In France, the public debate about the legalisation of assisted suicide, is raging. In December 2021, psychiatrists published a study that reconsidered the role of psychiatrists in dealing with requests for medical aid in dying. The study was based on 127 articles obtained mostly from Pubmed and Cairn, from 1997 to 2020 in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and Oregon. It emphasized that an in-depth visit with a psychiatrist should be provided in all cases, given that the most prevalent reasons for a request to die are “spirituality, attachment style, social isolation, despair, depression […]. Factors, such as a doctor’s qualifications, influence the psychiatric evaluation and can obscure the motivations that lead a person to request assisted suicide.
