ABSTRACT
The request for assisted suicide presents complex social, ethical, cultural, interpersonal, and psychological dilemmas. Current discussions of the issue tend to reduce these complexities to debates about individual rights and legal issues. This narrow view, however, does not take into consideration the interpersonal and social forces that shape the patient’s appraisal of his or her illness and that in turn inform his or her personal choice for hastened death. The doctor-patient relationship is only one such force, but is nevertheless critical in influencing how patients perceive their situation, how they attribute meaning to it, and how they make decisions about whether to seek assistance in dying (Varghese & Kelly, 1999).
