Yes. Thank you for the opportunity.
Obviously, this is the work that I do on the front lines every day with patients who express a desire to die as part of normal grieving, anger, frustration and sometimes despair at facing a devastating diagnosis. Most often, these wishes for death are fleeting and transient in nature.
In fact, Dr. Harvey Chochinov, a renowned psychiatrist in Canada, has shown that these death wishes can be transient even over a shorter period of time, 12 to 24 hours. Elimination of the 10-day waiting period doesn't allow a person time enough for reflection to change their mind.
Many times we see patients change their mind when they have access to good care and supports and an ability to see their lives in a different way, as having meaning. Wishes for death are often driven by fear and anxiety rather than uncontrolled physical symptoms.
Helping a person receive support to work through their new diagnosis is very important. A person with a “reasonably foreseeable death” under this new legislation could be having a really bad day and be in despair because they haven't seen a loved one or because, as we've seen, social isolation and loneliness have been amplified through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Out of those depths of despair, their worst day could become their last day in the absence of a required reflection period to make sure that this is actually what a person wants and that it's not a transient desire coming out of their not having adequate supports or time to really understand what they're asking for.