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Hot-take: It should be open to any adult for any reason they choose.
People are forced into the world without any choice. They should have the choice to leave it peacefully when they want.
Absolutely. I e said this a few times, but what right does the govt have to tell me I HAVE to live. I donβt give a fuck if Iβm not dying. If I want to die, what right does the government have to force me to live.
Itβs not like I woke up one day and was like βoh shit I wanna die!β Iβve never wanted to be alive. But assisted dying is not available here and I e attempted suicide so much myself thst I have a abi now.
The problem is allowing the government control over that.
what, ? that's what this article is about, The Canadian Government is asserting control over Canadian citizens choice.
Not really. Anyone can comitt suicide if they want to. This is about providing someone with medical expertise to do it for them.
The problem with unlimited use is that the government can kill dissenters and say they wanted it.
Or more likely given our current government, they can kill indigenous people.
I don't think this is as hot of a take as you may imagine. However, I think that the implementation is the tricky part.
If you think about it, anyone can try to die by suicide at any time they want, and there's really very little others can do about it. There's a thousand and one grim ways to accomplish it. In a way, providing people who really want to do it with a safe and effective process to accomplish it is, in my opinion, kind of humane.
That said, what is the safe and effective process? Who determines what is safe and effective? Personally, I'd like doctors involved, but most doctors (any one that I want to trust, at least) have taken an oath to do no harm, and they tend to take that pretty seriously. Is the government going to force doctors to perform euthanasia for anyone at all who wants it? That hardly seems like a good idea.
So the hows and whys are a bit trickier once you start digging into them, in my opinion. For context, I've dealt with major depression in the past and have spent (a short) time in a psychiatric ward after an attempt. I'm kind of sympathetic to both sides on this issue.
Idk why there is a debate on a safe and effective way to kill someone. Its inert gas asphyxiation every time. As a welder, its been a threat my entire career. Its scary because its so easy. You go to work, you get a little tired, you doze off, and you die. Thats it. Your body has no way to tell the difference between oxygen, nitrogen, and argon.
A charity run clinic where patients have safe access to buy and self-administer gas? (Obviously no walk ins, ffs)
Add an option to buy a cremation too, with a discount if you don't care about cremains and don't mind being part of a bulk lot, and this would be perfect, no?
Those who can't afford these services but still require them should be comped using donations and the fees of those who can.
Honestly, I think having a safe and painless option for death available for when you eventually decide you need it, is something I think the majority of rational people will end up supporting, so I doubt a charity of this sort would be short on donations either.
Kind of goes against the entire point of medicine and being a doctor if you just make it part of the field to facilitate people killing themselves for any reason they want to. MAID exists for a reason. People who want to kill themselves because of mental illness are sick and the therapy is not to let them do it. It is different when people are in pain and actively dying.
No one should be forced to survive.
If you think that physical health is the only indicator of quality of life then you have no idea how mental health works.
Its my damn switch, I should be able to switch it off when I want.
You just need to eat well and do yoga and meditation, right? It's just in your head, so cheer up!
/s, lifelong depression here
Your sarcasm was plenty clear without the "s", FYI.
Being suicidal exempting people from access to safe suicide is so morbidly ironic, it's not even funny.
The risk of fucking up a home suicide and surviving, brain damaged to the point where you're conscious enough to be aware of things but not to have agency, so you end up locked away for the rest of your natural life in a government funded ward, staffed by the cruel, burnt out people who usually end up working in those kinds of facilities...
That's one of the worst fates I can imagine.
And not to mention it's far more expensive for taxpayers to fund a lifetime of carehome expenses for every one of these survivors, who now, ironically, cannot actually consent to death, despite now being trapped in a reality that is far worse that what they were initially escaping.
So the mentally ill are forced to suffer because of somebody's saviour complex.... There are checks and balances in the system. The plan was to not just kill whoever walked through the door. Guess what? Not one life will be saved every person whether they are blessed with a compassionate death or not will die. NOBODY IS GETTING OUT ALIVE. What we are talking about is how much we are willing to let you suffer as you die.
I don't think there's a simple one-size-fits-all answer for everyone here.
What the majority of people with mental illness need is better treatment options. That they don't have to pay for out-of-pocket because the government doesn't fund it, or travel for hours in order to access. Fixing this is, to be honest, more important than extending MAID beyond serious physical conditions at the moment, and would help more people. But it's expensive and difficult.
On the gripping hand, there is such a thing as treatment-resistant mental illness. If someone has tried everything, and nothing works, and there are no new treatments on the horizon, then denying them the only relief possible is cruel. This small percentage of mentally ill people should be permitted access to MAID, after due consideration of their medical history.
This is cruel.
No? Good on them for barring mental illness as a sole reason.
I live with Persistent Depressive Disorder and it's admittedly been frustrating seeing people essentially telling people like myself that we should do the thing we're unhealthily telling ourselves to do anyways.
It literally comes off as people trying to tell me I'm lesser than and should kill myself, but with the veneer of continuing to look progressive.
I have my own struggles.
I have attempted twice on my own.
I don't currently have a desire to.
But removing a dignified and personally chosen means of exiting leaves only the other, more messy ways.
Personally, i believe this option should be available to everyone for any reason.
There's a guy in our town with no arms or legs. Gets around on a skateboard. Shot himself in the woods during winter but was found and given medical attention. But not before he lost all 4 limbs to frostbite. I've never spoken to him. Seems to have a pretty positive disposition given his circumstances.
Also have a bro whose gf slit her wrists in the tub. She survived. Hella trauma all around. Still on the waiting list for surgery to fix her hands years later.
Had a total karen of a neighbour once...Hard not to be callous cuz she was genuinely unpleasant to interact with but found out from my roommate that several years back she came home and found her son had hung himself in the closet at like 17. Who knows if she was nicer back then but clearly permafucked her mentally. She didn't even move out. She kept living there.
Dying peacefully via MAID is certainly less traumatic to everyone else.
If our gun laws here were like those in the states, I truly would not be here right now.
The same would be of MAID if it was supplied for those with mental illnesses.
It is insane to me that people are just casually blowing this off as if it means nothing. You have no room to regret a permanent decision, and no hope to hold out on.
If my attempts were successful I would have never found myself in this spot where yes, things are still rough, but I can at least say it's better. I'd have never predicted where things would have gone ten years ago when I was still depressed and feeling suicidal then, by giving people the option to do this, you rob them of the potential for a better life forever.
You're presenting assisted suicide as if it's just a "willy nilly" decision. People don't "just" go to a physician and stick a needle in their arm. It's a long process that involves careful evaluation.
Going "I didn't kill myself and I'm happier for it" doesn't make you the spokesperson of thousands of other people who are still here, suffering, and wishing they weren't here anymore. You aren't in their bodies. You aren't them. They should be able to decide for themselves and if that means suicide, they should be able to do it with dignity, not by jumping in front of a car and messing up multiple lives in the process, or running amok and getting shot by a cop, or jumping from a building and traumatising those around them.
You shouldn't get to make that choice. They should. That's the discussion here.
Part of the evaluation is determining whether someone is terminally ill. You are misrepresenting what MAID is by presenting it as a valid choice for someone who has a treatable mental illness.
That is not what I'm presenting at all. Suicide is the the greatest freedom a single person has. That does not mean somebody else has to participate in that act. If somebody requests that help, the process should determine whether the person can be helped before granting that request.
You're twisting the debate into something it's not about. This isn't a "let's get rid of all the mentally undesirables" act.
As someone who works in medicine the idea of allowing someone with something like TRD to access MAID is totally antithetical to what medicine is about and I'd be very suspicious of any doctor who does anything but argue against it. The Hippocratic oath basically forbids an MD from assisting someone with a treatable illness to kill themselves.
And what about untreatable illnesses? And what about treatable but incurable illnesses that make life hell for the patient? Do you make a distinction between livable and unlivable anguish? Is "treatable" a binary that determines patients' wellbeing?
Or, and hear me out here, instead of giving the government a cop out to say "your well-being is not our problem, have fun killing yourself", we have them do their jobs of governing and providing people with basic living standards and human dignity.
If they didn't suspend this and went ahead with this, what's preventing them from basically saying "it is what it is, if you can't function in the society we made inaccessible, here's your way out, not our job to coddle you"?
Disabled and mentally ill people killing themselves to suit society's needs will become the norm when it should be the opposite. This is basically systemic eugenics.
I agree with you: we do not do enough for our citizens. We should be doing way more. Where I disagree with you is preventing those who genuinely want to leave this world from doing so with dignity.
This isn't a "fuck the ill, kill 'em".
I highly doubt any of them are telling you to off yourself (unless you've pissed them off for putting words in their mouth like this).
I've spent decades of my life in a depressive cloud & wish I hadn't been forced to by other control freaks telling me they enjoy life, so I can to if I just try hard enough - as if I haven't. They aren't stuck with my brain, and have no clue what it's like. I feel like I'm being used as cheap labor because I'm forced to make profit for other people just to keep my life from getting worse. Which is also why I haven't offed myself as my luck would cause the attempt to fail (as it once did - "fortunately" to no permanent ill effect), and also make my existence more unbearable.
Fuck Off with your obviously conservative control freak bullshit.
Theyre not yelling at you to go out the door by leaving it open.
Theyre shutting the door on others from being able to choose.
Sound like a typical conservative. Only your choice matters. :/
"Let's not change the system as it stands, lets just get rid of minorities and people facing minority issues, and the system fixes itself!"
Idk man, that sounds eerily similar to fascism. Just because it's sugar-coated as being an "option" (which benefits them because they can no longer be held accountable for their poor decisions) doesn't make it any better.
Thank you for your comments on this post, it echos many of my own thoughts on the situation.
The issue with this is that we have MAID because of the courts, not because it was legislated. This will certainly be taken to court and based on previous rulings has a very high chance of being deemed unconstitutional.
This is not about healthcare or ethics, its about having cheap workers.
So people have to be mentally ill and in physical pain. What a great outlook for those mentally ill and seeking to end their misery. Now they have to hurt themselves too in order to be taken seriously.
Mental illness is more than just depression.
A scitzophrenic has a mental illness.
Not good at all.
I find it interesting to see so many downvotes on this thread. Lots of people telling depressed people to suck it up.
Why does everybody think black and white on this?
I'm clinically depressed. You can tell a person with depression they deserve to live with dignity while also telling them the world as it exists is cruel. Why must the options either be telling depressed people to "suck it up", or essentially telling them to off themselves with no middle ground?
This all feels like having a dirty white shirt, having no washer or dryer to clean it, and when given the opportunity to ask for something, we ask to throw it out instead.
This is neuvoreddit, filled with rddit questionables everything here is black and white.
You can tell a person with depression they deserve to live with dignity while also telling them the world as it exists is cruel.
Deserve vs will get is different. This world is rough and you can be well meaning in saying "you deserve better" but to folks deep in pain this sounds not far from "you deserve better sure but suck it up".
You are still creating excuses for mandating someone's choice at life with suffering vs not.
Edit: its also like sex work or drugs. You can make it illegal all you want but that just pushes people underground. So. Fucking. Stupid. Sometimes society makes us bash our heads against the wall over and over and expects us to put up with it.