Dr Ben Spencer

As a former mental health doctor and someone who has done research on decision-making capacity, I want to talk about stigma in the brief time I have today. I have looked after many hundreds of people—perhaps thousands—who have self-harmed or attempted suicide. Of course, a desire for one’s life to end can be entirely reasonable and an understandable wish, but it is often a manifestation of a treatable mental disorder. With the right intervention, care and support, people can get better. They can look back and say, “What was that about? I’m so thankful I didn’t succeed” when they get the care and treatment they need. The Bill refuses to acknowledge that. It frames the debate—the intervention—as shortening the death process or some form of assisted dying rather than what it is, which is physician-assisted suicide. The Bill is designed to take at face value an expression of a wish to die as an absolute fact—an expression of autonomy—and not a possible manifestation of mental illness. That is its blind spot. That is its most tragic flaw, and it is from there that I believe all its problems derive. Mental disorder can be very tricky to detect. There is nothing stigmatising about mental disorder. If someone in hospital expressed a wish to die, if someone in a care home or an outpatient clinic expressed a wish to die, if someone here in the Chamber expressed a wish to die or if a loved one expressed a wish to die, the first person I would want them to see would be a psychiatrist, not an assisted dying practitioner.