Thank you very much.
I want to tell you a bit about my experience. I have 30 years' experience as a full-service family doctor, during which I treated a lot of mental health, because we did not have good access to psychiatry. I have had a lot of experience with treating people with mental illness. I'm also a MAID provider and, for the last six and a half years, have assessed about 750 people for MAID, and I've provided about 430.
One of these was the one and only person who had MAID for mental illness as the sole underlying medical condition. That was E.F., who, as I'm sure all of you know, was approved by the superior court of Alberta to have MAID before I was allowed to provide it. I also have a lot of experience with our new group of patients, who we call “track two”. These are the patients whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable and who we've been providing for since March of 2021. My own experience is about 40 assessments and 18 provisions.
In addition, I work with the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers and was the lead author for the clinical practice guidelines on assessing patients with dementia and with chronic complex conditions. I am also a MAID researcher and have published a number of articles on MAID in Canada.
One of those, for example, was on suicide versus MAID. We spoke with providers and the general public and people who we knew had a great deal of experience with suicide—namely, a very vulnerable population, the kind that Dr. Maher was talking about. They all were very clear that suicide and MAID were completely different. The differences they talked about—and again, this is a wide variety of people—were that MAID meant that people could be with their family and that having assistance wasn't illegal. They didn't have to be secretive. They could be open and with family. For example, E.F. arrived in Vancouver with 10 family members surrounding her to support her through her last minutes.
I want to tell you a bit more about track two patients, because my research team did a research project on the first six months of track two patients and the experience that MAID assessors and providers had. We got detailed information about 53 track two patient assessments. In 67.3% of these, the main challenge was the concurrent mental illness, and this is my personal experience as well. What I'm saying is that we have already had a lot of experience now at assessing and providing or not providing medical assistance in dying for people who have concurrent mental illness, not sole mental illness.
I want to tell you that when I assess somebody who has unbearable suffering from a grievous and irremediable condition that includes mental illness and I tell them that they are eligible under our law, you should see the smile that comes across their faces: They've been listened to and their suffering has been acknowledged in a way that often nobody else has really acknowledged, which is that their suffering is unbearable, it's unrelenting and they envision the rest of their lives with more of it.
How do I, as an assessor, say that it's irremediable?
They have had one treatment after another, after another, by different psychiatrists, different psych hospitals, and again, I'm extrapolating my patients who have both physical and mental illnesses, but that's my experience, of course, except for that one, who was E.F.