S3-4 Euthanasia and assisted suicide: ‘what’s dignity got to do with it?’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While death hastening policies are emerging in various constituencies around the world, it behooves us to understand the complexities of what motivates people to seek out these life ending options. Some of the earliest studies in the Benelux countries identified a connection between choosing euthanasia or assisted suicide and loss of dignity. More recent studies have affirmed this association, suggesting that an appreciation of dignity may provide insights into how best to understand and be responsive to the needs of those expressing the wish for a hastened death. Dignity, defined as the quality or state of being worthy of honour, respect or esteem, conveys the essence of medical professionalism regarding how patients should be treated. Such treatment, or dignity conserving care, can help patients deal with existential issues, maintain their dignity, and lessen psychological distress. Failure to acknowledge dignity by lack of acknowledgment of personhood can undermine patients’ sense of self-worth, quality-of-life and will to live. Fractured dignity is further associated with feeling a burden to others, no longer feeling like the person they once were, and loss of autonomy, all of which have been identified as drivers in the wish to die. Our program of research has explicated the construct of dignity, developed and empirical model of dignity in the terminally ill; outcome measures to track dignity related distress; and trialed psychotherapeutic approaches designed to improve end-of-life experience and achieve death with dignity. The connections between this body of empirical work and the issue of desire for death, loss of will to live, and coveting a hastened death will be further explored.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
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".