Thank you for the question.
As I understand it, the question is whether, if we spend more time focused on addressing socio-economic determinants and their impact on people's experience of their health issues, we would avoid having to take on MAID as a solution.
You know, I think as part of thinking about treatment, and certainly again from a CPA perspective, the idea of biopsychosocial interventions to treat mental illness is really important and part of evidence-based care. We think about assessing and treating the biological symptoms of illness using a variety of measures and treatments, but in addition think about psychological measures and consider the social circumstances in which somebody lives.
When somebody has appropriate access to a treatment team that's able to provide biopsychosocial interventions, that should go a long way to trying to ensure that we are providing people with the best kind of care, which is what we would all want to do in a situation with somebody who has either physical or mental health issues and who is thinking about ending their life because of the nature of their experiences.
As I said, one of the first and primary safeguards is to ensure that people have the right access to treatment. That being said, there may still be circumstances in which somebody has experienced something in their life or they're in a unique circumstance where, regardless of what a treatment team can do, it doesn't specifically meet that patient's individual needs. If that is considered to be the only way to try to mitigate MAID, I don't believe that's something that will happen. I think that's why we have to think about those things in a very fulsome way and understand them as part of the safeguards and do the best we can to help steer people in a direction of hope and recovery, and then think about what safeguards we need to have in place to ensure people are not going too quickly to explore MAID as an option.