[deong]

But that's the only practical thing it could be. Suppose you shoot yourself in the head. What's the doctor supposed to put down as the cause of death? All he knows is that a bullet destroyed part of your brain. He doesn't know if you were depressed. Hell, he doesn't even know if it was intentional. Was it the girlfriend that left you last month, or that promotion you thought you were going to get that went to someone else?

What do you put down for a drug overdose? Was he chasing the next good time or escaping the pain of being molested as a child?

[vertex-four]

I think that the death certificate should either just say "yep, this person's dead", or it should list the actual reasons how and why a person died. In most cases, hopefully that'll be "this person lived out their life, and this happened to be the end of it", and that'll be self-evident because the person died of natural causes and received appropriate treatment for any illness at the appropriate stages. In others, it might require investigation. Whether it's a doctor's job to do that or a multidisciplinary team's is irrelevant to the question of what it should contain.