Opposition parties call for indefinite pause to MAID expansion for mental illness
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/special-joint-committee-maid-mental-illness-report-1.7095679
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/special-joint-committee-maid-mental-illness-report-1.7095679
In my opinion not expanding it to mental illness is short sighted.
Many people suffer in silence, or don’t let known the extent of their feelings of their mental illness and this could be an opportunity to open a dialogue with their doctor.
This could be an opportunity to let known the extent of their illness and seek alternative treatments before MAID as part of the requirements.
If people are at that point it may happen anyway but without anyone knowing how bad it had become.
To me, this is the crux of it:
Dr. Jitender Sareen is part of a group of eight university psychiatry chairs who wrote to federal ministers and urged the committee not to expand MAID to include mental illness.
Sareen said practice standards to guide psychiatrists and clinicians are inadequate, and Canada is lagging behind other countries in mental health and addictions funding.
"Offering death when the person has not had the opportunity to get better, with or without treatment, is, in our opinion, not acceptable," said Sareen, a professor and head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba.
If mental health supports in this country were anything close to adequate, it would be a different conversation.
Agreed.
Mental health is part of our health, just like dental and medicine should be. It shouldn’t be universal unless it covers head to toe.
Not everyone’s answer is going to be the same, either, so I don’t believe in restricting someone’s access to something if they feel it’s their time. At the same time, they should be given every resource to make the right decision for them, and to try to get better.
To me this perspective seems to reach the exact opposite conclusion than it should given its premises.
When the only additional supports the government is offering is death, it sends a strong message.
The problem is, when is enough, enough?
Should someone suffer in hell for 10 years? 25 years? 59 years without any relief?
Medication doesn't work for everyone, and they come with side effects which can exacerbate mental illness.
Cognitive therapy doesn't work for everyone either.
It's easy for them to say "who has not had the opportunity", but that sounds like arrogance. As if everyone with mental illness can be successfully treated.
People considering maid aren't just feeling under the weather, their existence is suffering to a level that these doctors could never imagine.
It's selfish to the extreme, and extreme in its cruelty, to force someone to suffer. Or worse, to force them to take an undignified exit from this world alone.
Shame on these doctors.
Instead, we should force them to keep suffering until we fix the supports.
Great idea.
Yeah, I don't think you're going to convince me that state-sponsered euthanasia is an acceptable alternative to a broken health care system.
Uh, yeah, because once dying is the recommended alternative to fixing the mental health care system, there's going to be less demand, and government will use that as an excuse to not fix the fucking problem.
Ah yes, keep the suffering as high as possible for some people in order to put pressure on fixing the system.
That isn't cruel at all.
20 years ago when I was well I thought it was a great idea. Things look differently when you have been suffering needlessly for a decade because proven treatment that could help you simply isn't offered unless you are wealthy. Whatever you might think of what it does to the "level of suffering," it is simply not an acceptable compromise for our government to offer MAID in place of treatment under any circumstances.
Yet they aren't going to offer significantly better treatment, so if that's not an option, why shouldn't MAID be?
It's not like hiring 10% more specialists will fix this, the volume of people needing help is way higher than that. You can yell all you want about wanting better treatment, the rest of us want to be realistic given the resources available. We probably need 500% more specialists, and there's simply no way to train or pay that many people.
The only way this problem gets solved is if we manage to create an AI that can successfully treat millions of people at the same time. It will likely happen at some point, but that point is not today, or even this decade likely. Until then, I'd like people to have options to retain their dignity.
Fine, if it's not an option. But it IS an option. Other countries can treat their ill. Fuck, THIS country could do it 40 years ago.
If we can spend money on MAID, we can spend money on treatment. There is absolutely no reason that we could not be offering treatment. If there was, then great. But it's simply being withheld for fucking ideological bullshit.
How much do you think it costs to render MAID?? It's not fucking cheap! Not even counting the societal cost. And if your argument really boils down to, "it's cheaper to kill people than to treat them," then sir, fuck you so hard.
I am one of those people you are talking about. Stop talking on my behalf, listen more.
Why don't we spend the CONSIDERABLE RESOURCES we are proposing to spend on MAID for mental illness on fucking treatment then? Yeah, it IS a great idea.
Because it isn't considerable resources that we spend on MAID, and it's not the same resources either. Some people with extreme mental illness need to talk to a mental health specialist daily for months or years.
MAID takes a handful of meetings, then a pill.
MAiD should be available for anyone and everyone, however no one should be suggesting the option to people.
Pausing MAiD for mental health related things won't fix anything if that's all they gonna do.
Everything we do is half assed.
Even though it's something that's technically correct on a philosophical level for SOME outlier patients, and in an ideal world and ideal system we could implement it well, I don't think our system is anywhere close right now. Working in the healthcare system I don't know anyone who's eager for this or who knows how we're going to sort through the massive haystack of innappropriate requests this will trigger, to correctly identify the few " needles" that it's actually ethical for.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A special parliamentary committee is set to release a report this week that could shape the federal government's decision on whether to allow those suffering solely from a mental illness to obtain medically assisted deaths.
Cooper said he was swayed by psychiatrists who told the committee it would be difficult — if not impossible — for medical professionals to decide whether a mental illness is beyond treatment, or whether someone's request for MAID is rational or motivated by suicidal ideation.
NDP MP Alistair MacGregor, one of the committee's vice-chairs, said the law was changed without proper consultation, leaving Parliamentarians and many different sectors of Canadian society struggling to catch up.
Helen Long, CEO Dying With Dignity Canada, said the government fulfilled three main preconditions for extending MAID eligibility to mental illness: expanding data collection, establishing a national curriculum for medical professionals and developing practice standards.
Dr. Jitender Sareen is part of a group of eight university psychiatry chairs who wrote to federal ministers and urged the committee not to expand MAID to include mental illness.
Dr. Sonu Gand, a professor at the University of Toronto and chief of psychiatry at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, said there aren't enough safeguards in place to protect the most vulnerable.
The original article contains 849 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I have a mental illness that makes every day a complete horror. I have been suicidal for decades. I have a line in the sand and it would be lovely to be supported until I meet that line. That is a fantasy, there is absolutely no support and now you silly fucks are using people like me for your political gain. I hope the political right all die in a fire.
Looks like this comment was removed by one of the mods. Here is a modified version that I think won't get removed:
I have a mental illness that makes every day a complete horror. I have been suicidal for decades. I have a line in the sand and it would be lovely to be supported until I meet that line. That is a fantasy, there is absolutely no support and now
peopleare using people like me for political gain. Iwish unpleaseantness on people who would do so.
Thanks for salvaging that comment. It seems to get to the heart of the real problem, at least as far as I'm able to relate to as someone who has struggled off and on for a long time. Being suicidal isn't about wanting to die; it's about not being able to bear living.
I don't think most people understand the respective cans of worms both the simplistic answers "yes we should," and "no, we shouldn't" entail. Both suffering patients and well-meaning professionals need to be heard on this-- but especially suffering patients. Setting aside existing problems of psychology and psychiatry, most supports that could be available just aren't. Promising new options are being researched that probably will never become available to most people, due to cost and/or unnecessary gatekeeping. As a suicidal person, if the only options are (a) suffer or (b) die, the natural conclusion you come to is that nobody cares how you feel, inevitably making you feel even worse.
Without knowing that you and your support team tried everything you reasonably could (and I'd be surprised if any public system in Canada was anywhere near the vicinity of "reasonable" right now) before choosing that final option, teasing out where the systemic funneling of depressed people toward MAID began and where the (presumed to be) individually-generated despair ended will become an impossibility.