Justice committee  Thank you. My name is Derryck Smith, and I'm a medical doctor and a practising psychiatrist. I appreciate having the opportunity to speak to the committee, and I particularly admire the hours that you're keeping in bending your minds around this thorny issue. My name is Derryck

Justice committee  I will do that but, I can't do it during this conference call.

Justice committee  I'd be pleased to do so.

Justice committee  You're quite correct that the advance directives were not in Carter. They were in the report of the special joint committee and that's what I was referencing. As I said previously, we already have advance directives in Canadian medicine. We can agree to not be tube-fed, not be re

Justice committee  You're quite correct. It was the special joint committee that recommended advance directives that could lead to physician-assisted dying. Now, to me, the issue always comes back to patient autonomy or, in other words, our ability to make meaningful decisions over how we live our

Justice committee  Well, I don't know what those words mean. When I spoke to the minister last week on this, I said that it was reasonably foreseeable that I would be back in my office within an hour, and it was also reasonably foreseeable that I would be dead in 50 years. That's a huge time frame,

Justice committee  I believe it is. It's workable in a number of different scenarios. Regarding the first one in which the patient is given a prescription for lethal medication, we know from Oregon that about a third of the patients never take that medication. We know that one of the principals in

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  My name is Derryck Smith. I am a practising psychiatrist. I was head of children's and women's psychiatry in Vancouver for 30 years, and I have been personally involved in two cases involving psychiatric illness and MAID, both of whom have received MAID, incidentally. You've he

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I don't know. I'll try again.

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I'm talking about the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses. There's good research that shows that psychiatric diagnoses are as reliable as other medical diagnoses. This is in spite of the fact that we don't have biological markers like blood tests or X-rays to make psychiatric di

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Thank you, Mr. Arseneault, for that question. I'm sorry I cannot answer you in French. I'll do my best in English. I think the detailed answer is in this report, which you have received already, the report of the expert panel on MAID and mental illness. I'm not going to be able

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Again, at the risk of being repetitive, I want to go back to the court decisions. The court decisions are where facts are established and rulings are made. The honourable gentleman's opinions were tested in court and found not to hold any water, so the court clearly found, when t

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Thank you for that question. It comes back to the point I made, which has come up repeatedly in the court decisions, that it's the whole person you look at, not the diagnosis. When I first saw cases in the Benelux countries with personality disorder, I thought that this was ter

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  These are people with chronic illnesses who have been suffering for many years, and incidentally I agree entirely with all the recommendations in the final report of the expert panel. I had nothing to do with this expert panel. I came at it as an interested party and I read it. I

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  There's no doubt a great inequality in access to services for many people with psychiatric illness. They are disadvantaged with respect to getting the kinds of treatment they need, but that is becoming true in all other parts of medicine as well. In my province, almost one millio