Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. My name is Alison Freeland. I am a psychiatrist, and I'm here in my capacity as chair of the board of directors of the Canadian Psychiatric Association and co-chair of the CPA's MAID working group. Today I will focus my remarks on

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Speaking from a CPA perspective, I think the perspective from the CPA is that we are trained in a certain way, we are committed to our profession and we follow through on doing assessments and treatment with patients absolutely to the best of our professional ability. I think we

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I would underscore Dr. Black's comments and add that a common verbiage used in psychiatry is the concept of “serious and persistent mental illness”, which in and of itself speaks to the fact that we try to treat people, but many people are left with residual symptoms and experien

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Again, speaking for the Canadian Psychiatric Association, we're founded on following evidence-based practice. We look at clinical practice guidelines. If I think about clinical practice guidelines, the concept of a heroic measure is probably not well articulated there. I believe

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  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 thin

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I think those are issues that we want to continue to understand and explore. As trained psychiatrists we do get experience in how to tease those things apart—to understand socio-economic suffering versus the experience of having suicidal ideation as a symptom of illness. Very car

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Thank you very much. I will skip this question, because from a CPA perspective, we haven't specifically studied that, and I don't feel I can give a representative response. You have my apologies.

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I think in those kinds of challenging situations.... Maybe I would just preface this by saying that, ideally, these are shared decisions because the patient is listening to the psychiatrist's perspective and input, and we are there to think about hope and recovery. At the same

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I'm just quickly counting them to give you the right number. We have 12 people on our working group. We went through a pretty rigorous process to request that people apply. A number of our members applied to be on this working group. That process happened a few years ago. We ha

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Overall, the expert committee report, from my cursory reading, reflects some of the important considerations for safeguards. Some of the things that were mentioned in the report were also things which, from our CPA discussion paper and input from our membership, were areas of con

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  The expert committee did very good, fast work. From my perspective, that was important and promising. We're going into the summer. I think it will depend on people staying focused and wanting to get that work done by next February.

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Thank you. My name is Alison Freeland. I am a psychiatrist, and I am here in my capacity as chair of the board of directors of the Canadian Psychiatric Association and co-chair of the CPA's medical assistance in dying working group to provide you with the CPA's perspective. Than

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Just to restate, I am here on behalf of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, which is the national member association for Canadian psychiatrists and psychiatrists in training. My role with the CPA is chair of the board of directors. I also co-chair our working group focused on m

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I'm speaking on behalf of the CPA, which represents our psychiatrist members. As a national member organization, approximately 50% of psychiatrists are members of our association. That has been a very steady rate over the last number of years. We've also been very pleased by an i

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I'm happy to explain our process for both position statements and how we've undertaken member consultations. The CPA routinely publishes position papers and statements on issues related to psychiatric practice, and we have a way of proceeding with that. Through our MAID working