Dr. Jitender Sareen is part of a group of eight university psychiatry chairs who wrote to federal ministers and urged the committee not to expand MAID to include mental illness.
Sareen said practice standards to guide psychiatrists and clinicians are inadequate, and Canada is lagging behind other countries in mental health and addictions funding.
“Offering death when the person has not had the opportunity to get better, with or without treatment, is, in our opinion, not acceptable,” said Sareen, a professor and head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba.
If mental health supports in this country were anything close to adequate, it would be a different conversation.
Mental health is part of our health, just like dental and medicine should be. It shouldn’t be universal unless it covers head to toe.
Not everyone’s answer is going to be the same, either, so I don’t believe in restricting someone’s access to something if they feel it’s their time. At the same time, they should be given every resource to make the right decision for them, and to try to get better.
Should someone suffer in hell for 10 years? 25 years? 59 years without any relief?
Medication doesn’t work for everyone, and they come with side effects which can exacerbate mental illness.
Cognitive therapy doesn’t work for everyone either.
It’s easy for them to say “who has not had the opportunity”, but that sounds like arrogance. As if everyone with mental illness can be successfully treated.
People considering maid aren’t just feeling under the weather, their existence is suffering to a level that these doctors could never imagine.
It’s selfish to the extreme, and extreme in its cruelty, to force someone to suffer. Or worse, to force them to take an undignified exit from this world alone.
Uh, yeah, because once dying is the recommended alternative to fixing the mental health care system, there’s going to be less demand, and government will use that as an excuse to not fix the fucking problem.
20 years ago when I was well I thought it was a great idea. Things look differently when you have been suffering needlessly for a decade because proven treatment that could help you simply isn’t offered unless you are wealthy. Whatever you might think of what it does to the “level of suffering,” it is simply not an acceptable compromise for our government to offer MAID in place of treatment under any circumstances.
Yet they aren’t going to offer significantly better treatment, so if that’s not an option, why shouldn’t MAID be?
It’s not like hiring 10% more specialists will fix this, the volume of people needing help is way higher than that. You can yell all you want about wanting better treatment, the rest of us want to be realistic given the resources available. We probably need 500% more specialists, and there’s simply no way to train or pay that many people.
The only way this problem gets solved is if we manage to create an AI that can successfully treat millions of people at the same time. It will likely happen at some point, but that point is not today, or even this decade likely. Until then, I’d like people to have options to retain their dignity.
Fine, if it’s not an option. But it IS an option. Other countries can treat their ill. Fuck, THIS country could do it 40 years ago.
If we can spend money on MAID, we can spend money on treatment. There is absolutely no reason that we could not be offering treatment. If there was, then great. But it’s simply being withheld for fucking ideological bullshit.
How much do you think it costs to render MAID?? It’s not fucking cheap! Not even counting the societal cost. And if your argument really boils down to, “it’s cheaper to kill people than to treat them,” then sir, fuck you so hard.
I am one of those people you are talking about. Stop talking on my behalf, listen more.
Other countries have mental health crisises as well. I can’t name a single first world country that has enough mental health support available to everyone. It’s very very difficult given that most people won’t even talk about their problems.
Maid is cheap, but my argument has nothing to do with that. Maid is a personal choice, and I think everyone deserves that right.
To me, this is the crux of it:
If mental health supports in this country were anything close to adequate, it would be a different conversation.
Agreed.
Mental health is part of our health, just like dental and medicine should be. It shouldn’t be universal unless it covers head to toe.
Not everyone’s answer is going to be the same, either, so I don’t believe in restricting someone’s access to something if they feel it’s their time. At the same time, they should be given every resource to make the right decision for them, and to try to get better.
To me this perspective seems to reach the exact opposite conclusion than it should given its premises.
In what way?
The problem is, when is enough, enough?
Should someone suffer in hell for 10 years? 25 years? 59 years without any relief?
Medication doesn’t work for everyone, and they come with side effects which can exacerbate mental illness.
Cognitive therapy doesn’t work for everyone either.
It’s easy for them to say “who has not had the opportunity”, but that sounds like arrogance. As if everyone with mental illness can be successfully treated.
People considering maid aren’t just feeling under the weather, their existence is suffering to a level that these doctors could never imagine.
It’s selfish to the extreme, and extreme in its cruelty, to force someone to suffer. Or worse, to force them to take an undignified exit from this world alone.
Shame on these doctors.
Instead, we should force them to keep suffering until we fix the supports.
Great idea.
Yeah, I don’t think you’re going to convince me that state-sponsered euthanasia is an acceptable alternative to a broken health care system.
Uh, yeah, because once dying is the recommended alternative to fixing the mental health care system, there’s going to be less demand, and government will use that as an excuse to not fix the fucking problem.
Ah yes, keep the suffering as high as possible for some people in order to put pressure on fixing the system.
That isn’t cruel at all.
20 years ago when I was well I thought it was a great idea. Things look differently when you have been suffering needlessly for a decade because proven treatment that could help you simply isn’t offered unless you are wealthy. Whatever you might think of what it does to the “level of suffering,” it is simply not an acceptable compromise for our government to offer MAID in place of treatment under any circumstances.
Yet they aren’t going to offer significantly better treatment, so if that’s not an option, why shouldn’t MAID be?
It’s not like hiring 10% more specialists will fix this, the volume of people needing help is way higher than that. You can yell all you want about wanting better treatment, the rest of us want to be realistic given the resources available. We probably need 500% more specialists, and there’s simply no way to train or pay that many people.
The only way this problem gets solved is if we manage to create an AI that can successfully treat millions of people at the same time. It will likely happen at some point, but that point is not today, or even this decade likely. Until then, I’d like people to have options to retain their dignity.
Fine, if it’s not an option. But it IS an option. Other countries can treat their ill. Fuck, THIS country could do it 40 years ago.
If we can spend money on MAID, we can spend money on treatment. There is absolutely no reason that we could not be offering treatment. If there was, then great. But it’s simply being withheld for fucking ideological bullshit.
How much do you think it costs to render MAID?? It’s not fucking cheap! Not even counting the societal cost. And if your argument really boils down to, “it’s cheaper to kill people than to treat them,” then sir, fuck you so hard.
I am one of those people you are talking about. Stop talking on my behalf, listen more.
Other countries have mental health crisises as well. I can’t name a single first world country that has enough mental health support available to everyone. It’s very very difficult given that most people won’t even talk about their problems.
Maid is cheap, but my argument has nothing to do with that. Maid is a personal choice, and I think everyone deserves that right.