According to a recent study that interviewed 379 Canadian patients who were receiving palliative care for cancer between 2001 and 2003, over half of those patients (62.8%) believed that assisted suicide should be legalized.
But of the 238 participants in the study who argued that assisted suicide should be legal, only 22 (5.8%) said they would actually exercise the option right away if it were legal, and over half of those 22 said they would do so, not because of heightened levels of pain associated with their illness, but because they felt they were a burden to their family or the health care system.
The study, entitled “Desire for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide in palliative cancer care” was published in the most recent issue of Health Psychology, a journal of the APA.
Dr. Keith Wilson, the lead researcher on the study, commented to the Canadian Press on the issue of the 22 patients who said they would have chosen assisted suicide were it legal.
“It turns out for those 22 people we’re talking about, the issues were much more complicated than pain,” said Dr. Wilson. “They didn’t tend to have any more pain than the people who didn’t want assisted suicide. But they did tend to feel sicker, they did tend to feel weaker. They were more likely to be depressed, and they felt that they had become a burden to others.”
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