I am a psychiatrist and ethicist currently working at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Saint-Pierre and the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. I pursued my medical and psychiatry training at KU Leuven University and earned a PhD in medical ethics. I was a postdoctoral fellow in bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in the United States and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Belgium’s public research council.

 

More recently, I was a fellow-in-residence at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.  During 2026-2027, I will be a Harvard Radcliffe Fellow,  working on my book on psychiatric euthanasia, drawing on my research, court cases, and memoirs to examine this practice and its unprecedented challenge to modern society. 

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As a psychiatrist from Belgium, I experienced the particularly complex ethical challenge of psychiatric euthanasia, i.e., voluntary euthanasia for a mental illness, a controversial practice permitted in a few and an increasing number of countries. I decided to pursue research on this issue, not because I advocate for the practice but because it poses foundational questions for psychiatry and, indeed, humanity at large. ​Some key findings include the disproportionate number of women and its significance, evidence of countertransference in such evaluations, the problems with conceptualizing remedies in mental disorders, and the nature of the tension with suicide prevention. ​

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My work has been published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Psychological Medicine, and the Journal of Medical Ethics, among others. I have been invited to testify before the Canadian Parliament on Canada's medical assistance in dying law and have served as an ethics advisor to governmental and non-profit organizations, including the US DARPA through RAND on a suicide prevention project. I also serve on the editorial board of the BrJPsych Open and have written for outlets such as Psyche (Aeon).

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