Thank you. I appreciate that.
This question is for Dr. van Os.
In your commentary copublished in the Psychiatric Times, titled “Psychiatric Euthanasia in the Netherlands: Young People, Procedural Medicine, and the Limits of Psychiatry”, you wrote about an increasing number of youth in the Netherlands who are seeking medical assistance in dying. However, you also say in the article that “rejection and withdrawal rates remain substantial”.
You got that from the American National Library of Medicine's data that studied the requests for medical assistance in dying by young Dutch people with psychiatric disorders. That same report concluded that although there was an increase in young persons seeking MAID MI-SUMC, “Only 3.0% of all applications by young people resulted in MAID, which is lower compared with the acceptance rate for MAID-PS among adults in the Netherlands. One in 4 applications was halted by the patient even before medical files had been assembled.” Of the files that continued to be accessed, 60% were rejected due to eligibility screening. That was in your article.
Wouldn't this data which you've cited in this commentary suggest that the system developed in the Netherlands to protect against unlawful cases of MAID for mental illness as the sole underlying condition is actually working?