Children's Laureate reflects on assisted suicide
November 7, 2025
7 Episodes
00:00
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- Frank Cottrell-Boyce is the UK Children's Laureate and multi award-winning children's book author and screenwriter. He reflects on life, death and assisted suicide with palliative medicine Professor Mark Taubert. They share moving stories of challenge and hope and explore the language and culture of the assisted suicide debate.
- Chelsea Roff is founder of Eat, Breathe Thrive, an international eating disorder charity. She co-authored the first systematic review of deaths by euthanasia and assisted suicide in people with eating disorders, describing 60 cases internationally. Suicide is a leading cause of death in eating disorders, leading to complex ethical and clinical challenges when NHS resources are limited. ‘One of the heart-breaking things about this illness is the more severe it becomes the more a person resists treatment – resists the very thing that is going to bring them out of it’. Assisted suicide legislation may only be intended for a small group patients but eating disorders demonstrate why ‘the repercussions are across the bows of medicine’.
- Hon. Robert Clark, Former MP and Attorney-General from Victoria, explains concerning realities about voluntary assisted dying (VAD) in Australia. 'Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil'. While the UK parliament is told that VAD has been an unqualified success in Australia, in reality there is lack of reporting and scrutiny of VAD processes, with negative impacts on patients, health services and health professionals.
- Irene is a Professor of Intellectual Disability & Palliative Care in London. Her research into euthanasia cases in the Netherlands reveals why the UK needs to be very concerned about people with autism and mild learning disabilities qualifying for assisted deaths.
- On suicide prevention day Prof Mark Komrad, clinical professor of psychiatry from Maryland, on the challenges of doctor-assisted suicide for psychiatrists and suicide prevention. What can the UK learn from flawed safeguards in Oregon's model of assisted suicide, where the law has expanded and where financial considerations often outweigh ethical concerns, creating a troubling precedent in medical practice?
- A palliative medicine consultant in Cardiff and national lead for DNACPR decisions in Wales draws insights from his clinical, academic and strategic roles, and the impact of decisions made during the Covid epidemic.
- David Randall, a consultant nephrologist working in London, spoke with Gillian Wright in 2021, about what really concerns him if assisted suicide is legalised in the UK






