiana State universities.

In several European countries, physician-assisted suicide by oral prescription and euthanasia by lethal injection is being made available to psychiatric patients. Sometimes it’s even administered by their own treating psychiatrists.

Closer to home, Canada, which now offers euthanasia for some people who are chronically ill, plans to expand eligibility to those dealing only with psychiatric disorders in March 2027, and in some of its provinces church-based healthcare centers cannot refuse to offer euthanasia services. Currently four out of every 100 Canadians dies by medical euthanasia, making it the fifth leading cause of death in that country. Here in the United States, assisted suicide, available in…