There's no doubt a great inequality in access to services for many people with psychiatric illness. They are disadvantaged with respect to getting the kinds of treatment they need, but that is becoming true in all other parts of medicine as well. In my province, almost one million people don't have a family doctor, so we're facing a crisis in terms of access to health care.
That's why I think you have to look at the individual case, not at groups of people who may be disadvantaged but at the individual patient who is sitting down in front of you having a discussion about whether or not MAID is an option for them. They probably will have accessed many services by that point. If they've accessed no services, then, of course, as a doctor, as a psychiatrist, I'm going to recommend that they have treatment.
The people who are doing assessments are not blind to the treatment thing, and if there's an obvious treatment that could be offered to the person to relieve their suffering, then by all means we would try not only to recommend it but to arrange it. We're not talking about people who have never been treated or who can't access services. We're talking about people who have been in treatment for years and years and are not improving and are still suffering interminably.
We should all work to get rid of inequalities in the health care system, particularly for disadvantaged communities, but I don't think that necessarily has much to do with a psychiatric illness and MAID.