If it were possible to establish that, those very few rare cases in which a person is doomed to suffer interminably, there would be no debate. If you look at the expert panel report carefully and you try to find some indication of how you differentiate between someone who is suicidal and someone who is requesting MAID, all they say repeatedly is that it is not possible to provide fixed rules. They do not cite a single research study that shows that any human being is capable of differentiating between those two groups.
When Dr. Smith was asked how to determine whether someone is suicidal or they're requesting MAID, he did not give any diagnostic criteria that one could apply, but he said he is capable of doing this. The research is very clear. There is no evidence that you can predict the course of a mental illness, either treated or untreated, using any reliable criteria. The research that has different psychiatrists predicting shows that they don't usually agree. This worries me, because all of the seriously suicidal....
I'll repeat this. I'd love to provide the evidence that Senator Kutcher requested. When someone is seriously suicidal, they feel there is no hope. We are allowed to, against their will, send an ambulance to save someone's life who is in the process or on the verge of killing themselves. Most of them—the vast majority—are very thankful that we did that at that time. They do meet the criteria in the sense that they usually had a long history of mental illness, they had lots of treatments and they were feeling totally hopeless at that moment, but they made a mistake.
How many people were so grateful to be alive when against their will they were saved? I am just so worried that people will needlessly die because we do not have any criteria. Even though people believe they can make that decision, the scientific evidence isn't there, and I challenge you to just look at the expert panel report and try to find what the criteria would be, how someone talking to someone will make that determination.