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Abstract
Euthanasia has received increasing attention in both academic and public debates as one of the most controversial issues. However, the contribution of psychology-related themes to the topic has had little role on these ongoing debates. The aim of the present study is twofold: (1) to explore the main themes relating to euthanasia as provided by psychology-related research; (2) to analyze the temporal trends of psychology-related research on euthanasia over the last decades. A comprehensive search of academic literature was conducted on PsychINFO database. A qualitative software-based thematic analysis was carried out on 602 journal abstracts published from 1935 to 2014. This study highlighted four different thematic areas which characterized the scientific discourse on euthanasia: (1) moral values, in terms of religious, philosophical, and social implications concerning the individual’s decision to die; (2) professional ethics, in terms of health and social workers’ legal responsibility in death assistance; (3) end-of-life care, with regard to medical options provided to support individuals nearing death; and (4) patient’s right to healthcare, in terms of access to palliative care and better quality of dying. Euthanasia discourse over the last decades seems to be overall characterized by two main dimensions: (1) the increasing trend of social legitimacy and acceptability of euthanasia over time, which moved from ethical to healthcare issues; and (2) the curvilinear temporal trend about the request/provision process in euthanasia, which moved from patient’s decision for ending life (mainly characterizing the most past and recent research) to the role of health professionals (with a peak in the 1990s). The results suggest palliative care as a potential future research area which can provide healthcare providers with skills to ‘connect’ with patients, understand patients’ hidden agendas, and grant a good quality of life and dying process.
Notes
1. PsycINFO is an expansive abstracting and indexing database which includes only articles that have psychological relevance as pertaining: the scientific study of animal and human behavior; content in any of the subfields of psychology; non-psychology content of interest to psychologists in different subfields (for example, statistics for use in research design and empirical analysis, anatomical summaries of different organ systems of the human body, etc.); content in related fields that has psychological or behavioral implications.
2. The search was conducted on May 2014, therefore the number of abstracts published in 2014 are related only to the period from January to April. However, also 2014 was considered for the present study because the aim is not to provide a bibliometric analysis but to explore the potential evolution of euthanasia-related themes in last years (specifically from 2010).
3. We have to remark that in some countries, such as Netherland, Belgium and Luxembourg, being in the terminal stage is not part of the rules of due care.