This article discusses mental illness and suicide and may be triggering for some readers. The Canadian Mental Health Association Crisis Line can be reached at 1-800-875-6213.
Scientifically and socially, Canada isn’t ready to expand medically assisted death to those whose only underlying condition for it is mental illness.
Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAiD) program ed for four per cent of all deaths in the country in 2022—after only six years of being implemented. Canada’s use of the treatment has outpaced the 10 other countries where it exists. According to to an article in the Toronto Star, it took 14 years for assisted death cases to for four per cent of deaths in the Netherlands, and assisted death still doesn’t for four per cent of national deaths in Switzerland and Belgium.
Given the surge in its usage, many expressed concern with Canada’s proposed expansion of MAiD, which would have extended eligibility to patients whose mental illness is their sole medical condition.
Increasing the number of people for whom medically assisted death may be a treatment gives rise to ethical concerns, yet so would withholding it.
Many perceive death as an undesirable outcome, particularly when it could have been delayed or preventable. Ultimately, though, everyone is entitled to autonomy over their own body and life. Denying access to MAiD would be to deny the fundamental right to agency.
Those who criticize MAiD for condoning suicide fail to consider the conditions of many individuals with severe disabilities or chronic illnesses will likely not improve and that forcing them to continue living is only prolonging—perhaps even intensifying—their suffering.
One reason Canada’s assisted death rates are so much higher than those of other nations is that MAiD doesn’t require its applicants’ conditions to be terminal. Eliminating this requirement maximizes the treatment’s capacity to allow its patients to with dignity rather than in suffering.
Criminalizing or limiting access to services rarely decreases their use, but rather increases unsafe recreations of them.
Suicide is far more traumatic for the person who attempts it and for the loved ones who survive them than medically assisted death.
The proposed expansion of MAiD to mental illness stipulates that the illness must be resistant to treatment.
Medical research into mental illness in Canada is far too recent and unexplored a discipline to be able to confidently say a person has explored all possible routes of treatment before applying for MAiD. Social factors are equally difficult to separate from mental health. The prevalence of housing and food insecurity in Canada inevitably breeds mental illness.
As much as we could try to guarantee exhaustive treatment for mental illness prior to granting access to MAiD, unequal living conditions are an unignorable and thus-far untreated cause.
Before expanding MAiD as a treatment for mental illness, Canada must first expand its medical research into mental health, as well as its social and mental health s.
—Journal Editorial Board
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