Thank you very much for this time to express myself on such a vital matter.
First, I think most importantly what I'd like to say is that I come here as a person with lived expertise of a once treatment-resistant, long-term, major depressive disorder, comorbid with a social anxiety disorder and a history of multiple, escalating suicide attempts and in-patient hospitalizations.
For years I was prescribed cocktails of medications. I was restrained, isolated and written off as hopeless, yet, if not for who I was then, I wouldn't be who I am right now, and at long last I finally actually enjoy the freedom of loving myself for who I am right now.
Since those dark decades, I've pursued an advanced education, worked as a mental health counsellor and participated in some of the biggest mental health initiatives in the country. I've toured every province and territory in Canada to talk with survivors and their families about mental health and mental illness.
It's based on this experience, both professional and personal, that I vigorously oppose the expansion of medical assistance in dying solely for the reason of a mental illness. I can say without reservation that had MAID been available for mental illness and accessible to mature minors at the time, today I'd be dead. That wouldn't have been the only time in my life in which I would have considered it. I struggled with my mental health, at times severely, for more than 20 years, yet today I'm not dead. Today I'm actually better, but I'm not exceptional. Recovery is routine. We're resilient by nature, and it takes active oppression to keep us down. Unfortunately, oppression is pervasive. Recovery ought not to be a privilege afforded to the few who can afford it; recovery is a right. I'm evidence of what's possible when certain freedoms, choices and means are justifiably restricted.
I think this legislation has arisen from a dangerous reductionism. For example, mental illnesses and physical illnesses, which we heard about earlier, are not collapsible into one another. The elimination of this difference has been a misguided attempt to elevate the esteem of mental health through attaching it to the greater perceived esteem of more worthy physical health issues. This, of course, perpetuates stigma.
Mental health is worthy of independent esteem just as it is. The framing of mental illnesses as irremediable brain diseases is both unhelpful and largely untrue. Continually banging the drum of biological determinism, telling people that their brain is broken and irreparable, is not based in scientific consensus. This too perpetuates stigma.
Irremediability of mental illnesses cannot be reliably predicted. Any clinician who tells you otherwise, in my opinion, is simply not a very good clinician. If you've tried four medications without success and then you feel that nothing works and that you've tried everything, you haven't. You've tried one thing. Professional silos exhaust and kill people, and they too perpetuate stigma.
When allowing assessors to decide if someone with a mental illness is a hopeless case, you really need to ask yourself how many times you are willing to be wrong. How many wrongful deaths are acceptable? The absence of evidence for hope is not evidence for absence of hope.
If this legislation were actually about rights, it would more thoughtfully consider the decision pathway or the choice architecture that leads people with mental illnesses to want to die in the first place, whether through MAID or any other means. If you walk that path, you'd see that MAID for mental illness alone is actually indistinguishable from suicide. How can we make a free choice if we think we have no other choices available? This is what it's like inside the mind of somebody who is considering suicide. I would know. Thanks to our natural availability bias, exacerbated by the cognitive rigidity imposed by our mental duress and cultivated by the lack of accessible treatment options, we falsely conclude that we will never get better, that there's no hope, and we have no other choice.
It doesn't have to be this way. Recovery from mental illnesses is not only possible; it's indeed expected and likely, especially when people access care early, but every single province in this country is failing to meet its obligations under the Canada Health Act with respect to the delivery of mental health care. Until access to medically necessary psychotherapy is universal, and as long as wait times for psychiatry and other interventions can exceed a year or more, then mental health care in this country is neither accessible nor comprehensive.
MAID for mental illness alone essentially asserts that if people with a mental illness think they want to kill themselves, we should let them, and even help them to do so. To call this assisted dying is to sanitize the reality. This is assisted suicide, and that is in direct opposition to suicide prevention efforts.
MAID for mental illness alone is the ultimate indignity. It is worse than a violation of the rights of people with mental illnesses; it's robbing them of the opportunity to have their superseding rights restored and defended.
In the spirit of the law of this land and in the moral law of our hearts, mental health care is a right and suicide is not a crime. Suicide is a public health emergency maintained by a failing health care system. Don't pin that on the victims. Don't gaslight us into thinking that this is about our rights, our biological constitution or a romanticized ideal of a good death, one that happens to be conveniently cheaper on the public purse than investing in real care. The expansion of MAID to mental illness disincentivizes the repair of a broken system. Please refocus your energy instead on building a system that helps people to thrive, not to die. Every Canadian with a mental illness has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof, whether that's by illness or systemic failings.
To that end, I ask you to fight for our charter right to live and stop the expansion of MAID for mental illness alone.
Thank you for your attention today.