Attitudes Toward and Desire for Assisted Suicide among Persons with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aimed at investigating attitudes toward assisted suicide among individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and the differences in health status (illness severity and functional disability) and psychosocial adjustment (depression, perceived stress, social support, and coping) between those in favor of and those against assisted suicide. This study also aimed at describing the characteristics of terminally-ill individuals who acknowledge contemplating assisted suicide. Forty-four individuals diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were surveyed about their attitudes and the circumstances that would make them contemplate assisted suicide and filled out standardized measures of mood, stress, social support, coping, and illness status. Seventy percent of the sample found assisted suicide morally acceptable and 60% thought it should be legalized. In addition, 60% of patients agreed they could foresee circumstances that would make them contemplate assisted suicide, but only three (7%) indicated they would have requested it already if it had been legal. Willingness to contemplate assisted suicide was associated with reports of elevated levels of depressive symptoms and reports of hopelessness. Results highlight the need to assess psychological status carefully when terminally ill individuals begin contemplating assisted suicide or voice a request for it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".