Thank you, Madam Chair.
I will direct my question to Dr. Dembo.
In 2013, you wrote an article entitled “The Ethics of Providing Hope in Psychotherapy”, in which you describe “Patient 1” as a “38-year-old woman with schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, with both illnesses proving resistant to multiple medications and psychotherapies”, who had suffered “10 years of chronic, severe distress”.
You saw her in an intensive care unit, and after thoroughly assessing her and conducting a detailed review of the literature, you concluded that “there was almost no likelihood that she could recover”. Yet instead of helping her die, you conveyed hope to her. After another treatment attempt, her symptoms “vanished, and she has now remained well for 2 years. She is once again engaged in academic and advocacy work, as well as with friends and family, and grateful to be alive”. You concluded that “in hindsight, it seems that we did the right thing, but, at the time, we could not have possibly known.”
Does that not underscore the determination of the expert panel that you served on, which stated, on page 9, that “it is difficult, if not impossible, for clinicians to make accurate predictions about the future for an individual patient” in cases of mental illness? Doesn't that demonstrate the significant risk, in opening the door to sole mental illness, that persons will have their lives prematurely ended, persons like “Patient 1”? At the time, MAID was not available.