Exploring MAID and Mental Illness

Normally my day begins by changing my t-shirt. It's soaking wet from the sweat from the nightmares. I wake up most mornings saying, not another day. As a person suffering from mental illness, I and other people are invisible. No one recognizes us. They're embarrassed by mental illness and that's... The stigma is vast. If medical assistance in dying had been available back during those times where things were really, really low, there was no hope that I wouldn't be here today. I would have died thinking I had a depression that would never go away. If Canada doesn't delay made-for-mental illness, you And I would feel like that we're disposable. I will speak on behalf of those who don't have a voice, those who are frightened to have a voice. I hope I'm speaking for them. It's the one thing I believe I have to do to advocate for the mentally ill and advocate for a proper way for access to death for the mentally ill. Around the world, there are conversations on medically assisted dying. Germany, France and the UK are all currently debating whether it should be permitted and for whom. Medical assistance in dying in Canada, also known as MAID, is available for adults with terminal illness or serious and chronic medical conditions, but is not yet available for people who suffer solely from a mental illness. It's a controversial idea the country is currently debating. My name is John Scully. I'm 82 years old. I've been diagnosed with severe depression, incurable PTSD, and incurable anxiety disorder. I suffer from somatic pain, chronic pain. That means pain that they can't diagnose and assume it's psychiatric. I've been In this condition for roughly 40 years, all of my illnesses really go back to childhood when I was growing up in Wellington, New Zealand, where I suffered from chronic, desperately bad asthma. That was not good for my health or my mental health, and I think that's the start of my mental decline right there. Because of my asthma, I missed most of the school year. I was not going to make anything of myself, and with the urging of my parents, they put me into a trade, washing floors at a local newspaper. That's how I got into journalism. John eventually started a career in broadcast journalism, working for various news outlets including CBC and the BBC. Here is a variety of press... passes and accreditations from that's india i think this is a fresh pass from russia this is us getting set up in uganda and kampala they kept sending me to cover the troubles in northern ireland with bombs and guns and uh things going off in the night it was hairy but you know You did it because you're a journalist. They also sent me to do a documentary on the Indo-Pac border. We were covering the refugees boarding across the border, but the refugees were riddled with cholera and disease, and they were dropping literally in front of us. That was really my first horrific war zone, and I guess the... real start of PTSD. Fear is good, it's healthy. If you're not frightened, you get killed. I was thinking that I have to control the fear, be calm, and go ahead and get the story, and go back to the hotel, if there was one around, and get hammered at night. That was my antidepressant. I started bouncing around from war zone to war zone and I've steeled myself all the time. I paid a huge price for it. Dying with Dignity is an advocacy group for people considering medically assisted dying. As controversy around the potential expansion builds, they've received an increase in calls from people with mental health problems. The team are doing additional training to better protect callers. Suicide intervention is really a conversation, right, between two people. There'll be a moment where this person might recognize that they have some reasons to stay alive. We have some really difficult calls, people who cannot access MAID, who are not eligible, or maybe the law doesn't allow them to access MAID at this time. Some of the calls are distressing and, you know, sometimes a wellness check has to be done. Assisted dying for those with a mental disorder is their sole underlying condition is not currently legal. We expect that to change in 2024. What exactly that will look like, we're still not 100% sure. There will be a longer assessment period. Right now for those people who are in what we call track two or whose deaths are not foreseeable, it's a minimum of 90 days. We anticipate it will be at least the same for those with a mental disorder. There will be some consultation with an individual with expertise, so whether it's a psychiatrist or a counselor or therapist, that type of consultation will be required. Clinicians are really going to be looking at the history, how long people have been working on their mental health, what treatments have they tried. You know, what has their life been like? They'll be ensuring people aren't currently suicidal. NAID is not for someone who's suicidal. It's a well-thought-out decision from someone who is, you know, in the right frame of mind. What I think is important is that people have the right to choose. And the suffering that we hear about and that people experience as a result of a mental illness can be just as hard, just as difficult as from a physical illness. When you talk to someone like John and you hear about his... decades of trauma. It's really difficult for me to understand how anyone couldn't agree that this is a person who needs the opportunity to be assessed. So we start with calcium. Got one of those left. Aye, three left. One. One? One. In our everyday ongoing lives, I don't try and help him too much because if I do, he'll just sit in the chair all day. So if he wants to make tea I say yes that would be really nice to make tea. So he has to get up and make the tea and I have to remind him to take the walker because he'll get halfway across the room and start falling over. So I have to make sure that either I can get the walker to him or I can catch him. I met my wife Toni at a coffee shop in Wellington, New Zealand. She saw me in the coffee shop reading a Donald Duck comic. And she kind of found this was kind of weird. Some clown reading a Donald Duck comic, a grown man, well, a 20 year old. We got to love each other. She is a treasure and a gem and I live for her. When I got started to get sick and immobile, there's nothing she wouldn't do until this very day. My body collapsed, my mind collapsed terribly. I had to get rid of the depression. I had attempted suicide twice. The PTSD plays into it all the time, as does anxiety. They all roll into one. The last time it happened, I was living up north and John was renting a place in the city because he was working in the city at the time. And I got a call from him saying he'd taken up a whole bunch of pills. It was a two and a half hour, three hour drive, so I left and drove as fast as I could. I called my daughter, who'd just got married recently, and she and her new husband got him some help, checked him out and into the hospital, and yeah, it was not an easy time. I've been through every single treatment that's possible to get. I take 30 pills a day, 3-0. That's to deal with other physical and mental problems. I've had 19 shock therapies, 8 transcranial magnetic stimulation, that's where I put a band around your head of electrodes. It did no good, but God knows what harm it did. All of that has contributed to my plight now where I'm looking for a maid. I think Tony finds it tough. I think she'll tell you that she is behind me whatever I decide. My kids are like that too. Whatever I decide about living and dying, they are with me. As brutal as it may be, or as grief-stricken as it may be, they are with me. Here it is. This is an application for MAID. Patient request for medical assistance in dying. It is... It excludes mental illness because I got this before, well, the law hasn't been passed so there's no law in place for the paperwork to be in place. I don't think I've really looked through it before or read it. An eye opener. Yeah. What surprises you? Just the way it's worded. I hadn't actually thought about it. Yeah. And had it been available, maybe you would have already. Yeah. But I'm thankful for the delay, anyway, because you're still here with me. That's a blessing or a curse, I'm not sure which. Well, you have the ability to make it a blessing. Uh-huh. So I think it should be available to you if you want it. And if you want it, that's a personal choice within the law, which is perfectly good. You can have your family around you. They can support you. It can be a pleasant way to go, not just maybe somebody will catch me before the pills take over. Suicide is not something I can handle. I refuse to let you think that you're going to do that. Sorry. No, yeah, but there's the possibility, eh? I mean, do you talk about maid or suicide? Suicide. Oh. If you decide to do maid, that's one thing. Suicide is something totally different. And you're not allowed to do it. Heh. Why not? Because I'll punch you in the nose. Now, that would hurt, but I'd be dead. In 2015, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that banning assisted dying deprived Canadians of their dignity and autonomy. But the legislation to include maids solely for mental health keeps getting delayed. For some, though, these deferrals have been crucial in finding the right treatment. My struggle with mental illness started when I was 23. My father died of cancer and it took three weeks and he was dead. So that was a shock. The first time I really experienced that kind of pain. And after that, I kind of went downhill, let's say, for the next couple of years. I was at the university doing my PhD, but it wasn't going well. I couldn't focus. So between 25 and 45, approximately, I had several bouts of depression. Like it was recurring. So every time they'd give me antidepressants and then I'd go crashing again. And with higher and higher doses, it was getting more difficult to get better. I had several moments where I was suicidal. Georgia eventually received the correct diagnosis for bipolar disorder rather than depression in 2021. The change of medication changed her life. and her outlook on mental health. Life for me has changed since I got my diagnosis. Well, you know, I am married. I also paint, have a house. You know, life is pretty good. I have my friends. If a maid had been available back during those times where things were really, really low and I was suffering a lot and crying and just, you know, like there was no, like, hope. If I asked for it, I would have gotten it. I wouldn't be here today, and I wouldn't have known my real diagnosis, the right diagnosis, in 2021. I would have died thinking I had a depression that would never go away. On the individual level, I'm not diminishing at all the people suffering because I know what it is. But if Canada doesn't delay, made for mental illness, I would feel like angry, but also dismissed. And I would feel... Like that we're disposable. There's too many clashes and too much controversy for us to say, let's go. In 2022, 4.1% of all deaths in Canada were medically assisted. If passed, they would be one of a handful of countries allowing euthanasia due to psychiatric suffering. It is currently allowed in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands under stringent conditions. The medical community in Canada remains divided on the new potential law. My name is Sonu Ghand. I'm a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. I'm a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association as well. If made-for-soul mental illness had been started to be provided, I fundamentally feel it would have been irresponsible. All the evidence shows us that when we attempt to make predictions of irremediability in mental illness, we are wrong more than half the time. It's literally better to flip a coin, to guess whether somebody will or will not get better from a sole mental illness. We don't even understand the underlying biology of the vast majority of mental illnesses. And the second problem with mental illness is evidence shows us we do not know how to separate or distinguish suicidality that's actually a symptom of the mental illness itself from... other motivations leading to psychiatric-made or psychiatric euthanasia requests. The evidence in Europe shows us that there's actually overlapping characteristics between people who are suicidal from mental illness symptoms, who can benefit from suicide prevention, and people who seek and get psychiatric euthanasia there. And so it's not only that we don't know how to separate those groups, We don't even know if they are separate groups. And that combined leads to the third problem, which is that then in particular, you risk and jeopardize the most marginalized people in society. And unfortunately, we know that with mental illness, there are also concurrent higher rates of social suffering like poverty, loneliness, housing insecurity, isolation, all sorts of social suffering. And so it's a... terrible perfect storm where you're taking somebody in a period of genuine suffering who, from their illness itself, they have a hard time separating out what any possible hopeful future might or might not be. And in the context of issues like MAID, the problem becomes that we need to predict who will not get better. And I can think in my own practice of a number of people who Struggled for a long time. We tried various things. They didn't get better for a long time. And then they did. Dr. Chantal Perrault has been a maid assessor and provider since 2016 when it first became available. She supports the expansion and has worked in mental health for 40 years. I don't think of it as killing someone. When I provide maid, I do end a life, but it's at the person's request. clear and consistent request on their part for their suffering to end. And I consider it a tremendous honor and a privilege to meet people at that stage of their lives and to be able to help them. I think people have a very rudimentary idea of what mental health is in Canada. There's a very strong mentality of, oh, if they just worked harder, if they pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, they would be able to get on with it. And it's just not like that, as I think a lot of people don't understand that aspect of it. just how debilitating it can be to live with a mental disorder. Can people with these disorders live and enjoy life? Absolutely. But some cannot, and again, it's those few people who cannot, who are suffering intolerably, who deserve the right to be assessed for MAID. There have been people that have been waiting and hoping since 2016 to be able to apply. But again, of those many that might apply initially, very few would be found eligible. Oftentimes people are concerned that the 17-year-old boy whose girlfriend has dumped him and he's now very depressed and says he wants to die, that he would be found eligible for MAID. He wouldn't because he's 17, but even if he turned 18, he would not be found eligible for MAID. That would be an acute situational crisis, which would likely render him incapable of making that kind of decision. I think it's very possible to make a distinction between somebody who has suicidal ideation and someone who has a rational request to die with medical assistance. And somebody who's, again, in the throes of an acute episode of mental disorder would not be found eligible. At a particular moment in time, it may be difficult to make a decision. that discernment, but you speak to people over a period of time. Somebody applying under the mental disorders would not be seen in one interview and then receive MAID. So we would want to see somebody who was rational, had mental capacity, talking about wanting MAID, and that they were clear and consistent in that request and not wavering. And so I think that's very different story than somebody who has suicidal ideation. As the debate continues, it remains unclear if the law will be passed by the proposed deadline in 2024. Polling suggests that only 42% of Canadians support expanding eligibility solely for mental illness. John has been asked to record his testimony to present to Canadian MPs as they deliberate. Hi, can you see me? I can see you just fine. I'm ready to record when you are. My name is John Scully. I'm 82. I'm severely mentally ill. I've been a patient in seven psych wards. I've seen dozens of psychiatrists. I've tried every drug... I don't feel a burden to speak out about MAID. I have a moral obligation to speak out for the rights of the mentally ill and for the rights of people who want MAID for the mentally ill. I think it's my job. It's all I've got left. But I do it. Absolutely willingly. And I do it because I believe in what I'm doing. I want MAID for the mental ill to be passed without any further cruel delays. It must be passed on schedule, devoid of the obfuscation that has prevented it from passing in the last three years. Recording stopped. That's that. I don't know how it went, you know. I felt I stumbled a couple of times. Yeah, I think now is the time to make a cup of tea. Thank you. So in Parliament today was tabled the Joint Committee report looking at medical assistance in dying or mental illness as the sole underlying condition. We agree with the conclusion. that the committee has come to, that the system is at this time not ready, and more time is required. On the question of whether or not there's equivalency between mental and physical suffering, I don't think there's any question that there is equivalency. The question here is one of readiness. After repeated delays, the government announces the law will be postponed a further three years to March 2027. I was relieved. I was actually... Glad and appreciative that the government took a sober look and stepped back from the brink. I do recognize that there are people who are going to be disappointed. I feel it's very unfortunate that the narrative they've pushed is that the only way we can help you is by providing MAID. Because then when that gets taken away, that represents yet another disappointment. People are genuinely suffering. But maybe the questions we honestly as a society need to ask first is how do we actually help people live better? Since last filming with John, he has been taken into hospital after a fall at home. He's still processing the news. I was sitting at home watching TV and I saw that the government has now booted it to whatever year. And I was shocked. I felt beaten. I felt... that I had lost. We are now not treated as equals. We're not treated as a person with a physical illness. We now have to fight this battle all over again because of that government decision. It's a stamp saying, you mentally ill, you don't matter. And that's been the attitude towards the mentally ill for generations. It makes it harder for people to live with mental illness and be open about it. It's a secret illness now. pushed further under the carpet. If you are suffering distress or despair and need support, you could speak to a health professional or an organisation that offers support. Details of help available in many countries can be found at Befrienders Worldwide, www.befrienders.org.

No one recognizes us. They're embarrassed by mental illness and that's... The stigma is vast.

If medical assistance in dying had been available back during those times where things were really, really low, there was no hope that I wouldn't be here today. I would have died thinking I had a depression that would never go away. If Canada doesn't delay made-for-mental illness, you And I would feel like that we're disposable.

I will speak on behalf of those who don't have a voice, those who are frightened to have a voice. I hope I'm speaking for them. It's the one thing I believe I have to do to advocate for the mentally ill and advocate for a proper way for access to death for the mentally ill.

Around the world, there are conversations on medically assisted dying. Germany, France and the UK are all currently debating whether it should be permitted and for whom. Medical assistance in dying in Canada, also known as MAID, is available for adults with terminal illness or serious and chronic medical conditions, but is not yet available for people who suffer solely from a mental illness. It's a controversial idea the country is currently debating. My name is John Scully.

I'm 82 years old. I've been diagnosed with severe depression, incurable PTSD, and incurable anxiety disorder. I suffer from somatic pain, chronic pain. That means pain that they can't diagnose and assume it's psychiatric.

I've been In this condition for roughly 40 years, all of my illnesses really go back to childhood when I was growing up in Wellington, New Zealand, where I suffered from chronic, desperately bad asthma. That was not good for my health or my mental health, and I think that's the start of my mental decline right there. Because of my asthma, I missed most of the school year. I was not going to make anything of myself, and with the urging of my parents, they put me into a trade, washing floors at a local newspaper. That's how I got into journalism.

John eventually started a career in broadcast journalism, working for various news outlets including CBC and the BBC. Here is a variety of press... passes and accreditations from that's india i think this is a fresh pass from russia this is us getting set up in uganda and kampala they kept sending me to cover the troubles in northern ireland with bombs and guns and uh things going off in the night it was hairy but you know You did it because you're a journalist. They also sent me to do a documentary on the Indo-Pac border.

We were covering the refugees boarding across the border, but the refugees were riddled with cholera and disease, and they were dropping literally in front of us. That was really my first horrific war zone, and I guess the... real start of PTSD. Fear is good, it's healthy.

If you're not frightened, you get killed. I was thinking that I have to control the fear, be calm, and go ahead and get the story, and go back to the hotel, if there was one around, and get hammered at night. That was my antidepressant. I started bouncing around from war zone to war zone and I've steeled myself all the time. I paid a huge price for it.

Dying with Dignity is an advocacy group for people considering medically assisted dying. As controversy around the potential expansion builds, they've received an increase in calls from people with mental health problems. The team are doing additional training to better protect callers. Suicide intervention is really a conversation, right, between two people. There'll be a moment where this person might recognize that they have some reasons to stay alive.

We have some really difficult calls, people who cannot access MAID, who are not eligible, or maybe the law doesn't allow them to access MAID at this time. Some of the calls are distressing and, you know, sometimes a wellness check has to be done. Assisted dying for those with a mental disorder is their sole underlying condition is not currently legal. We expect that to change in 2024. What exactly that will look like, we're still not 100% sure.

There will be a longer assessment period. Right now for those people who are in what we call track two or whose deaths are not foreseeable, it's a minimum of 90 days. We anticipate it will be at least the same for those with a mental disorder.

There will be some consultation with an individual with expertise, so whether it's a psychiatrist or a counselor or therapist, that type of consultation will be required. Clinicians are really going to be looking at the history, how long people have been working on their mental health, what treatments have they tried. You know, what has their life been like? They'll be ensuring people aren't currently suicidal.

NAID is not for someone who's suicidal. It's a well-thought-out decision from someone who is, you know, in the right frame of mind. What I think is important is that people have the right to choose.

And the suffering that we hear about and that people experience as a result of a mental illness can be just as hard, just as difficult as from a physical illness. When you talk to someone like John and you hear about his... decades of trauma. It's really difficult for me to understand how anyone couldn't agree that this is a person who needs the opportunity to be assessed. So we start with calcium.

Got one of those left. Aye, three left. One. One?

One. In our everyday ongoing lives, I don't try and help him too much because if I do, he'll just sit in the chair all day. So if he wants to make tea I say yes that would be really nice to make tea. So he has to get up and make the tea and I have to remind him to take the walker because he'll get halfway across the room and start falling over.

So I have to make sure that either I can get the walker to him or I can catch him. I met my wife Toni at a coffee shop in Wellington, New Zealand. She saw me in the coffee shop reading a Donald Duck comic. And she kind of found this was kind of weird.

Some clown reading a Donald Duck comic, a grown man, well, a 20 year old. We got to love each other. She is a treasure and a gem and I live for her. When I got started to get sick and immobile, there's nothing she wouldn't do until this very day.

My body collapsed, my mind collapsed terribly. I had to get rid of the depression. I had attempted suicide twice. The PTSD plays into it all the time, as does anxiety.

They all roll into one. The last time it happened, I was living up north and John was renting a place in the city because he was working in the city at the time. And I got a call from him saying he'd taken up a whole bunch of pills.

It was a two and a half hour, three hour drive, so I left and drove as fast as I could. I called my daughter, who'd just got married recently, and she and her new husband got him some help, checked him out and into the hospital, and yeah, it was not an easy time. I've been through every single treatment that's possible to get. I take 30 pills a day, 3-0.

That's to deal with other physical and mental problems. I've had 19 shock therapies, 8 transcranial magnetic stimulation, that's where I put a band around your head of electrodes. It did no good, but God knows what harm it did. All of that has contributed to my plight now where I'm looking for a maid.

I think Tony finds it tough. I think she'll tell you that she is behind me whatever I decide. My kids are like that too. Whatever I decide about living and dying, they are with me. As brutal as it may be, or as grief-stricken as it may be, they are with me.

Here it is. This is an application for MAID. Patient request for medical assistance in dying. It is...

It excludes mental illness because I got this before, well, the law hasn't been passed so there's no law in place for the paperwork to be in place. I don't think I've really looked through it before or read it. An eye opener.

Yeah. What surprises you? Just the way it's worded.

I hadn't actually thought about it. Yeah. And had it been available, maybe you would have already. Yeah.

But I'm thankful for the delay, anyway, because you're still here with me. That's a blessing or a curse, I'm not sure which. Well, you have the ability to make it a blessing. Uh-huh. So I think it should be available to you if you want it.

And if you want it, that's a personal choice within the law, which is perfectly good. You can have your family around you. They can support you. It can be a pleasant way to go, not just maybe somebody will catch me before the pills take over. Suicide is not something I can handle.

I refuse to let you think that you're going to do that. Sorry. No, yeah, but there's the possibility, eh? I mean, do you talk about maid or suicide? Suicide.

Oh. If you decide to do maid, that's one thing. Suicide is something totally different.

And you're not allowed to do it. Heh. Why not? Because I'll punch you in the nose.

Now, that would hurt, but I'd be dead. In 2015, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that banning assisted dying deprived Canadians of their dignity and autonomy. But the legislation to include maids solely for mental health keeps getting delayed.

For some, though, these deferrals have been crucial in finding the right treatment. My struggle with mental illness started when I was 23. My father died of cancer and it took three weeks and he was dead. So that was a shock. The first time I really experienced that kind of pain. And after that, I kind of went downhill, let's say, for the next couple of years.

I was at the university doing my PhD, but it wasn't going well. I couldn't focus. So between 25 and 45, approximately, I had several bouts of depression. Like it was recurring. So every time they'd give me antidepressants and then I'd go crashing again.

And with higher and higher doses, it was getting more difficult to get better. I had several moments where I was suicidal. Georgia eventually received the correct diagnosis for bipolar disorder rather than depression in 2021. The change of medication changed her life.

and her outlook on mental health. Life for me has changed since I got my diagnosis. Well, you know, I am married.

I also paint, have a house. You know, life is pretty good. I have my friends. If a maid had been available back during those times where things were really, really low and I was suffering a lot and crying and just, you know, like there was no, like, hope.

If I asked for it, I would have gotten it. I wouldn't be here today, and I wouldn't have known my real diagnosis, the right diagnosis, in 2021. I would have died thinking I had a depression that would never go away. On the individual level, I'm not diminishing at all the people suffering because I know what it is.

But if Canada doesn't delay, made for mental illness, I would feel like angry, but also dismissed. And I would feel... Like that we're disposable. There's too many clashes and too much controversy for us to say, let's go.

In 2022, 4.1% of all deaths in Canada were medically assisted. If passed, they would be one of a handful of countries allowing euthanasia due to psychiatric suffering. It is currently allowed in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands under stringent conditions.

The medical community in Canada remains divided on the new potential law. My name is Sonu Ghand. I'm a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. I'm a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association as well. If made-for-soul mental illness had been started to be provided, I fundamentally feel it would have been irresponsible.

All the evidence shows us that when we attempt to make predictions of irremediability in mental illness, we are wrong more than half the time. It's literally better to flip a coin, to guess whether somebody will or will not get better from a sole mental illness. We don't even understand the underlying biology of the vast majority of mental illnesses.

And the second problem with mental illness is evidence shows us we do not know how to separate or distinguish suicidality that's actually a symptom of the mental illness itself from... other motivations leading to psychiatric-made or psychiatric euthanasia requests. The evidence in Europe shows us that there's actually overlapping characteristics between people who are suicidal from mental illness symptoms, who can benefit from suicide prevention, and people who seek and get psychiatric euthanasia there. And so it's not only that we don't know how to separate those groups, We don't even know if they are separate groups.

And that combined leads to the third problem, which is that then in particular, you risk and jeopardize the most marginalized people in society. And unfortunately, we know that with mental illness, there are also concurrent higher rates of social suffering like poverty, loneliness, housing insecurity, isolation, all sorts of social suffering. And so it's a...

terrible perfect storm where you're taking somebody in a period of genuine suffering who, from their illness itself, they have a hard time separating out what any possible hopeful future might or might not be. And in the context of issues like MAID, the problem becomes that we need to predict who will not get better. And I can think in my own practice of a number of people who Struggled for a long time. We tried various things. They didn't get better for a long time.

And then they did. Dr. Chantal Perrault has been a maid assessor and provider since 2016 when it first became available. She supports the expansion and has worked in mental health for 40 years.

I don't think of it as killing someone. When I provide maid, I do end a life, but it's at the person's request. clear and consistent request on their part for their suffering to end. And I consider it a tremendous honor and a privilege to meet people at that stage of their lives and to be able to help them.

I think people have a very rudimentary idea of what mental health is in Canada. There's a very strong mentality of, oh, if they just worked harder, if they pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, they would be able to get on with it. And it's just not like that, as I think a lot of people don't understand that aspect of it. just how debilitating it can be to live with a mental disorder.

Can people with these disorders live and enjoy life? Absolutely. But some cannot, and again, it's those few people who cannot, who are suffering intolerably, who deserve the right to be assessed for MAID.

There have been people that have been waiting and hoping since 2016 to be able to apply. But again, of those many that might apply initially, very few would be found eligible. Oftentimes people are concerned that the 17-year-old boy whose girlfriend has dumped him and he's now very depressed and says he wants to die, that he would be found eligible for MAID.

He wouldn't because he's 17, but even if he turned 18, he would not be found eligible for MAID. That would be an acute situational crisis, which would likely render him incapable of making that kind of decision. I think it's very possible to make a distinction between somebody who has suicidal ideation and someone who has a rational request to die with medical assistance.

And somebody who's, again, in the throes of an acute episode of mental disorder would not be found eligible. At a particular moment in time, it may be difficult to make a decision. that discernment, but you speak to people over a period of time.

Somebody applying under the mental disorders would not be seen in one interview and then receive MAID. So we would want to see somebody who was rational, had mental capacity, talking about wanting MAID, and that they were clear and consistent in that request and not wavering. And so I think that's very different story than somebody who has suicidal ideation. As the debate continues, it remains unclear if the law will be passed by the proposed deadline in 2024. Polling suggests that only 42% of Canadians support expanding eligibility solely for mental illness. John has been asked to record his testimony to present to Canadian MPs as they deliberate.

Hi, can you see me? I can see you just fine. I'm ready to record when you are.

My name is John Scully. I'm 82. I'm severely mentally ill. I've been a patient in seven psych wards. I've seen dozens of psychiatrists. I've tried every drug...

I don't feel a burden to speak out about MAID. I have a moral obligation to speak out for the rights of the mentally ill and for the rights of people who want MAID for the mentally ill. I think it's my job.

It's all I've got left. But I do it. Absolutely willingly.

And I do it because I believe in what I'm doing. I want MAID for the mental ill to be passed without any further cruel delays. It must be passed on schedule, devoid of the obfuscation that has prevented it from passing in the last three years. Recording stopped.

That's that. I don't know how it went, you know. I felt I stumbled a couple of times.

Yeah, I think now is the time to make a cup of tea. Thank you. So in Parliament today was tabled the Joint Committee report looking at medical assistance in dying or mental illness as the sole underlying condition. We agree with the conclusion. that the committee has come to, that the system is at this time not ready, and more time is required.

On the question of whether or not there's equivalency between mental and physical suffering, I don't think there's any question that there is equivalency. The question here is one of readiness. After repeated delays, the government announces the law will be postponed a further three years to March 2027. I was relieved. I was actually...

Glad and appreciative that the government took a sober look and stepped back from the brink. I do recognize that there are people who are going to be disappointed. I feel it's very unfortunate that the narrative they've pushed is that the only way we can help you is by providing MAID.

Because then when that gets taken away, that represents yet another disappointment. People are genuinely suffering. But maybe the questions we honestly as a society need to ask first is how do we actually help people live better? Since last filming with John, he has been taken into hospital after a fall at home. He's still processing the news.

I was sitting at home watching TV and I saw that the government has now booted it to whatever year. And I was shocked. I felt beaten. I felt...

that I had lost. We are now not treated as equals. We're not treated as a person with a physical illness. We now have to fight this battle all over again because of that government decision. It's a stamp saying, you mentally ill, you don't matter.

And that's been the attitude towards the mentally ill for generations. It makes it harder for people to live with mental illness and be open about it. It's a secret illness now. pushed further under the carpet. If you are suffering distress or despair and need support, you could speak to a health professional or an organisation that offers support.

Details of help available in many countries can be found at Befrienders Worldwide, www.befrienders.org.

Transcript for:Exploring MAID and Mental Illness

Transcript for:
Exploring MAID and Mental Illness