Patients Who Seek to Hasten Death by Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: A Qualitative Study

Thank you for this article elucidating the varied reasons why patients hasten their death with VSED.

At least in Switzerland and in the Netherlands, VSED is already widely used. And the reasons for choosing VSED is increasingly studied and measured. In contrast, there has been far less examination of requests for VSED through an advance directive. This is important because patients with progressive diseases like dementia may be forced to VSED earlier than they would have liked. They must VSED when they still have decision-making capacity. But at that stage and time, their lives are still valuable to them. So, they specify that VSED should begin at some future time when certain intolerable conditions are met.

A growing number of organizations around the world are developing VSED directives. https://www.thaddeuspope.com/vsed.html But are clinicians prepared to honor such directives? What are the reasons that patients complete such directives? Hopefully, the same sort of qualitative study published in this issue of AFM can be deployed to address these questions too.