I am saying that safeguards are going to fail because the cultural ethos, the suicide contagion, is already permeating our society. My teams are pulling their hair out over people planning to refuse medications so that they can get MAID. These are people who have healed and recovered. We're doing suicide prevention, and people are being presented with “suicide is coming”.
As for safeguards and standard treatments being tried, which the Benelux countries do, it begs the question of what counts as a standard treatment. I do subspecialist care. I have literally limitless options. It's because of this that my patients get better. It's because we can continue to try. The average treatment time for me to help people recover from severe schizophrenia is three years. It's not a short process. It's like a long chemotherapy protocol for people with certain types of cancer. How do you maintain hope in the face of that?
I have a patient, and in the middle of treatment, a family doctor came and offered her MAID. She said, “Oh, thank goodness my family doctor cares enough about me to relieve my suffering.” I wanted to relieve her suffering by treating her. She was 35.
Are there safeguards? The fundamental value question here is that you either support suicide or you don't. If you're opposed to suicide, if you think the suicide taboo provides protection, and if you think there's merit in supporting life, then clearly this is my fundamental argument here: Provide the basic services. I work in an ACT team, one of the subspecialist teams caring for the sickest. There are 80 in Ontario. There should be 150 by population. Right now we have 5,000 people with degenerative illnesses waiting for care. They're going downhill. They're waiting up to five years. If I asked you about the cancer field, would you be okay with funding 60% of the cancer centres and letting everybody else kind of flounder and hopefully live?
I think safeguards are fanciful, given the clinical reality. This is my great frustration. I can stand here and tell you that you don't get what it's like on a daily basis. I don't know if I'm the only person in the room who spent yesterday listening to a patient in emergency tell me why she took an overdose. I don't know if I'm the only person in the room who's listened to thousands of people after the fact tell me why they wanted to kill themselves and about the help they wished they'd had.
Offering suicide before they get the help—I don't know how you can do it.