Thank you for that question and the opportunity to follow up on that.
I am convinced that I would have been an eligible candidate. I had been in and out of hospital involuntarily more than half a dozen times. I had been transferred to different hospitals. I was on locked wards. I was on more than a dozen different medications, and nothing really seemed to work. I talked to plenty of different doctors. It was chronic and persistent for enough years that I absolutely would have been a candidate, and should this legislation have continued to unfold toward allowing so-called mature minors, I would probably have qualified much earlier on.
I am so grateful, so eternally grateful, that MAID for mental illness was not available when I was struggling, because I was convinced that I wouldn't live to see another day, and I have. I think everybody deserves that opportunity too. If you really look at the root causes of why people are struggling for so long, it's not that the treatments don't work. We have lots of evidence to suggest that they do and that the real problem is access and getting connected to those treatments, which was exactly what I experienced.