Hot-take: It should be open to any adult for any reason they choose.
People are forced into the world without any choice. They should have the choice to leave it peacefully when they want.
I don’t think this is as hot of a take as you may imagine. However, I think that the implementation is the tricky part.
If you think about it, anyone can try to die by suicide at any time they want, and there’s really very little others can do about it. There’s a thousand and one grim ways to accomplish it. In a way, providing people who really want to do it with a safe and effective process to accomplish it is, in my opinion, kind of humane.
That said, what is the safe and effective process? Who determines what is safe and effective? Personally, I’d like doctors involved, but most doctors (any one that I want to trust, at least) have taken an oath to do no harm, and they tend to take that pretty seriously. Is the government going to force doctors to perform euthanasia for anyone at all who wants it? That hardly seems like a good idea.
So the hows and whys are a bit trickier once you start digging into them, in my opinion. For context, I’ve dealt with major depression in the past and have spent (a short) time in a psychiatric ward after an attempt. I’m kind of sympathetic to both sides on this issue.
Idk why there is a debate on a safe and effective way to kill someone. Its inert gas asphyxiation every time. As a welder, its been a threat my entire career. Its scary because its so easy. You go to work, you get a little tired, you doze off, and you die. Thats it. Your body has no way to tell the difference between oxygen, nitrogen, and argon.
Gas chamber scare quotes
The problem is allowing the government control over that.
what, ? that’s what this article is about, The Canadian Government is asserting control over Canadian citizens choice.
Not really. Anyone can comitt suicide if they want to. This is about providing someone with medical expertise to do it for them.
The problem with unlimited use is that the government can kill dissenters and say they wanted it.
Or more likely given our current government, they can kill indigenous people.
Look at places where there is no government control. How’s that going?
Kind of goes against the entire point of medicine and being a doctor if you just make it part of the field to facilitate people killing themselves for any reason they want to. MAID exists for a reason. People who want to kill themselves because of mental illness are sick and the therapy is not to let them do it. It is different when people are in pain and actively dying.
forced
Way too big a word. Nobody is forcing anybody, its just nature doing its thing and last I checked, fetuses aren’t exactly capable of making decision, less even being forced to make one.
I do agree that everyone should be able to exit when they choose so but the human mind being what it is a lot of times a lot of people temporarily feel they want to exit, and with some help or medication, they want to stay. The road out should be taken slowly and with care and dignity, and definitely not be an “I want out! Okay!”
This is cruel.
No? Good on them for barring mental illness as a sole reason.
I live with Persistent Depressive Disorder and it’s admittedly been frustrating seeing people essentially telling people like myself that we should do the thing we’re unhealthily telling ourselves to do anyways.
It literally comes off as people trying to tell me I’m lesser than and should kill myself, but with the veneer of continuing to look progressive.
“as a mom, I’m against child-protection”
You can be mentally ill and still wrong. Just because you’re affected doesn’t mean you’re right.
Cool. So the “right” thing for people like me with mental illnesses to do is to kill ourselves, or have the “right” to decide to do it when we’re of unsound mind.
Do tell me how this isn’t basically eugenics?
Nice strawman.
Being against the death sentence doesn’t mean “let all killers free!”, just like being for assisted suicide regardless of mental illness or not isn’t “kill all the people with shrinks”.
We already have cases of veterans being suggested MAID for minor issues. People with mental illnesses, especially the “bad ones” already have a lot of hoops to jump through to be taken seriously because of systemic issues in the medical system.
You’re essentially letting the people who make those issues prevalent win in allowing this. A lot of these issues are also the result of traumatic situations where they know the worst of people and nothing else.
If I was given MAID as an option ten years ago, I would have taken it because I grew up around severe abuse and betrayal, and only knew people for the worst of what they could be and treated kindness and generosity as something to immediately be suspicious of regardless of the situation. A lot of the times these are disordered behaviours where the second you get a diagnosis for something like borderline personality disorder, people, even many of the physicians supposedly caring for you, assume the worst of you.
What prevents a physician from saying “narcissistic personality disorder? Oppositional defiant disorder? Let me just take the opportunity to suggest this real quick and make things better for all of us”
Theyre not yelling at you to go out the door by leaving it open.
Theyre shutting the door on others from being able to choose.
Sound like a typical conservative. Only your choice matters. :/
“Let’s not change the system as it stands, lets just get rid of minorities and people facing minority issues, and the system fixes itself!”
Idk man, that sounds eerily similar to fascism. Just because it’s sugar-coated as being an “option” (which benefits them because they can no longer be held accountable for their poor decisions) doesn’t make it any better.
I have my own struggles.
I have attempted twice on my own.
I don’t currently have a desire to.
But removing a dignified and personally chosen means of exiting leaves only the other, more messy ways.
Personally, i believe this option should be available to everyone for any reason.
If our gun laws here were like those in the states, I truly would not be here right now.
The same would be of MAID if it was supplied for those with mental illnesses.
It is insane to me that people are just casually blowing this off as if it means nothing. You have no room to regret a permanent decision, and no hope to hold out on.
If my attempts were successful I would have never found myself in this spot where yes, things are still rough, but I can at least say it’s better. I’d have never predicted where things would have gone ten years ago when I was still depressed and feeling suicidal then, by giving people the option to do this, you rob them of the potential for a better life forever.
You’re presenting assisted suicide as if it’s just a “willy nilly” decision. People don’t “just” go to a physician and stick a needle in their arm. It’s a long process that involves careful evaluation.
Going “I didn’t kill myself and I’m happier for it” doesn’t make you the spokesperson of thousands of other people who are still here, suffering, and wishing they weren’t here anymore. You aren’t in their bodies. You aren’t them. They should be able to decide for themselves and if that means suicide, they should be able to do it with dignity, not by jumping in front of a car and messing up multiple lives in the process, or running amok and getting shot by a cop, or jumping from a building and traumatising those around them.
You shouldn’t get to make that choice. They should. That’s the discussion here.
Part of the evaluation is determining whether someone is terminally ill. You are misrepresenting what MAID is by presenting it as a valid choice for someone who has a treatable mental illness.
That is not what I’m presenting at all. Suicide is the the greatest freedom a single person has. That does not mean somebody else has to participate in that act. If somebody requests that help, the process should determine whether the person can be helped before granting that request.
You’re twisting the debate into something it’s not about. This isn’t a “let’s get rid of all the mentally undesirables” act.
As someone who works in medicine the idea of allowing someone with something like TRD to access MAID is totally antithetical to what medicine is about and I’d be very suspicious of any doctor who does anything but argue against it. The Hippocratic oath basically forbids an MD from assisting someone with a treatable illness to kill themselves.
Or, and hear me out here, instead of giving the government a cop out to say “your well-being is not our problem, have fun killing yourself”, we have them do their jobs of governing and providing people with basic living standards and human dignity.
If they didn’t suspend this and went ahead with this, what’s preventing them from basically saying “it is what it is, if you can’t function in the society we made inaccessible, here’s your way out, not our job to coddle you”?
Disabled and mentally ill people killing themselves to suit society’s needs will become the norm when it should be the opposite. This is basically systemic eugenics.
I don’t think there’s a simple one-size-fits-all answer for everyone here.
What the majority of people with mental illness need is better treatment options. That they don’t have to pay for out-of-pocket because the government doesn’t fund it, or travel for hours in order to access. Fixing this is, to be honest, more important than extending MAID beyond serious physical conditions at the moment, and would help more people. But it’s expensive and difficult.
On the gripping hand, there is such a thing as treatment-resistant mental illness. If someone has tried everything, and nothing works, and there are no new treatments on the horizon, then denying them the only relief possible is cruel. This small percentage of mentally ill people should be permitted access to MAID, after due consideration of their medical history.
No one should be forced to survive.
If you think that physical health is the only indicator of quality of life then you have no idea how mental health works.
You just need to eat well and do yoga and meditation, right? It’s just in your head, so cheer up!
/s, lifelong depression here
Your sarcasm was plenty clear without the “s”, FYI.
The issue with this is that we have MAID because of the courts, not because it was legislated. This will certainly be taken to court and based on previous rulings has a very high chance of being deemed unconstitutional.
So the mentally ill are forced to suffer because of somebody’s saviour complex… There are checks and balances in the system. The plan was to not just kill whoever walked through the door. Guess what? Not one life will be saved every person whether they are blessed with a compassionate death or not will die. NOBODY IS GETTING OUT ALIVE. What we are talking about is how much we are willing to let you suffer as you die.
So people have to be mentally ill and in physical pain. What a great outlook for those mentally ill and seeking to end their misery. Now they have to hurt themselves too in order to be taken seriously.
Mental illness is more than just depression.
A scitzophrenic has a mental illness.
