“Please help me die”: applying self-determination theory to understand suicide travel

Abstract

At the age of 104, renowned Australian scientist Professor David Goodall travelled to Switzerland in 2018 to commit physician-assisted suicide (PAS). His last words were “My life has been rather poor for the last year or so. And I’m very happy to end it” (Blouin, 2018). In fact, Dr. Goodall is among 611 people from 31 countries who have travelled to Switzerland to engage in PAS (Wilson, 2014). The tourism literature refers to this phenomenon as suicide travel: individuals visit countries such as Switzerland and Luxembourg to die legally, thus circumventing restrictions prohibiting death by suicide in their home country (Mondal & Bhowmik, 2018)....