Certainly, the Quebec legislation that was just tabled got it right when they said that you can't determine whether psychiatric disease is irremediable. You can't, and the paradox here is that I'm representing 80 psychiatrists in Ontario who do subspecialist work. We see only the sickest people who are people who have been treated for the longest time, suffering terribly, and we're part of a group of 200 subspecialists in Canada.
We do a different type of work. We see only the sickest, and the paradox here that a lot of people just don't seem to get, and it's incredibly frustrating for me, is that the longer someone has been sick, the easier it becomes to treat them because with psychiatric disorders we have, as treatment options, literally hundreds of medication combinations. There is no exhausting treatment possibilities like there is with a terminal cancer where this chemo no longer works. I literally have hundreds of combinations, and when people have tried things, it helps narrow down what will work over time.
It's the work of time. I'm going to use an analogy here. I worked in pediatric oncology for many years. When a child was diagnosed with leukemia and had to start a two-year chemotherapy protocol where they were vomiting and ill for that two years, come the one-year mark, we had kids who didn't want to keep going.
What this law is offering people is an opportunity to stop because the healing is hard and long, but recovery is always possible. I've surveyed my colleagues on this. We've talked about this. We have yet to find a case where treatment and recovery were not possible. The challenge is that 70% of all people with mental illness in Canada stop taking their medication or they don't want to continue treatment because of suffering. What you are saying is to give up before the remedy is provided, give up before the healing is possible, and it's done under this guise that we have to relieve their immediate and horrible suffering—poor them.
If you did that with dying children, where would you be? Right now you're offering to do it with dying adults and these are neurodegenerative diseases. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes to treat, but it doesn't mean they are not treatable.
Let me give you numbers. My teams in Ontario treat the 7,000 sickest. We have 6,000 on our wait-list waiting up to five years. I would like to know, have any of you had a serious illness where you've had to wait five years for treatment? This is stigmatization entrenched in our system.