Thank you.
I've known Mona for many years. We're colleagues. She's a smart, wise psychiatrist, but I will say she has information but not knowledge, and she is the first to say out loud that she doesn't work with the sickest people. She has also publicly said that she believes that people should have to have at least 10 years of treatment before you can even start to think about whether someone has irremediable illness.
Apropos the myth that Senator Wallin just threw out there that we're trying to force treatment on anybody, I'm sure that Dr. Gupta would agree we're not forcing treatment on any capable patient. They keep coming because they want help and relief from their suffering. At the risk of sounding insensitive, no one is keeping them from killing themselves. I say this with literally a broken heart because of the number of my patients who have carefully and thoughtfully planned their own deaths. As for this myth that it's tragic and horrible, people keep saying.... It is tragic and horrible in mental illness. We have one study from Switzerland in which 40% of the families report having PTSD or depression after supporting a loved one who's dying.
Dr. Gupta's report brings together plausible evidence but in the same breath says that we can't identify who's irremediable, the key legal criterion we're talking about here. It talks about your duty to review and also says that this is an ethical decision, not a clinical decision. I'm frankly stunned that Dr. Gupta has gone there. I'm also wondering why two people resigned from that panel. I would like to know that story. What you have is a number of very sensitive thoughtful statements but not a single safeguard. In the Benelux countries, you at least have to have tried standard treatment before you get euthanasia. In Canada—