Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to meet with you today. I'm going to restrict my remarks to the question of MAID for persons whose mental disorder is their sole underlying medical condition, as this is my area of expertise. Throughout, to be more succinct, I will shorten this to MAID for mental disorders.
I'm a psychiatrist and an associate professor at Université de Montréal. In my clinical practice I work in consultation with liaison psychiatry, which involves the psychiatric care of the medically ill. I'm a researcher in the ethics and philosophy of psychiatry, and I've been working on assisted dying for the last several years. I did serve on the Council of Canadian Academies' working group on MAID for mental disorders as the sole underlying medical condition.
As a psychiatrist in Quebec, I'm a member of the Association des médicins psychiatres du Québec, the AMPQ, which represents the province's 1,200 psychiatrists. Currently I am chair of its advisory committee on MAID for mental disorders. This committee includes five psychiatrists with divergent views about the topic, a patient partner, and a family member. The committee has worked over the last nine months to produce an advisory document laying out an approach to thinking about the difficult clinical questions that can arise in the context of a person's requesting MAID for a mental disorder. We've just finished it. I've sent the French version—