Thank you very much, Co-Chairs.
Thank you for coming to present to us this afternoon.
I really want to focus on something that has been a recurring theme throughout this whole question on mental illness being a sole underlying condition. Inherent in this, from everything I've heard, are two very important things that I took away from the discussions of everyone else who has talked to us.
One of them is that this has to be done on an individual case-by-case basis. One cannot set blanket laws and blanket decisions for people. In fact, the whole Supreme Court decision on this issue said clearly that this had to be a case-by-case basis, because we all know—and I happen to be a physician—that when you deal with a patient with illness, even physical illnesses....
Let's just look at physical illnesses for a moment. Fifty people with the same physical illness are not going to respond to treatment in the same manner. We have to understand the nature of the individual when making these decisions.
The second piece that I took away from this is that there seems to be a huge level of discrimination against people who have mental illness as a sole underlying condition. The idea that people with mental illnesses do not have compos mentis, the ability to make decisions or to decide what is intolerable suffering for them and, working with a physician, would be able to come up with a decision that is reasonable for them....
We keep talking about blanket decisions and whether we should make a generic decision about this or that. I'd like to know your position on that situation. Should we make blanket decisions, legislative or otherwise, or should we deal with this on an individual case-by-case basis? Should we try not to discriminate between mental illness and physical illness?
I'd like Dr. Stewart to answer first, and then perhaps Ms. Provencher would be able to answer.