A sign of the changing times? Perceptions of Canadian psychologists on assisted death.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that all Canadians had the right to control their own end-of-life (Carter v Canada, 2015). The federal government, in response, began drafting legislation to regulate physician-assisted death (PAD) in Canada. Assisted death is an umbrella term for [a] death that requires an intentional act or omission [from] second (Downie, 2004, p. 6). PAD refers to form of assisted death where a physician knowingly and intentionally provides person with the knowledge and/or means required to end his or her life (Canadian Medical Association, 2014). Clear terminology is essential because different definitions, according to Downie (2004), serve as the bases for superficial arguments (p. 6).PAD provides challenges and opportunities for Canadian psychologists. Challenges include limited understanding of the perceptions and competency of psychologists surrounding assisted death. Further, limited training exists for psychologists to develop competency (Werth, Lewis, & Richmond, 2009). Opportunities for psychologists emerge from their experience in treating mental illness, common occurrence at end-of-life (Wilson, Curran, & McPherson, 2005), large contributions to end-of-life research (Galbraith & Dobson, 2000), and experience providing assessments of client competency (Niederjohn & Rogers, 2009). Like psychiatrists, who are grouped with physicians for the purposes of research (Emanuel, 2002), psychologists seem to be among the most qualified professionals to provide insight and practical knowledge to the current debate (Galbraith & Dobson, 2000). In the context of legalizing PAD, psychologists have already provided information to the Supreme Court regarding the psychology of assisted death (Canadian Psychological Association, 2015).This study examined the knowledge and perceptions, both personal and professional, of Canadian psychologists on assisted death. To inform the literature as well as provide further perspectives to the PAD debate, the researchers asked two questions. What are the personal and professional perceptions of Canadian psychologists on assisted death? To what extent do Canadian registered psychologists feel confident in their abilities and training for assessing the competency of individuals requesting assistance in dying?MethodParticipants (i.e., registered psychologists practicing in parts of Canada) responded to 32-question online survey that took 20 min to complete. The survey was available for period of 2 months and was accessible through R2P2 (Canadian Psychological Association, 2014), Facebook (2015), as well as through consenting psychological associations.The authors developed six-part survey to address the research questions; Sections III, V, and VI are relevant to the current article. The questions in Section III, based upon the work of Wilson et al. (2013), addressed studied psychologists' personal and professional perceptions toward two elements of PAD: letting die (i.e., the right to refuse life-saving medical treatment) and receiving medical assistance in dying. Participants could answer yes, I believe every competent adult should have this right, yes, but I believe it should be allowed only in certain cases or situations, or no, I do not believe anyone should have this right. In Section V, the questions assessed studied psychologist's beliefs on their own ability to assess the competence of terminally ill adults pursuing PAD. In Section VI, psychologists were presented with two vignettes, based on the work of Levy et al. (2013), that aimed to assess the participant's personal and professional perceptions of PAD under different conditions (e.g., cases of mental illness vs. terminal illness). In Sections V and VI, participants rated statements on five point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree.ResultsA total of 97 individuals responded, with all but four having listed themselves as being registered psychologists practicing in Canada. …
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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 | 0.011 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".