Walking Alongside: Views of Family Members on Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Illness as the Sole Underlying Medical Condition
Open accessAbstract
Medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was introduced into Canadian federal legislation in 2016. Mental illness as the sole underlying medical condition (MI-SUMC) is currently excluded from eligibility; such exclusion is scheduled to expire on March 17, 2024. Irremediability, capacity, quality of life, autonomy, family involvement, and healthcare system constraints have been debated intensively. Recent studies have not explored the views of family members of persons with mental illness on MAiD MI-SUMC. This study aimed to fill this knowledge gap. Twenty-five Ontario residents who had a loved one with mental illness participated. A persona–scenario exercise was designed to explore participants’ views on MAiD MI-SUMC in hypothetical situations. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. A lived experience-advisory panel was engaged throughout the study. Seven themes were developed: Witnessing suffering; A road with barriers and limitations; Societal barriers; The unknowns of mental illness; Individual choices: the life or death that a person wants; MAiD MI-SUMC as an acceptable choice when suffering cannot be relieved with available treatments and supports; and The emotional outcome. Participants constructed their views based on their experience of supporting a loved one with mental illness. MAiD MI-SUMC was perceived as a multifaceted issue, whose acceptability and potential introduction required a concurrent exploration and discussion of the challenges arising due to limitations of the healthcare system, the opportunities and limits to family involvement, and the value of patient autonomy.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Persons with mental illness and family participants were aligned in their views on MAiD MI-SUMC service delivery, with a variety of perspectives expressed within both groups in our study.
“Persons with mental illness and family participants were aligned in their views on MAiD MI-SUMC service delivery, with a variety of perspectives expressed within both groups in our study [35, 41, 42].”
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 53 · Cited by 7
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- Regional Euthanasia Review Committees – RTE. (2022). Annual report 2021. Retrieved 2023/03/01 from. https://english.euthanasiecommissie.nl/binaries/euthanasiecommissie-en/documenten/publications/annual-reports/2002/annual-reports/annual-reports/RTE_JV2021_+Annual+Raport_English.pdf
- Authors
- Bastidas-Bilbao, H., Stergiopoulos, V., Cappe, V., van Kesteren, M. R., Stewart, D. E., Gupta, M., Simpson, A. I. F., Dawthorne, M., Rajji, T. K., Castle, D., & Hawke, L. D.
- Affiliations
- Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CA)
- Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, ON, Canada
- University Health Network (CA)
- Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CA)
- University of Tasmania (AU)
- Corresponding author
- Hawke, Lisa D.
- ORCID
- Venue
- Qualitative Health Research
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2023-09-29
- Volume
- 33
- Issue
- 13
- Pages
- 1140-1153
- ISSN
- 1049-7323 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-7557
- PMC
- PMC10626980
- OpenAlex
- W4387157176
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 53
- Citations by year
- 2024: 6 · 2023: 1
- FWCI
- 1.79
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Qualitative Health Research (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research (332964)
- Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto (Department of Psychiatry Suicide Studies Fund)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Palliative Care and End-of-Life Issues
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Palliative and Oncologic Care
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Ethics and bioethics in healthcare
- Keywords
- medical assistance in dying, mental illness, family perspectives, patient autonomy, family involvement, health system barriers, quality of life, witnessing suffering, end-of-life decisions, Ontario
- MeSH terms
- Mental Disorders, Canada, Family, Humans, Medical Assistance, Ontario, Quality of Life, Walking, Suicide, Assisted
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
