Awareness and Dying: The Problem of Sedating 'Existential Suffering' in Palliative Care

The number of people who die while sedated is increasing, in part due to a currently widespread conviction that dying brings about paucity of meaning and is seen as an intolerable situation for the person affected. Palliative care tends to affirm this attitude towards dying and denying when it uses terminal sedation in cases of 'existential suffering'. We hope to launch an interdisciplinary discussion on how Meaning-Maintenance and Dignity-Therapy can help support an 'active dying phase', and encourage caregivers not to uphold sedation as a possible standard of palliative medicine. This is followed by a dialogue between ethics of palliative medicine and medical psychology, which reaffirms the last-resort character of terminal sedation.