Insight: She's 47, anorexic and wants help dying. Canada will soon allow it.
Next year's expansion of the criteria for medically assisted death will allow Canadians like Lisa Pauli, whose sole underlying condition is mental illness, the choice to die in this way.
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I am a proponent of MAID, but I find it extremely disturbing that we're opening up MAID to conditions that aren't even covered under our social health system. We are openly saying that we consider mental health issues too expensive to treat and would prefer that people with these conditions just die already. Social supports for people with disabilities and expanding health care to include mental health coverage should absolutely be part of this, or we're just being murderous ghouls as a society.
I agree in principle, but that's not what's happening in the real world.
My husband has ME/CFS. It's a life-destroying disease, even though it doesn't usually kill you. There's no treatment, no cure, and no idea about the underlying cause, after many decades of research.
It's heartbreaking to read messages from people who caught it as a teen, seen all their schoolfriend grow up, experience life, find love etc, all while the sufferer is in pain all day, no hope of improving, relying heavily on what family they have who are willing to support.
This is by no means ideal, but neither is decades of suffering. I err on the side of reducing the constant pain.
To be fair, that's a poor example, as the research on ME/CFS is dogshit. It never gets the attention it deserves and its victims suffer in deafening silence, because it's not some sexy field to research and there's no immediate, highly visible threat to the almighty economy.
We're seeing this mirrored with long COVID. At least 16 million Americans are suffering from it — nearly 1 in 20 — and, even with rates that enormously high, research is moving at a glacial pace. There's no operation warp speed, no coordinated global effort, nobody in world leadership gives a fuck.
Mental illness treatments are often ineffective. Those with mental illness tend to suffer lifelong, even if they can afford care.
I’m not sure it’s as crystallized as that yet, but I agree with your sentiment. Everyone should have the right to choose to die but if the reason is “there was no other option,” then, we should be damn well sure we offered everything we could. Let’s not be taking societal shortcuts to “oh well, we gave it our best shot.”
I support someone’s right to end their own suffering, 100%, but it is very bad form to: be ABLE to help someone, INGORE that they are suffering, but SMILE while helping them polish their gun.
Yep. I believe people should have choices, but after proper care. My daughter has Anorexia, but since she was still not an adult she had access to a counsellor, medication, and programs. It turned her life around. But once you are 19+ there is nothing unless you have lots of money
unless your have lots of money
That's the key right there isn't it?
Why should the wealthy elite of this society be the only ones to get access to the care they need to stay alive and well???
We are becoming a society with castes. This will not go well.
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
It's getting exacerbated though.
It doesn't help when a government offical got in trouble for suggesting a veteran apply for MAID when they complained about having chronic pain.
There's a conspiracy theory that the government has rolled out MAID as a way to lower healthcare costs by just killing people instead of treating them and stories like these add fuel to that fire.
Man I wouldn't even be surprised at this point.
I agree with this as long as the solution is more healthcare, not less MAID. The latter is just cruelty.
You could give free mental health to every Canadian and still 3/4 of it would never use it due to stigma, so it wouldn't even cost as much as they think
Yeah, like I think the option should exist once you've passed certain qualifiers. But being mentally ill has so many consequences from capitalism. I myself struggle with metal health at times, and those times are always at their absolute worst financial problems come up. And our society is extremely difficult to get started in. Most people my age are only one paycheck away from desperation. When you're mentally ill poverty is a symptom, you're that much less capable of working. And society refuses to help you in the long term. You'll always have to face your own unreliability as an existential threat, which worsens how unreliable you are.
It is morally wrong to euthanize people because capitalism has decided they have no worth, and because they can never have a life worth living without society changing. But thats almost never what people want to talk about, they want to talk about how it's just wrong to let the unwell die. Never about how they can prevent us from becoming so unwell we cannot function.
Is it morally right to force them to continue living without changing the system?
We both know that the economic system won't be changed anytime soon.
Not at all, its just important not to lose sight of what the actual problem is here. The problem being that capitalism causes mental health problems, and makes it almost impossible to completely treat many mental health problems. We can't concede that point, least of all now when it is a subject of national debate. People don't want to just watch our vulnerable and impoverished choose death over continuing to suffer in ways they don't have to. Theres a real point of radicalization here, a point where people want solutions and we can actually offer real ones to them.
People choose to commit suicide all the time for thousands of different reasons, medical assistance doesn't enable suicide it simply makes it more humane.
I never said it did enable it, nor did I say that we shouldn't have legal options for people who are suffering.
But again, this isn't entirely an issue of medical ethics. I'm not saying we shouldn't have MAID, I am saying that every single time the subject comes up we should be saying as loudly and as frequently as possible that many of these people are dying of capitalism. They are dying of wage slavery. They are killing themselves because capitalism has decided they have no worth, and they are facing homelessness starvation and spiraling health conditions as a consequence.
You're misunderstanding me. I am not anti MAID. I'm not going to share too much personal details here but I've dealt with suicide many times in my adult life. I am well aware of how real the suffering of the mentally ill is. That only galvanizes my conviction that if you're talking about this subject and you're not pointing the finger at the Canadian government and absolutely demanding that they expand disability income, create UBI, and expand public Healthcare and ensure every Canadian citizen has access to widespread and competent mental health care - then you don't have any actual interest in helping the mentally ill. Only in making sure that death is an option, which is kinda like ensuring veteran's welfare after deployment by making sure they can kill themselves when society fails them. You can advocate for both. You can think that MAID should be an option and that our government has to actually make society a livable place.
