Terminally ill patients that desire death is already a touchy subject with the government, religion, family, and ethics and so there is no true right or wrong answer to whether physician assisted suicide is ‘justified’. To only answer the prompt and ignore the legality and morals of the physicians performing the assisted suicide, I believe that yes, mental health professionals should serve as gatekeepers for physician-assisted suicide. There are many arguments against a Mental Health Professional (MHP) to be the gatekeeper, such that they are biased and ethical issues, that one person should not make that decision for someone else, that it should not be mandatory for MHP’s to be involved, and also that there aren’t across the board standards to assess a patient’s mental state to make a rational decision about their own death. To eliminate bias and ethical issues that a …show more content…
The type of MHP would have to be given tests based on a guideline, a standard of pros vs. cons, that would challenge their own beliefs but they would have to be able solve first if the patient had a mental disorder and if they did to treat it before continuing on and if the patient did not have a mental disorder/or completely recovered and is in the right state of mind to understand the