I'll do my best. I appreciate the disability accommodation. Thank you.
One of the hats I wear is that I sit on Providence Health Care's psychiatry lived experience research advisory committee. I am always struck by the urgency accorded to the expansion of MAID for mental illness versus that of providing funding for comprehensive mental health care, supports, services, a livable income and housing for those with mental illness. Injustice can often be measured in time.
We know that neither people nor policy are islands unto themselves, yet MAID is discussed as if it exists inside a vacuum, free of influence from or consequence to society. In the little time I have, I am going to address a couple of persistent myths that constantly derail and impede rather than build understanding.
Myth one is the claim that people oppose expanding MAID because they believe mental illness is less real than physical illness, and they treat it as less significant and less worthy of support. This claim is false. The division between physical and mental illness is asserted and maintained by the medical model and the Canadian state. A two-tier health care system has been built around mental health due to the exclusion of many essential elements from Canada's public health care system. The average provincial and territorial mental health care funding lags behind that of many peer countries. Proportionally, Canada's public spending on mental illness is lower than its occurrence among all illnesses. People with mental illness face particular threats to their civil rights and higher levels of police interactions and incarceration.
Stigma requires power. Without power, stigma is just someone's bad opinion. When it comes to claims asserted by the myth, the call is coming from inside your house—not ours. As disabled people, we understand disability as one large tent. The experience of oppression is not the same, but the cause of it is. Please remember that the majority of disabled people have more than one disability. Co-occurrence of chronic illness and mental illness is common.
Myth two is that failing to expand MAID is discrimination. This claim is also false. This and other assertions made by proponents of MAID reflect a profound lack of understanding of disability, disability rights history and the causes and consequences of—and solutions to—the discrimination and injustice disabled people experience. Those eager to offer aid in accessing death to an autonomy-deprived population are certainly making a choice, but why?
At least one study has found that support for euthanasia on the basis of mental illness was positively correlated with holding attitudes of stigma towards people with mental illness. Further, a forthcoming chapter by Trudo Lemmens and Scott Kim demonstrates that parity arguments logically lead to absolute autonomy—death on demand for anyone.
This aligns with disability analysis that for years has asked, why us? The co-opting of or, at best, the outdated and incorrect understanding of disability rights invoked in the name of expanding MAID is evidence of the absence of disabled knowledge and understanding. MAID is, among many things, authored by epistemic injustice and must be repealed, not expanded.
Thank you.