Medical Assistance in Dying committee  If it were possible to establish that, those very few rare cases in which a person is doomed to suffer interminably, there would be no debate. If you look at the expert panel report carefully and you try to find some indication of how you differentiate between someone who is suic

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I have not conducted a MAID assessment, but I've certainly assessed large numbers of people who wanted to have their lives ended.

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I believe that Dr. Smith confuses irremediability of the diagnosis and the reliability of giving a diagnosis with the question of irremediability of the symptoms that lead to a request for MAID. Yes, you can reliably determine that someone has schizophrenia or suffers from depres

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  The number who are accepted is fairly small. In 2016, in the Netherlands, it was about 1,500 people who requested it. They have a very detailed protocol, which takes an average of 10 months of assessments and evaluation. Of those almost 1,500, they accepted 60 of those cases afte

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  —hundreds of thousands of people who have convincingly explained that they wanted to die to end their suffering and are now thankful to be alive. If you proceed to allow MAID for persons with a mental illness, how many people who would later have been happy to be alive are you wi

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Thank you. For 50 years I've been conducting research on suicide prevention and end-of-life issues and working in suicide prevention. In 1995 I held the Bora Laskin national fellowship in human rights research to study euthanasia in the Netherlands. I have published 12 books and