Professor Richard Huxtable:

This goes back to the principal ground on which we might seek to allow assisted dying. Broadly, to refer to some philosophical arguments, I think the arguments often boil down to, on one hand, the pure autonomy view in that it is all about what the person wants and that gives us our ground for performing or allowing assisted dying. The alternative is the so-called joint view, where you put together the autonomous wishes of the person and their suffering. If suffering enters the equation and if it is all about autonomy, we will hear from people with psychiatric suffering, distress and the like that there will be discrimination if they are excluded from it because they could give an account that their suffering is such that it should qualify.

I would, however, distinguish one question. For a moment, I wondered if there are two things to separate out. The first is that a person can have capacity to make a great range of decisions while also having some sort of psychiatric condition or suffering. However, really the question is whether psychiatric suffering should be a basis. In that context, I would express reservations, although there is a lively debate going on in the past ten years at least around, for example, treatment-resistant depression. As soon as one brings in the notion that something is treatment resistant, then perhaps there might be limited scope. However, I would have reservations.