No problem.
Rather than enabling patients to end their lives through assisted suicide, governments should consider how much funding there is for mental illness, how long the waiting lists are to see a psychiatrist and how government can provide excellent multidisciplinary team care to such patients. Only then can patients truly be said to have a choice about their treatment.
This brings me to my third point. The management of mental illness involves seeing the patient as a whole person and exploring all aspects of their presentation and their care—the psychological, social and biological factors. There is no evidence that mental illness treatment is irremediable. In practice, improving some or indeed all of their biological, social and psychological factors may need to be optimized for a patient to see an improvement.
Do you consider a suicidal patient who is suffering from a clinical depression associated with significant loneliness and poverty to be irremediable? Of course not, but many of these factors, such as poverty and housing, may take months to address adequately, by which time they may have already died from MAID in mental illness if provided.
I was shocked to read how a patient in Canada with multiple chemical sensitivities was provided with MAID because they could not cope living with their illness in housing that did not meet their health care needs, despite official agencies looking for such housing for two years. Surely there was something profoundly wrong about this woman's treatment that she could secure death from government-funded agencies but not housing.
In summary, disclosing difficult and frightening thoughts like suicide needs to be met with not only empathy but also practicality, working with the patient to find solutions. It's not to superficially endorse their dangerous and life-threatening cognitive distortions of mental illness and enable patients with mental illness, some of society's most vulnerable, to end their own lives by providing MAID for mental illness.
I sincerely thank you for your attention. I would be happy to answer any questions.
Thank you.