Mentally ill people in a severe phase of illness are usually not able to form their own will. Image: dpa
How will assisted suicide be regulated in the future? On Thursday, the Bundestag will vote on two bills. Here a psychiatrist tells why he would choose the more restrictive solution – and what concerns he has.
In order to show the different perspectives with which society and thus also the medical profession view assisted suicide, we asked two doctors to explain their position. Some questions in the two interviews are identical in order to be able to compare the answers well with one another. A link to the interview with the internist Wolfgang Oblinger can be found at the end.
Eve sleeper
Editor in the “Life” department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.
Mr. Reif, what is your experience with assisted suicide?
It happens that in a psychiatric context, too, patients ask that suicide be made possible for them or that they even want to be killed. With sufficient specialist knowledge, however, this can be assessed relatively quickly as a symptom of the mental illness. Again and again, for example, I see patients, especially those with depression, who have informed themselves about assisted suicide before the psychiatric treatment or have become a member of one of the euthanasia associations. For someone with expertise it is actually clear that the suicidal idea here was caused by the mental illness; without a specialist medical assessment, however, this does not seem to have been noticed.